You must trust the author you are studying. Proceed by feeling your way. One must ruminate, gathering and regathering the notions. You must silence the voices of objection within you. You must let [the author] speak for himself, analyse the frequency of [his] words, the style of his own obsessions. His thought invents coordinates and develops along its own axes.
Deleuze to his students in his Foucault seminar.
… the negative task of undoing reterritorialisation must always be accompanied by the positive task of understanding how and why those reterritorialisations were constructed in the first place. Deleuze and Guattari place a great premium on self-knowledge – but rather than asking us to get to know our inner self, they require us to come to know how that inner self was constituted.
Ian Buchanan, Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus
Godard's work was becoming ever more intellectual at a time when French society, high and low, was increasingly turning toward a quasi-American vernacular mass culture[….] As a living symbol of France's highest tradition, Godard was invulnerable, as a player in the industry, his place was shakier than ever.
Godard's response to the changing trends was to express his displeasure with them in diatribes that grew increasingly heated; he also became openly, publically nostalgic for the era before television, before mass media – 'It's true that, today, I can't find information, my information, in the newspapers' – and cited this failure as the resason for his switch to classical subject matters.
'That is to say, one can't find material [for a film] in the local news. So one has to copy, and since one has to copy, I prefer to copy Antigone than the life of Raymond Barre', a French politician. Contemporary life, Godard suggested, had become so impoverished that it no longer inspired his films; belonging to the age of living myths, he needed to resuscitate the great artistic legends as a way of telling his own story.
Brody, who is particularly good on Godard's 'classical' turn in the early 1980s.
Q. Chet’s amazingly vague when he talks about his music — is that why the film’s as much about his lifestyle and image?
A. I think he made music the way he lived — and as a photographer and a filmmaker, I really appreciated that. I asked him, “Are there any other musicians I should interview for this film?” He said, “No, I don’t think so.” His idea of talking about music was talking about driving fast cars, or about what it was like to sail a boat. His favorite sport was deep-sea diving.
Bruce Weber, director of the recently reissued Let's Get Lost, interviewed
Q. Is there any autobiography in what you do now?
A. Well, we don't really know who we are, in a sense. I'm trying to build a self with each song and find out what that is. You could say that's autobiographical, but not in any traditional way.
Scott Walker, interviewed in 1997
What I must say also is that clearly, like all writers who invoke Dieu the word and the word Dieu in their texts, I am religiously atheistic, but literarily deistic, that's it. Ultimately I think that no one can write without the aid of God, but what is it, God? without the aid of writing, God-as-Writing.
Cixous, interviewed
Arbus liked photographing the blind 'because they can't fake their expressions. They don't know what their expressions are, so there is no mask'.
[…] Arbus said that she wished she could have photographed 'the suicides on the faces of Marilyn Monroe and Hemingway. 'It was there. Suicide was there', she claimed.
Everywhere Kertesz looked he saw reflections of his own situation. A walk in the snow became a form of solace and an expression of the sadness from which it was intended to provide relief. Snow turns the city into a wilderness; parks become as vast as the central plain – the puszta – of Hungary. Dwarfed by the scale of their undertaking, Kertesz's overcoated men inch their way through the snow.
Geoff Dyer, The Ongoing Moment
… the best part of my hopes, the best part of my dreams, was born in the Left. I remain a lost Leftist. I no longer know what the Left means but I think it's simply the primordial desire of man for a better world. For me that's the Left – [to be] for a world of justice, freedom – and so this relationship between present and past was born.
Theo Angelopoulos, interviewed
… In Tarkovsky's entire cinematic oeuvre there is only one true establishing shot, marking the sudden shift in location to Rome from Tuscany towards the end of Nostalghia. As he discusses in Time of Travel, in Nostalghia Tarkovsky also sought to avoid seeing Italy as a tourist, whose gaze is attached to pretty spots on the landscape; rather he wanted each character (and viewer) to conjure up his or her own Italy – in anonymous ruins, modern hotels and bare apartment. It was uncharacteristic of Tarkovsky to place his films in any objectifable or recognisable landscape; his spaces emerge in the visual plane of concrete characters, not as the recepticle holding the action but as its consequence.
Robert Bird, Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema
Q: [Godard's longtime cinematographer] Raoul Coutard has said there are only two subjects in your films: death and the impossibility of love. I would argue for a third, the cinema itself.
A: In the beginning, it was for the cinema itself. And the cinema itself made us – my ancient comrades of the New Wave and me – made us aware, little by little, of death, life, all of everything.
Godard, interviewed
It's almost as if [Kiarostami's] making films without a camera. If he were using the camera, he would not know what he was going to do – the camera would help him discover it. In the camera, the light is in front. In a projector, the light comes from behind. Whereas here, the light that is his intelligence comes before everything. It is not the light of the thing, like when Cézanne paints an apple or a glass. When Cézanne paints an apple, he's not saying I am painting this apple. He says nothing. He paints it. Then afterward, when he's showing it, he might say I painted an apple. So, now when I want to criticize a film I say, "It was made without a camera."
Godard, interviewed
Most directors, and three-quarters of the people who will receive prizes in Berlin, only pick up the camera to feel alive. They do not use it to see things that you cannot see without a camera.
Godard interviewed
Two quotes from essays collected in Forever Godard:
Since the earliest days of his career, Godard's films have always combined perceptions and apperception, not only on the part of the characters (what they say, what they hear, what they suddenly think of, what they foresee, what they remember), but also on that of the utterance itself (the camera starts to look at the actor rather than the character; the director suddenly choses to reflect on the nature of cinema, on showing, on narration, instead of continuing to tell the story as though there was no one pulling the strings; he recalls the history of cinema and its stories).
… does a 'voice-off' come from a 'space-off' (a nearby or surrounding space), or some space that is more mysterious, magical, virtual, both of the scene and not of it?
I need a day/ to tell/ the story of one second/ I need/ a year/ to tell the story/ of one minute/ I need a lifetime/ to tell/ the story of one hour/ I need an eternity/ to tell/ the story/ of one day/ one can tell everything except/ the story of what one is doing.
from Peguy, Clio
One writes neither for the true proletarian, occupied elsewhere, and very well occupied, nor for the true bourgeois starved of goods, and who have not the ears. One writes for the mal- or "disadjusted", neither proletarian or bourgeois; that is to say, for one's friends, and less for the friends one has than for the innumerable unknown people who have the same life as us, who roughly and crudely understand the same things, are able to accept or must refuse the same, and who are in the same state of powerlessness and official silence.
Jean Mascolo, Le Communisme
from James Gavin, Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker:
Wilson (critic for the New York Times), 1973: 'His playing is still laconic to the point of listlessness, delivered in a stark, rather unshaded monotone'.
Gavin writes of a concert in 1974: 'Few who head it could forget Chet's version of 'The Thrill is Gone', which he counted off at a tempo so slow that the music seemed to float in space'. 'This is the end, so why pretend …', he sang, pulling listeners into the black hole of desolation where he seemed the happiest. Then came a trumpet chorus so drawn out and full of silence that it felt as though he were groping through the dark for the next note'.
And of one in 1976: 'Baker wrapped himself in a cocoon onstage: eyes closed, head and shoulders curled in, utterly withdrawn from the audience, whom he barely acknowledged. Only the most pained and fleeting smile ever crossed his lips as he visited some hazy inner place'.
And one in 1978: 'Every tempo had slowed to the "junkie beat" of his 1959 album Chet, made at the peak of his early addiction'.
Endress: 'The music is the only thing that kept him alive. I didn't dare approach him. He seemed so broked and sad'.
Gavin evokes ' A chilingly stark musical skeleton', and writes of 'his hollow, otherworldly singing'.
Norris: 'everything was closing in on him. He knew this'.
Stilo: 'He was a man completely lost, you understand? Asking someone to show him minimum reason to live'.
Masy: 'I saw death in his eyes. He was awake, but in another world'.
Baker to Weber: 'You can't help me. I'm too far out'.
Fevre: 'Taking speedballs the way he was, I think he was trying to escape from himself or from life'.
Gavin: 'The implication that he had committed a sort of passive-aggressive suicide – opening a window and letting death come to him – perfectly fit the profile of a man who, by his own admission, had never had the courage to confront tough decisions'.
Mihály Vig and I were walking along a street in Pécs together, and I was complaining to him that young people today are so terribly far removed from anything spiritual and intellectual. I said that when I was young, there was at least a handful of us who used to read, compose music, or paint pictures. In other words, we were thinking beings and were possessed by a search for something, which connected us. I was saying that this seems to have died out.
To this, Mihály said to me that he thought I was wrong – the people I am thinking of still exist in the same numbers today, but they are not visible. And, pointing up at the windows there, that evening at Pécs, he asked me, “How do you know there is not one sitting up there right now? It is just that they don't want to meet you as an ‘author’. They are busy. They cannot bear this world and are in some way testing a different one. Perhaps by creating something. Perhaps they are just sad and that's why they can't come. And that sadness will lead to something. To another gap for seeing out of the intolerable through to the tolerable. Or,” said Mihály, “he or she is sitting up there alone, reading your book, of all people's.”
László Krasznahorkai, interviewed
I was born into a predicament and a country where a person accursed with a heightened aesthetic and moral sensitivity like me simply cannot survive. It is enough to have an oversensitive and vulnerable person on one side, and the brutality of the other side will instantly produce mortal danger. Naturally, there are various strategies to help you survive in some way. I used to drink myself quite drunk whenever I could. I went on doing this until my health suffered so much that I was at risk of becoming a dramatic hero in an age which does not give a shit about drama – in an age which thinks no more of a dramatic ending than the Great Bulldozer thinks about a particular shell as it grinds up tens and tens of thousands of shells while driving along the sea shore speckled with herons drowned in oil. Had it meant anything at all, had it drawn that lethargic attention to anything, had there been one single oversensitive youth to draw strength from such a dramatic ending, I admit I would not have hesitated for a moment to act this role. But it would not mean anything; it would not draw attention to anything and would not restore anybody's strength.
László Krasznahorkai, interviewed
Since happiness is an important matter in comedy […] it is worth pointing out that Characters (in the strong sense of the word) can be individuals who are not particularly happy: they are often paranoid, miserable, even bitter, constantly worried about their It, unable to trust anyone.
Yet this specific paranoid or overprotective passion in relation to their object reveals a more interesting configuration: the other side of the misery of the character's Ego is the happiness of his It[….] it is only their It that is happy. 'They' on the other hand, do everything and go to great lengths to make and keep the It as happy as possible; this can indeed put them in stressful and often miserable positions.
However, we should go a step further here and recognise that they do not really mind this misery at all. They might constantly complain, yet this does not indicate that they are not satisfied with things as they are. They do not feel unhappy because they are miserable and in a constant state of stress. On the contrary: they are quite content insofar as their It is content, and insofar as they manage to keep it content.
Alenka Zupancic, The Odd One In: On Comedy
[Comedies] are never 'intersubjecive'. Although comedy, as opposed to tragedy, is above all a dialogical genre (whereas it would be difficult to have a real tragedy without a few great monologues), the type of comic characters we are discussing is fundamentally 'monological'.
What is at stake is not merely a parody of tragic monologues, though this aspect also exists, and often plays its part in comedy. The crucial point is that these heroes are extracted, by their passion, from the world of the normal intersubjective communication – they are quite content, one could say, to converse solely with their 'it/id'. Yet they remain a part of this same world, which will not leave them in peace.
This configuration brings about a specific comic genre of 'dialogical monologue' in which the characters, technically in dialogue with othes, are in fact absorbed in a dialogue with themselves, or with their 'it'. The comedy of such dialogues does not come from witty and clever exchanges between two subjects, or from local misunderstandings that make (comic) sense on another level of dialogue, but from the fact that the character is not really present in the dialogue he is engaged in.
Alenka Zupancic, The Odd One In: On Comedy
In the contemporary ideological climate it has become imperative that we perceive all the terrible things that happen to us as something positive – say as a precious experience that will bear fruit in our future life. Negativity, lack, dissatisfaction, unhappiness, are perceived more and more as moral faults – worse, as a corruption at the level of our very being or bare life. There is a spectacular rise of what we might call a bio-morality (as well as morality of feelings and emotions), which promotes the following fundamental axiom: a person who feels good (and is happy) is a good person; a person who feels bad is a bad person.
[…] [B]io-morality […] is replacing the classical notion of responsibility with the notion of a damaged, corrupt being: the unhappy and the unsuccessful are somehow corrupt at the level of their bare life, and all their erroneous actions or nonactions follow from there with an inexorable necessity.
[…] success is becoming almost a biological notion, and thus the foundation of a genuine racism of succesfulness.
Alenka Zupancic, The Odd One In: On Comedy
For an avowed atheist, who viewed life as a tragic absurdity between two voids, the death of a lover opened as deep and complex a well of feeling as the death of Christ opens in a believer; the whole nature of existence is brought into question. As if impelled by the force of his emotions, Bacon the atheist had ransacked the central rituals of both the Greek and Christian faith: only there, he was convinced, could he find a structure to convey the extent and the implication of his own drama.
That drama – of art demanding the sacrifice of the artist – lies at the heart of the whole enigma of Bacon’s art.
Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma
Peppiatt notes the shift in the subject matter in Bacon's work. 'When I was young I needed extreme subject matter for my paintings', he said, 'Then as I grew older I began to find my subject matter in my own life'. Thus a movement away from screaming Popes and anonymous figures to portraits of his friends. History and mythology is supplanted by portraiture.
They were his close friends, whom he saw on an almost daily basis: he had watched them in and out of love, drunk and sober, close up and across the street, in snapshots and in mirrors. He knew their faces better than they did themselves; he recalled and rehearsed the shadows case as they laughed under bar light, the dark pools on the reddened flesh, then the head snapping back in a blur, as if in a search of its old contours.
He saw them in film sequence, always moving, and at times almost unrecognisable from one instant to the next. This was the mystery of their appearance, which he loved and which prompted him to try and capture them, tenderly, violently, erotically, in paint.
[….] The artist appears to have identified with Isabel Rawthorne, for instance, whom he painted with obsessive frequency, both in full-length portraits and small-format heads. If a magnificent sense of dignity emanates from these studies, it is because the artist's affection is greater, but only just, than the destructive fury with which he dislocated and twisted her every feature.
Bacon once said that he thought of real friendship as a state in which two people pulled each other to pieces – dissecting and criticising mercilessly. This is the act of 'friendship' that Bacon perpetrates in the portraits: a pulling apart of the other until he gets to an irreducible truth or 'fact' as he liked to call it, in a pseudo-scientific fashion – about their appearance and their character.
Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma
There is no such thing, said Debord, as a situationist work of art. No doubt art is still part of the spectacle, which is to say, a particular way in which relations between people are mediated by images.
Cinema must be abolished ('the cinema, too, must be destroyed'), but Debord makes films. It must be abolished, but film can be abolished in film; the mediation of which it would be part can itself be staged and made explicit.
The filmed world is no longer to appear natural. The immersion of an audience in a narrative will be frustrated. We'll see the film crew, the clapper and all the apparatus of film-making. And to Debord's montage there belongs the power to disrupt a familiar cinematic syntax.
By the filmed Society of the Spectacle, there is only found material – scenes from Battleship Potemkin and The Triumph of the Will, footage of Nixon meeting Mao, Castro, pictures of the earth seen from space, scenes from '68 (French riot police around the Flins factory) commericals and publicity stills from the fashion world ('plagiarism is necessary') …
So too is image broken apart from soundtrack: the soundtrack for Society … consists of excerpts from Debord's book of the same name, but with dialogue from Welles' Mr Arkadin mixed in, excerpts from Shakespeare ('from this day … we band of brothers') and Melville ('… desolation and horror, at the calm centre of mysery') …
'Society broadcasts to itself its own image of its own history, a history reduced to a superficial and static pageant of its rulers – the persons who embody the apparent inevitability of whatever happens'.
'This dominant equilibrium is brought back into question each time unknown people try to live differently, but it was always far away. We learn of it through the papers and newscasts. We remain outside it, relating to it as just another spectacle. We are separated from it by own own nonintervention'.
'The only interesting venture is the liberation of everyday life, not only in a historical perspective, but for us, right now. This project implies the withering away of all alienated forms of communication. The cinema, too, must be destroyed'.
By the film, by way of the film, relations no longer mediated, but disrupted. The film as anti-spectacle. As situation. What might relations be between us now: immediate? Can we turn, finally from the film, from all art (the spectacle) to one another, to Life (capital 'l')? On screen: May 1968 barricades in Paris. Fires and street fighting …
Any work of art after Debord is … after the fact? presumptuous? Later than ever. All too late.
(Patrick Keiller, director of the great London and Robinson in Space suggests that the mysterious Robinson – named after a character in Kafka's Amerika, finds his utopia in my city. This doesn't surprise me. But then again, as he also says, Robinson is currently in prison, 'having been picked up in late 1996 by MoD police wandering lost on moorland near the former Spadeadam rocket base, suffering from apparent memory loss'.
Keiller says he is planning a third Robinson film. And note (for a future post): 'The Situationists saw their explorations at least partly as preliminary to the production of some kind of new space, but in 1990s London, they seemed to have become an end in themselves, so that 'psychogeography' led, not to avant-garde architecture, such as Constant's 'New Babylon', but to, say, the 'Time Out Book of London Walks' (via).)
The youth who attacked the orphanage at Auteuil as a symbolic force of control were rioting out of boredom rather than material privation, asserting their refusal to be assimilated into a pre-ordinained economic order. By throwing a brick, spitting in the face of authority, committing a crime, getting hopelessly drunk, drifting pointlessly between bars, they were able to short-circuit the 'circuit of exchange' which controlled their lives. 'Let youth cease to serve as a commodity', preached Isou. The new proletariat, above all, Isou said, must be able to accept nothing as given and deny all social forms of order. They were outsiders who were determined to stay on the outside.
Hussey on Debord
I've spent whole summers at Neauphle alone except for drink. People used to come at weekends. But during the week I was alone in that huge house, and that was how alcohol took on its full significance. It lends resonance to loneliness, and ends up making you prefer it to everything else.
[…] Alcohol, even those in the gutter, tend to be intellectuals. The proletariat, a class far more intellectual now than the bourgeoisie, has a propensity for for alcohol, as can be seen all over the world. […] Just look at the history of ideas. Alcohol makes people talk. It's spirituality carried to the point where logic becomes lunacy; it's reason going mad trying to understand why this kind of society, this Reign of Injustice, exists. And it always ends in despair.
[…] What they lack is a god. The void you discover one day in your teens – nothing can ever undo that discovery. But alcohol was invented to help us bear the void in the universe – the motion of planets, their imperturbable wheeling through space, their silent indifference to the place of our pain.
A man who drinks is interplanetary. He moves through interstellar space. It's from there he looks down. Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn't comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny.
No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting, can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation. Alcohol's job is to replace creation.
Duras, Practicalities
… I know hippies, kids well. My son is a sort of kid too. There is an almost irrepressible repulsion against knowledge and culture. They don't read anything. This is something fundamental, something entirely new.
[…] This is what young people are doing, you know. On the international level they are creating a void. […] they don't do anything. They excel at not doing anything. Getting to that point is fantastic. Do you know how not to do anything at all? I don't. This is what we lack most … They create a void, and all this … this recourse to drugs, I think is a … it's not an alibi, it's a means. I'm certain of that. Do you think so too? They're creating a vacuum, but we can't yet see what is going to replace what was destroyed in them – it's much too early for that.
[…] even if they're not politically aware, they nonetheless represent a political force. […] they represent a question, a question that weighs as heavily as a mountain: What now? […] by definition they are outside of the circuit of production. The hippie is a creature who has absolutely no ties with anything. […] it's not a rejection; it's a waiting period. Like someone taking his time. Before committing himself to act.
[…] There's a gap between hope and despair, if you will. Where it's both together. A gap that can't be described yet. I think it escapes description. It is what I call the void, the zero point. Perhaps the word 'void' is going too far … the zero point. The neutral point. Where sensitivity regroups, if you will, and rediscovers itself …
[she goes on to give the example of the Cultural Revolution ('a great mystico-communist experiment') as striving for exactly this 'zero point'.]
Anyway: it is said that there are more and more disturbed people. Madmen: mental institutions everywhere are full of them. This to me is profoundly reassuring. It clearly proves that the world is intolerable and that people feel it to be so. It merely proves that people's sensitivity is increasing. And intelligence … Do you see?
[…] I hope that there will be more and more madmen: I make this statement with pleasure, with satisfaction. Personally. It proves that the solution is near. The premises of a solution.
Duras, interviewed in 1969 in Cahiers du cinema
Excerpted from Guy Debord's film, We Turn in the Night Consumed By Fire:
Although the select population of this momentary capital of disturbances included a certain number of thieves and occasionally a few murderers, our life was principally characterised by a prodigious inactivity; and of all the crimes and offenses denounced there by the authorities, it was this that was sensed as the most threatening.
[…] It was there that we acquired the toughness that has stayed with us all the days of our life, and that has enabled several of us to remain so lightheartedly at war with the whole world. And as for myself in particular, I suspect that the circumstances of that time were the apprenticeship that enabled me to make my way so instinctively through the subsequent chain of events, which included so much violence and so many breaks, and where so many people were treated so badly – passing through all those years as if with a knife in my hand.
Perhaps we might not have been quite so ruthless if we had found some already-initiated project that seemed to merit our support. But there was no such project. The only cause we supported we had to define and launch ourselves. There was nothing above us that we could respect.
[…] The sensation of the passing of time has always been vivid for me, and I have been attracted by it just as others are allured by dizzying heights or by water. In this sense I have loved my era, which has seen the end of all existing security and the dissolution of everything that was socially ordained. These are pleasures that the practice of the greatest art would not have given me.
And I've always liked this, which turns up in the middle of Critique of Separation:
It must be admitted that none of this is very clear. It is a completely typical drunken monologue, with its incomprehensible allusions and tiresome delivery. With its vain phrases that do not await response and its overbearing explanations. And its silences.
Not far from Chez Moineau, there was a famous government information poster which warned that 'L'alcool tue lentement' (Alcohol kills slowly). The poster had not been up for twenty-four hours when, on Debord's instructions, a raiding party from Chez Moineau had scrawled over it, 'On s'en fout. On a le temps' ('We don't give a fuck. We've got the time').
Hussey on Debord
Artistic creation is by definition a denial of death. Therefore it is optimistic, even if in an ultimate sense the artist is tragic.
There are no entertaining moments in [Mirror]. In fact I am categorically against entertainment in cinema: it is as degrading for the author as it is for the audience.
Tarkovsky, Time Within Time
The English edition of the Diaries is incomplete. Nostalghia.com provide translations from the Polish edition (see, in particular, those selections that pertain to the making of The Sacrifice.)
Lars Iyer's Blog 