A truly remarkable feat, spawning the all-too familiar paint by numbers form of conventional storytelling, a pastiche of every stereotyped and derivative film ever produced. Yet it was the first! And to be the first is everything, a genius and a success! To provide the very palette and template that blended genres must follow, the formula that is the logic of staging entirely for action and effect. This is why it can’t be neatly typecast. It is equally horror, melodrama, love-story, swashbuckler fantasy, comedy, adventure. I am tempted to anoint it the grand eponym of the tradition, the film of films, the first genuine film ever made, upon which every subsequent reincarnation must be subsumed and pay homage. A fitting baptism for both the history of film and the bloodbaths and carnage of the 20th century and beyond: the rictus.
In Cold Blood
Perhaps the strongest argument ever made against capital punishment came from a murderer.
“Those prairiebillys, they’ll vote to hang fast as pigs eat slop. Look at their eyes. I’ll be damned if I’m the only killer in the courtroom.”
Anti-Oedipus
Foucault’s preface: “Last, but not least, the major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism. And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini – which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively – but also the fascism in us all, in our heads, and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”
“… something essential is taking place, something of extreme seriousness: the tracking down of all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives.”
Through a Dark Glass
“That we try to reach out to one another, but more often than not are held back by compulsions within ourselves.”
The priority of our most ardent, unfulfilled desires inhibits are happiest communion with others.
Carnival of Souls
There’s a fine line between eeriness and boredom. All horror movies skate this line. Music helps, though not in this case. It plays to distraction. Music should replace filmic composition. It subsumes the narrative, while the characters mimic the songs ballet. Music choice is key. In the end, film always yields to the superiority of song.
The acting is poor and forced which lends itself to campiness. But there’s also some amazingly quotable lines. Weirdly uninterested in backstory. The “Man” is not as frightening because we see him too many times and too clearly. After a while, the novelty of the uncanny is replaced with bored familiarity. Why bored? Well, don’t just stand there. Do something! It’s ingrained. We are trained to throw tomatoes at the actors.
Frog Hospital
There’s a deep wisdom here. It catches you by surprise at times.
“It is unacceptable, all the stunned and anxious missing a person is asked to endure in life. It is not to be endured, not really.”
Faust
Upon rewinding and carefully rewatching the book burning scene, my initial (startling) impression was wrong. The burning Bible did not open up and tempt Faust with the power of the devil. It was a different book. But how ghastly, how profoundly unsettling such a small textual change would have rendered unto to an entire metaphysics. What a disruption! What a bettor’s bet! Into the bargain, a new unexpected raising of the t stakes. God bet the devil not only the rights to Earth’s title and pink slip, but also heaven too!
Palm Beach Story
“You have no idea what a long-legged gal can do without doing anything.”
My Motto Fir Life
“Make it three yards motherfucker, and we’ll have an automobile race.”
Historie(s) du Cinema
“May every eye negotiate for itself.”
“Do not show every aspect of things. Allow yourself a margin of indefiniteness.”
“A film is a girl and a gun.”
The promise of cinema: “The world for a nickel.”
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act with beauty and courage.”
“Perhaps all the terrifying things are something helpless things that need our help.”
“In effect cinema is not part of the communications industry, or the entertainment industry, but of cosmetics, the industry of masks.”
“Cinema has always yearned to be more real than life.”
“Film needs two reels one that gets full or the other gets empty, the master and the slave.”
“To say is to see.”
“A movie projector has to remember the camera.”
“Cinema is only an industry of escapism, because it’s the only place where memory is a slave.”
“The image will come at the time of Resurrection.”
“On the eve of the 20th century, technology decided to reproduce life, so we invented photography and Cinéma. But since morals were still strong, and we would take everything from life, even its identity, we mourned, this killing.”
“Is the man on camera real or already the fiction of a man?”
“If there’s an easy way, the fool chooses the difficult way.”
“And deep inside each love story lurks the story of a nurse.”
“We got rid of perspective, the vanishing point.”
“Art is like fire, it’s born from what is burnt.”
“What is cinema? Nothing. What does it want? Everything. What can it do? Something.”
“Things are there. Why manipulate them?”
“Man has in his own heart places that don’t exist yet and where pain enters so they can be.”
“This is what I like about cinema generally speaking. A saturation of wonderful signs, that swim in the light of their lack of explanation.”
The Hack 