Category: Quotes

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.

Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks

Hikikomori, lit. 'pulling away, being confined', i.e., 'acute social withdrawal', is a Japanese term to refer to the phenomenon of reclusive individuals who have chosen to withdraw from social life, often seeking extreme degrees of isolation and confinement because of various personal and social factors in their lives[….]

Although there are occasions when the hikikomori may venture outdoors, usually at night to buy food, the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare defines hikikomori as individuals who refuse to leave their parents' house and isolate themselves from society for a period exceeding six months. While the degree of the phenomenon varies on an individual basis, in the most extreme cases, some youths remain in isolation for years or even decades. Often hikikomori start out as school refusals or futoko in Japanese.

From Hikikomori, Wikipedia entry

Fate means what we are at the mercy of. And we are at the mercy of what cannot yet become word.

Salvation always comes from where nobody expects it, from the depraved, from the impossible.

Evil increases automatically. Inertia, laziness, cowardice, death are self-multiplying. Good 'is' not, except by propagation; it is not in any man, but originates only between. No man is good. But the word or act that links men may be good. And by linking evil has to be constantly combated.

Man must be torn open again and again by the plowshare of suffering.

Nothing great in this world can be achieved without great expectation. The expectancy of the listeners is a condition for every communication. Only in response to the messianic expectancy of all peoples could the Messiah come. And only what fulfils a longing finds an enduring place in history.

Only by his great outcry, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me,' did Jesus become our brother[….] Faith cannot live unless it remains intermittent; that bitter truth admits death where it belongs in our belief, as a bringing of new life.

The combined expectation and delay of Christ's return is the contradiction on which the Christian lives, a tension which is the paradoxical essence of Christianity.

The greatest temptation of our time is impatience, in its full original meaning: refusal to wait, undergo, suffer.

The history of the human race is accordingly written on a single theme: How does love become stronger than death?

Death is not overcome by not dying, but by our loving beyond death.

Rosenstock-Huessy, cited here.

In the new thinking, the method of speech replaces the method of thinking maintained in all earlier philosophies. Thinking is timeless and wants to be timeless[….] Speech is bound to time and nourished by time, and it neither can nor wants to abandon this element. It does not know in advance just where it will end. It takes its cues from others. In fact, it lives by virtue of another's life, whether that other is the one who listens to a story, answers in the course of a dialogue, or joins in a chorus; while thinking is always a solitary business, even when it is done in common by several who philosophise together.

Rosenzweig, The New Thinking

A speechless universe means madness for the individual, chaos for the things of the world and mere violence to keep order between man[…] This indeed was the first fascist's, Sorel's conclusion. On his death bed, in 1923, he cried: 'We have destroyed the validity of all words. Nothing remains but violence' …

from Rosenstock-Huessy's Speech and Reality

Nature and revelation: the same material, but opposite ways of being exposed to this light. The more everyday the material, the more revealing and revealed can it become.

Rosenzweig to Rosenstock, October 28th, 1916

The man who wrote The Star of Redemption is of a different caliber from the author of Hegel and the State. Yet when all is said and done, the new book is only – a book. I don't attach any undue importance to it. The small – at times exceedingly small – thing called (by Goethe) 'demand of the day' which is made upon me in my position at Frankfort, I mean the nervewracking, picayune, and the same time very necessary struggles of people and conditions, have now become the real core of my existence – and I love this form of existence despite the inevitable annoyance that goes with it.

Cognition [Erkennen] no longer appeals to me as an end in itself….. [whereas] the questions asked by human beings have become increasingly important to me. This is precisely what I mean by 'cognition and knowledge as a service': a readiness to confront such questions, to answer them as best I can out of my limited knowledge and my even slighter ability. You will now be able to understand what keeps me away from the university …

Rosenzweig to Meinecke, cited here.

I tried to explain the intellectual content of a play which I had been reading.

'And all this is simply stated?' asked Kafka.

'No', I answered. 'The author tries to present these ideas concretely'.

He nodded quickly. 'Quite right. Simply to say something is not enough. One must live it. And for this language is an essential intermediary, something living, a medium. Yet language also must not be used as a means but must be experienced, suffered. Language is an eternal mistress.

from Gustav Janouch's Conversations With Kafka

A few hours earlier, last night, when I was having dinner with [crossed out] X. (X. has been called up [crossed out] and leaves today but he is leaving [crossed out]), I had already soaked up a lot of wine.

I asked W. to read a passage from the book that I was carrying around with me and he read it out loud (no one I know reads with more tough simplicity, with more passionate grandeur than him). I was too drunk and I can no longer recall the exact passage exactly. He himself had drunk as much as me. It would be a mistake to think that such a reading done by men under the influence of drink is merely a provoking paradox.

Everything I can say that is most true about X. is that he [crossed out] at the point in my life [crossed out]. I think that we are joined together in that we are both open without defences – from tempation – to forces of destruction, not out of boldness, but like children who never give up a cowardly naivety.

His face with its pronounced features, marked by a punctilious reserve, at the same time clenched and feverish, wounded by the constant agony of impossible inner turmoil, his shaven head (almost uniform in colour, as if made of wood or stone) perhaps make up something more contradictory than anything I have ever encountered: an obvious cowardice (more obvious than mine) but so marked by gravity, so beyond rescue that nothing could be more heartbreaking to witness; at one and the same time a little boy at fault and a venerable old man, a naive sailor on a spree and a stupid divinity losing his boulder-thick head in the darkness of the clouds …

People like [X.] and me can never aspire to sanctity. Do I know what we can aspire to? If we are closer to the saints than to other men, it is to the extent that we are 'little flayed gods'. Why shall I not become a little god if it is true that one may no longer laugh, get drunk, enjoy naked girls and then know ecstasy without being a god?

from the first version of Georges Bataille's Guilty, cited here. X is Leiris.

Are we totally separated from you?/ Is there not a breath of your peace,/ Lord, or your message/ Intended for us in such a night?

Can the sound of your word/ Have so faded in Zion's emptiness,/ Or has it not even entered/ This magic realm of appearance?

The great deceit of the world/ Is now consummated./ Give then, Lord, that he may wake/ Who was struck through by your nothingness.

Only so does revelation/ Shine in the time that rejected you./ Only your nothingness is the experience/ It is entitled to have of you.

Thus alone teaching that breaks through semblance/ Enters the memory:/ The truest bequest/ Of hidden judgement.

Our position has been measured/ On Job's scales with great precision./ We are known through and through/ As despairing on the youngest day.

What we are is reflected in endless instances./ Nobody knows the way completely/ And each part of it makes us blind.

No one can benefit from redemption/ That star stands far too high./ And if you had arrived there too,/ You would still stand in your own way.

Abandoned to powers,/ Exorcism is no longer binding./ No life can unfold/ That doesn't sink into itself.

From the centre of destruction/ A way breaks through at times,/ But none shows the direction. The Law ordered us to take.

Since this sad knowledge/ Stands before us, unassailable,/ A veil has suddenly been torn,/ Lord, before your majesty.

Your trial began on earth./ Does it end before your throne?/ You cannot be defended,/ As no illusion holds true here.

Who is the accused here? The creature or yourself?/ If anyone should ask you,/ You would sink into silence.

Can such a question be raised?/ Is the answer indefinite?/ Oh, we must live all the same/ Until your court examines us.

Gerschom Scholem, 'Didactic Poem', 1934. It concerns Kafka.

Anyway, how could he describe the process? Somehow it involved emptiness – no other word would do. The day had to be empty. For that matter, so did he. Walking, he felt himself emptying out, as if he had become transparent or was no longer there, no longer belonged to the world of others, might as well not exist. Afterward he could never reproduce his thoughts in tangible form, though 'thought' was too big a word to describe his indistinct, vague reveries, the jumbled images and snatches of sentences that passed through his head.

from Cees Nooteboom's All Souls Day

Flaubert was in a sense the forerunner of writing scruples. I do believe that in the eighteenth century, say, Voltaire or Rousseau wrote much more naturally than people did from the nineteenth century onwards. Flaubert sensed this more than any other writer. If you look at Rousseau's letters, for instance, they're beautifully written. He dashed off 23 in a day if necessary, and they're all balanced, they're all beautiful prose. Flaubert's letters are already quite haphazard; they're no longer literary in that sense. He swears, he makes exclamations, sometimes they're very funny. But he was one of the first to realise that there was appearing in front of him some form of impasse. And I think nowadays it's getting increasingly difficult because writing is no longer a natural thing for us.

W. G. Sebald, in an interview

He wrote his books just like a farmer who sowed and reaped, grafted, fed his animals and mucked out after them. From a sense of duty, and to have something to eat. "It was a job like any other."

"My most productive work times were morning and night: the hours between noon and night found me stupid."

"I could not tie myself to a paper or a publisher. I wouldn't want to make any promises that I couldn't keep. Things can only grow from me unforced."

[Jakob von Gunten]'s my favorite, among all my books." After a pause: "The less the action and the smaller the geographical region a writer uses, the more important is his talent. I am immediately suspicious of novelists who excel in plot and use the whole world as their character. Everyday events are beautiful and rich enough that a writer can strike sparks from them."

"Artists must fit in with the ordinary. They must not become clowns."

"In 1913 when I, with a hundred francs, returned to Biel, I thought it was advisable to be as inconspicuous as possible. No [gloating.] I went walking by myself, day and night. In between I conducted my business as a writer. Finally, when I had exhausted all my subjects, like a cowherd his pasture, I went back to Bern. At first things went well there for me. But imagine my fright when I got a letter from the feuilleton editor of the Berliner Tageblatt in which they said that I hadn't produced anything for half a year! I was confused. Yes, it's true, I was totally written out. Burned out like an oven. I made a genuine effort [despite the letter] to continue writing. But they were silly things, and that worried me. What works for me is what can grow quietly within me and what I've somehow experienced. Then I made a couple of amateurish attempts to take my life, but I couldn't make a proper noose. Finally it reached the point where my sister Lisa took me to the Waldau Institute. I asked her just outside the gate "Are we doing the right thing?" Her silence gave me the answer. What else could I do, but enter?"

"It's madness and cruelty to demand that I continue to write in the sanitarium. The basis of a writer's creativity is freedom. As long as this condition is not met I refuse to write again. [In that regard] no one has given me a room, paper or pen."

Across from the casino at Jakobsbad there's a baroque building that resembles a monastery, probably an old folks' home. "Should we go inside?" Robert: "It looks much nicer on the outside. One should not try to reveal all secrets; I've believed that my whole life. Isn't it good, that in our life so much remains foreign and strange, as though behind ivy-covered walls? That gives it an inexpressible appeal, which more and more goes lost. Today it's brutal, how everything is desired and taken."

On the matter of productivity: "It's not good for an artist to wear himself out in his youth. Then his heart is prematurely fallow. Gottfried Keller, C.F. Meyer, and Theodore Fontane saved up their creativity for old age, certainly not to their disadvantage."

"During my last months in Bern I had nothing to say. Gottfried Keller might have experienced something of the sort when he accepted the post of [Staatsschreiber]. Always pacing about the same room can lead to impotence."

"Writing in particular needs a man's full strength–it just sucks him dry."

"At the sanitarium I have the quiet that I need. Noise is for the young. It seems suitable for me to fade away as inconspicuously as possible."

"I was so happy this morning," said the enthusiastic Robert "when I saw clouds instead of blue sky. I don't care for beautiful views and backdrops. When the distant disappears, the close grows more intimate. Why shouldn't we be satisfied with one meadow, one forest, and a couple of peaceful houses."

"I liked my hospital room quite a bit. One lies like a felled tree, and needs no limbs to stir about. Desires all fall asleep, [like children exhausted from their play]. It feels like a monastery, or the waiting room of death. Why have an operation? I was happy as things stood. It's true I got nasty if the other patients got something to eat and I didn't. But even this didn't last long. I'm sure that Hölderlin's last 30 years were not as unhappy as portrayed by the literature professors. To be able to dream away in some quiet corner without having to constantly satisfy obligations is certainly not the martyrdom that people make it out to be!"

"Ordinary people like us should be as quiet as possible."

"You see, every time I moved into a new city I tried to forgot the past and immerse myself completely in my new milieu."

I asked Robert if it was true that he had burned three unpublished novels in Berlin. "That could well be true. At the time I was mad for novel-writing. But I realized that I had seized on a form that was to too long-winded for my talent. So I moved back into the little shell of short stories and feuilletons …"

"In Herisau" he continues "I haven't written anything. What for? My world was smashed by the Nazis. The papers that I wrote for are gone; their editors hunted down or killed. I've almost become a [Petrefakt]."

After a few steps, Robert: "Let's slow down; we don't want to chase after the beautiful, but have it with us, like a mother her child."

"In your youth you're eager for the unusual, and you're almost hostile to the everyday. As you age you come to trust the everyday more than the unusual, which arouses suspicion. That's how people change, and it's good that they do."

"How often such quiet, inconspicuous folk are underestimated when they're young, and yet they are that which holds the world together; from them comes the strength that helps a nation survive."

Robert never acquired his own library, at most a pile of little Reclam editions. "What else do you need?"

In the sun, Robert’s head reddens like a tomato. He smiles at me with enthusiasm: "It would be nice to keep going like this into the night."

"Back in Zschokke's day, they still understood how to write gracious novels. Today novelists terrorize readers with their dense tediousness. It's not a good sign for these times that literature acts in such an imperialistic way. It used to be modest and good-natured. Today it possesses [Herscherallueren]. Das Volk are said to be its subject. That is not a healthy development."

Robert: "It's good to be thrown back on simple things. Think of how many people shed their ballast in the war, and how beauty then had room to grow."

from Carl Seelig's Wandering With Robert Walser, in English for the first time, in a draft translation by Bob Skinner (via Vertigo).

In each life, particularly at its dawn, there exists an instant which determines everything[….] This instant is not always a mere flash[….]

How old was I? Six or seven years I believe. Stretched out beneath the shade of a linden tree, gazing up at an almost cloudless sky, I saw the sky topple and sink into the void: it was my first impression of nothingness, all the more vivid in that it followed a rich and full existence[….] Commencing on this day I began to ruminate on the lack of reality in things[….] I was one of those men predestined to wonder why they live instead of actually living, or at most living only on the margins.

The illusory character of things was once again confirmed for me by the proximity, by my ceaseless frequenting of the sea; a sea whose ebb and flow, always mobile as it is in Brittany, disclosed in certain bays an expanse which the eye could only embrace with difficulty. What void! Rocks, mud, water… Since each day everything was put back into question, noting existed. I imagined a night aboard ship. No reference points. Lost, irremediably lost – and starless.

Seen in its vastness, existence is tragic; up close it is absurdly petty.

from Jean Grenier, Islands

Half myself mocks the other half.

To be pathetic when we cry, we must cry without wanting to and without knowing it.

'Leave behind endless hope and vast thoughts', says the poet. I no longer have vast thoughts.

Strength is not energy. Some writers have more muscles than talent.

Thoughts still in seed; they must be left to develop. If we touch them, they will be spoiled.

If, when a stone falls, God helps it to fall.

To descend into ourselves, we must first lift ourselves up.

My ideas! It is the house for lodging them that costs me so much to build.

Those thoughts that come to us suddenly and that are not yet ours.

When you write easily, you always think you have more talent than you really do.

The time I lost in pleasure I now lose in suffering.

I wanted to bypass words, I disdained them: words have had their revenge – through difficulty, etc.

These thoughts form not only the foundation of my work, but of my life.

To know how not to write – to be capable of not writing.

… this poetry of thought.

What we write with difficulty is written with more care, engraves itself more deeply.

We still know how to mark the hours, but no longer how to ring them. The carillon of our clocks is missing.

Thoughts that cannot survive the test of the open air and that evaporate as soon as we take them out of our room. To put them to the test of isolation. Take them out of the book where you found them: they do not endure.

Where do ideas go? – They go into the memory of God.

I would like thoughts to follow one another in a book like stars in the sky, with order, with harmony, but effortlessly and at intervals, without touching, without mingling; and nevertheless not without finding their place, harmonising, arranging themselves. Yes, I would like them to move without interfering with one another, in such a way that each could survive independently. No overstrict cohesion; but no coherence either; the lightest is monstrous.

Those who sing well have an echo in their throat …

Plato is the Rabelais of abstractions.

Heaven will abolish the language in which these works are written.

The skies of skies, the sky of the sky.

God is the place where I do not remember the rest.

Take us back to the time when wine was invented …

Forbidden to speak of God …

Children always want to look behind mirrors.

Through memory we travel against time, through forgetfulness we follow its course.

A work of genius, whether poetic or didactic, is too long if it cannot be read in one day.

Thought forms in the soul in the same way clouds form in the air.

A thought is as real as a cannonball.

from The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, ed. and trans. Paul Auster

… it has never occurred to me in this war to seek out danger and death as I had done so often in earlier years – at that time death avoided me, not I it; but that is long past! Today I would greet it very sadly and very bitterly, not out of fear or anxiety about it – nothing is more soothing than the prospect of the stillness of death – but because I have half-finished work to be done that, when completed, will convey the entirety of my feeling. The whole purpose of my life lies hidden in my unpainted pictures. Aside from that, death is not frightening …

Franz Marc, writing to his mother in 1916 from the front, two weeks before his death.

The role of servant accorded with Walser's passion for the minimal: elemental happenings and small private feelings which he calls 'the true truths'. Max Brod, one of his first admirers, appositely remarked: 'After Nietzsche, Walser had to come'. Or, as Walser himself said, 'God is the opposite of Rodin'.

from Christopher Middleton's introduction to Walser's great Jakob von Gunten

To write is an attempt to know what we would write were we to write.

Duras, cited by Vila-Matas

A feeling of perhaps still having 'friends' but no longer any 'comrades' (= fellow workers or, at the very least, comrades who give you encouragement with the idea that they are working too). In this respect, a terrible gap left by Giacometti. Perhaps because with Bataille gone, he was the last. Limbour and Queneau are certainly friends, and friends whom I admire, but it isn't the same thing: the fact that they are working merely gives me the great pleasure – or the great expectation of pleasure – of reading something by them.

Leiris, Journals, 22nd August, 1966

It isn't that I no longer have ideas, but ideas don't dance for me any more.

– Remark by Bataille towards the end of his life.

Leiris, Journals, 30th April, 1982

I would wish it on no one to be me.
Only I am capable of bearing myself.
To know so much, to have seen so much, and
To say nothing, just about nothing.

Robert Walser

– The painter Philip Guston once said something very nice about this, he says. He said that when he went into his studio everybody was in there with him: his dealer, the public, all the great artists of the past. They are all looking over his shoulder and talking. One by one they leave, and then he himself leaves, and then the painting begins.

Gabriel Josipovici, After

A few notes from Thomas F. Barry's article on Handke.

Here is Handke himself:

When I was 36 years old, I had the illumination of slowness. Slowness has been since this time a principle for my life and my writing…. Perhaps instead of slowness one could speak more exactly of a deliberateness. Never, never become fast, never suggest, always keep a distance to things and be cautious.

Barry remembers this from The Afternoon of a Writer:

You know of course slowness is the only illumination I have ever had.

Barry: The productive otherness of the experience of literature in acts of reading and writing is, as Handke phrased it in his acceptance speech for the Buchner prize […]

nothing other than poetic thinking that is all about hope, that allows the world to begin anew again and again whenever I, in my obstinacy, have already considered it predetermined, and it is also the basis of the self-awareness with which I write.

Barry: Handke's preface to the original German edition of The Weight of the World gives the reader some insight into what kind of radical literary experiment he was taking with his journals, an experiment that focuses the attention of both writer and reader on the nature of perception and its formulation in language. Handke calls this first journal 'a sort of novel or epic of everyday occurrences'.

Barry tells us how Handke's plan for the notebooks changed: 'Handke soon realised that he was paying attention to only those thoughts and events that suited his plans and everything else became insignificant and thus forgettable'. 

But precisely through this state of heightened attentiveness, into which I had thought myself, I became aware of the daily forgetting.

It is thus to this 'daily forgetting' (a beautiful phrase) that Handke will now attend. Is that what The Afternoon of a Writer is about? And My Year in No-Man's Bay?

Reflecting on his earlier fiction, Handke says:

These narratives and novels have no story. They are only daily occurrences brought into a new order. What is 'story' or 'fiction' is really always only the point of intersection between individual daily events. This is what produces the impression of fiction. And because of this I believe they are not traditional, but that the most unarranged daily occurrences are only brought into a new order, where they suddenly look like fiction. I never want to do anything else.

And he says this:

The more I immerse myself in an object, the more it approaches a written sign.

Handke has published 4 volumes of his journals, which he began to keep in the mid 70s. Was this amidst the general crisis to which he alludes at the beginning of My Year in No-Man's Bay?

There was one time in my life when I experienced metamorphosis. Up to that point, it had only been a word to me….

Very early on, while at the famous Group 47 meeting, he says:

Above all, it seems to me that the progress of literature consists of the gradual removal of all fictions.

Throughout the tumultuous conference, I watched [Shostakovich's] hands twist the cardboard tips of his cigarettes, his face twitch and his whole posture express intense unease. While his Soviet colleagues on the right and left looked calm and as self-contained as mantelpiece Buddhas, his sensitive face looked disturbed, hurt and terribly shy … He seemed like a trapped man, whose only wish was to be left alone, to the peace of his own art and to the tragic destiny to which he, like most of his countryman, had been forced to resign himself.

Nabokov on the 1949 Cultural and Scientific for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. Shostakovich had been commanded to go by Stalin.

‘What are you working on, exactly? I have no idea.’

‘Reification,’ he answered.

‘It’s an important job,’ I added.

‘Yes, it is,’ he said.

‘I see,’ Carole observed with admiration. ‘Serious work, at a huge desk cluttered with thick books and papers.’

‘No,’ said Gilles. ‘I walk. Mainly I walk.’

Michelle Bernstein, All the King’s Horses, cited here.

30 Oct 1940. Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time – is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.

Cesare Pavese, from his Diary

A partial transcription of the Bela Tarr interview included as an extra on the DVD of Werckmeister Harmonies.

[Tarr is asked about Damnation]

There is a difficulty about what we really think to be a film. The question really is what is film for? It's been some time since we came to the conclusion that the film is not about telling or it's function is something very different, something else. So that we can get closer to people somehow; we can understand everyday life and that somehow we can understand human nature: why we are like who we are, how we commit our sins, how we betray one another and what interests lead us.

And that's how we found this rather simple, even primitive crime story which is really a banal story because this is the thing we can get furthest away from[….] It was [a matter of] getting away, of distancing ourselves from the story because we thought that the wall, the rain, the dogs have their own stories, and that these stories are more important than these so called human stories that we write.

We believe that apart from the main protagonists of the film there are other protagonists: scenery, the weather, time and locations have their own faces and play an important role in the story […]

[Asked how he discovered this use of time]

From the very beginning the way we handled time was different to other films first of all because we cut and edited the film differently most films are piece of 'information - edit', 'information – edit' – we didn't edit that way. We are paying no concern to internal, psychological processes and we concentrate on the physical being present of the actors that is why metacommunication is more important - in fact its more important than verbal communication – and from here it is only a short step from putting it in time and space.

[Asked whether he is making a special demand on the viewer]

No, I don't have special demands from the audience I believe that I regard the audience as partners perhaps a bit more grown up than I am myself. I believe that if we make films with more openness, fairness and honesty people watch films with their hearts and minds and they only believe their eyes and then they can understand what we do and it's quite a simple thing.

And it will be special and part of their lives, and after all that's all we want and perhaps that people that come into the movies they leave a bit different, a different person than when they come in, if not as a different person, with something more in their hearts. And if we get that result we are happy and satisfied; if you get closer to the people you see on the film if you get touched by the beauty of the destitute then we've reached something, we've achieved something.

[The interviewer says that Tarr's films aren't always about beauty, but portray ugly landscapes and ugly people. Tarr responds in English, with magnificent simplicity, refusing to extrapolate.]

This is my nation.

[How do you chose the people you work with?]

We always make sure that those people we invite to work with us they are actually our friends. We always try to make sure that they are not actors but personalities and they give their entire personality to the film and that they should be present. And this is a matter of confidence: that they give us something, that they trust us that we won't betray them; that in the end we won't break our promises[….] All the people who work with us are present as personalities, be it as professional actors, workers in a factory or independent actors.

[When you say this is my nation: is it the real Hungary to which he is referring, or the imaginary world he has made in his films? Does it relate to everyday reality?]

I believe that one is making the same film all through one's life. These are the various forms, the various stages of the very same film. It's not that we don't think or look further because all these films are after all different. Every time we try to get closer to a somewhat clearer style, to create something simpler, even more simple, and to try to give an even clearer picture of what is there in Hungary today because after all we are Hungarians and we very much hope that this can be deciphered and understood in every part of the world as well.

[Can his films be taken as a political allegories?]

I would like to make it clear: there are no allegories in any of my films. And there are no symbols, such metaphysical things are far from [the genre of film]. A film as a genre in itself is always something definite. Because that piece of instrument we call the lens can only record real things, there are no allegories. There are very simple and definite scenes in the film.

And we try to think about the quality of life, because everybody has just one single life. It does matter how they live that single life; it is important what the quality of their lives is. I don't regard anything with sancity apart from life itself. And that's why it does matter what we talk about in a film.

As far as politics is concerned, I think it's a dirty business and it's not the object of any normal piece of art. We would never make political films. We would like to do more than that.

[The interviewer says Tarr's films are full of mud and dirt, with people getting drunk and falling over. They're very much about the ugly real world.]

Yes, yes.

[The interviewer presses Tarr on this: Why people falling over drunk? Why the mud and dirt? Tarr responds in English, quickly and directly.]

This is the same question why we make a film about ugly people because this is our nation this is our people that's what I see.

[Tarr's now asked to explore the relationship between literature and film.]

Film by itself is quite a primitive language. It's made simpler by its definiteness by its being so concrete and that's why it's so exciting. It's always a challenge to do something with this kind of limited language. The writer Krasznahorkai always says how can you do anything with such limited options, with such limited tools? He's frustrated that we deal with cheap things. Film is a cheap show in the town market and it's a great thing we can develop that into something valuable something that will withstand time and can be watched in 10 or 20 years or more.

[Tarr explains how he works with Krasznahorkai – how his novels inspire Tarr and his friends to find (or build) suitable a locations (a 'reality'). Film and literature are different languages, Tarr insists again.]

… that reality [i.e., the reality of a location] must be ours and we make a film about our reality with his help and from here on we talk a different language.

[On his wife and editor, Agnes Hranitzky] She's present all through the making of the film. And she is coauthor and no decisions are made without her, partly because she really knows and understands things. We do work together we make the films together. And there is an everyday process of making these film with the preparations the shooting and the editing.

And there is another important member of the family and that's the composer [Mihaly Vig] with whom we've worked together for the past 15 years and without the composer the films wouldn't be what they are. About our relationship: he would go into the studio a month before the shooting takes place, would compose the music, give it to us and then we already use the music at the stage of shooting. So the music plays an equal role to the actors or the scenes or the story. And we trust him so much that we don't go there into the studio he composes the music and brings it to us.

It's very close and very profound; a very friendly relationship that has been shaped over the past 15 years. We don't have to talk about anything serious; we never talk about art, we never talk about philosophy, we don't discuss aesthetics, we always talk about very concrete practical issues.

[Asked about cinematographers]

It's always difficult thing because one is always in the hands of a cinematographer, and what we ask is a very difficult task, both in physical and professional terms. And it's always very difficult to find the right person; some don't live up to it; some don't have the time; some are talented but make mistakes elsewhere so it's very difficult to find the right person. And we are quite autocratic and we tell the cinematographer what to do […]

[Asked about his relationship to the film industry in Hungary]

We won't knock at the door of the film industry and ask permission to be let in. Because we felt that everything that was happening in the film industry was a lie and it was a very bad and cheap thing. We thought there's no point talking to and negotiating with these people; we thought we had to kick the door in and show them what life really is and we have to show people what real life is like because they hardly see it on the film.

And from then on it was quite simple. We thought that making films should be cheap; we should be able to create films with low budgets and they have to be be 16mm with handheld cameras with nonprofessional actors and with a lot of closeups so going straight into their faces show the faces and to tell what social problems we are facing. 

And as time went by that problems there are are not only social but ontological, and there are cosmic problems as well and then we found out that everything even the weather was bad and from then on there's nothing else to do but make it total [Tarr is laughing] and create a complete desperation and the more desperate we are the more hope there is. It's quite simple.

[Asked whether his films appeal to the young in Hungary]

We were always famous for showing people on the screen who weren't seen elsewhere or before. I think at those times it was important to find a different kind of narrative.We were quite intrigued as to how we could make an epic film. Of course as we know that is quite the contrary of the film genre in general. So it looked like an exciting challenge. And we loved these young people very much because we thought that we had to talk about people who became marginal who lived on the margins because we ourselves are exactly as marginal as they are. So therefore it was nothing special to make a film about them.

Karrer's monologue from Bela Tarr's Damnation:

I sit by the window and look out completely in vain. For years and years I've been sitting there and something always tells me I'll go mad the next moment. But I don't go mad the next moment, and I have no fear of going mad because fear of madness would mean that I'd have to cling to something. Yet I don't cling to anything. I cling to nothing, but everything clings to me.

They want me to look at them. To look at the hopelessness of things. To watch as a scruffy dog outside my window under the pewter sky in the torrential rain walks up to a puddle and has a drink. They want me to watch the pitiful effort everyone makes in trying to speak before they drop into the grave. But there's not time for they are already falling. And they want this irreversibility of things to drive me mad, but the next second they want me not to go mad.

Once I almost talked about that with a woman. I told her that I hated her that I'd never loved her. Yet I didn't hate her just like I'd never loved her. I wanted to know if it made sense to speak at all. I told her that I hated her tenderness, her faithfulness, her being so neat and precise. I was revolted by the blind trust with which she clung to me.

She looked at me disapprovingly and went off to heat up my supper. I just stood there and yelled. For three days, we stayed indoors. She kept walking behind me. She only started crying on the second day. She stood crying in her nightie. She didn't sob, she just whimpered. Just wailing without moving. Then she crawled into the corner and would not move.

I was looking at her nightie. All I saw was the nightie, that lacy nylon nightie. Then I jumped on her. I pulled it and tore it. I ripped it. But she still didn't understand. She just kept clinging to me and repeating something to me. Then she went into the bathroom and locked the door.

I just watched the buckets of coal in the air and counted them. Then I started all over again and counted them again. I don't know how long it lasted. It was dawn by the time I broke the door down. It was what I'd expected, but even so it shocked me. I couldn't believe that frail body had so much blood in it.

Just as I'd never have believed there'd be somebody I could trust the way I trust you, someone who could make me believe it is worth speaking. I know you understand that I love you and that it's not over. And that you're able to step out of this story like any other. And I don't want anything, only that we should get out of this pigsty forever and never lose each other again. 

When I write about this kind of thing, about this kind of centrifugal situation that leads to suicide, I am certainly describing a state of mind that I identify with, which I probably experienced while I was writing, precisely because I did not commit suicide, because I escaped from that.

Bernhard, interviewed, cited.

By his own admission, Godard no longer likes to watch the 'rushes' of his films, claiming that he lacks 'enough complicity with the crew' and directs from a state of 'solitude', in which he is present on the set, yet 'absent' as an organising or unifying force in the conventional directorial sense.

One is struck in watching In Praise of Love by an intense sense of depersonalisation in all Godard's set ups, which often obscure the actors and their faces from our view, and in his editing, which offers us only sections of each shot rather than a sustained gaze.

Godard's recent films are even more 'fragmented', not only in their temporal and spatial structure but also in Godard's use of brief sections of images rather than long takes and extensive use of off-screen space, in which his protagonists operate on the margins of the frame, just as Godard operates on the margins of cinematic discourse.

Dixon, from an article.