Two Letters (Mark Cousins/Tilda Swinton) Part II

Dear Mark,

I'm back from the big broad California. I'm
back in the little town in the Highlands of
Scotland.

The leaves have taken over the earth. This
morning, at 6, they were a pre-breakfast world
of Frosties underfoot. I'm slowly realising they
were doing exactly this all the time i was stepping
out in the sun last week in my flip flops.

I'm thinking that maybe it's particularly
the integrated schizophrenia of this intergalactic/
parochial existence of mine that makes
Apichatpong the man for me.

My children are at an age - just II - when
life's myriad choices can feel agonising to them.
Yes: i want to come for a walk on the beach
with you but yes, i also want to stay inside and
be warm. Yes, i want that cake with the interesting
icing on it but yes, i also want a bit of
good old millionaire shortbread. Yes, my best
friend makes me feel like crying sometimes: Yes,
i hate my beloved brother whom i cling to in
dark places.

Recently, it occurred to me to encourage
them to recognize that life can hold both, it can
be both and more: always. Brisk beach and
warm fire, all manner of delicious snysters, all
sides of a real person in a real relationship. It's
the question of choice that's all. Choice and
timing.

I was thinking particularly of Apitchatpong
Weerasethakul when i hit on this scheme: thinking
about his films and the spell they cast and
the other - meaner - spell they break. Of the
way in which he religiously - and i mean the
precision of that word - reminds us of the
balance, the coexistence, the all-round everythingness
of living, of human interaction,
of the natural world we are inescapably a part
of - and of its timing, its tick tock mechanism
of incessant movement, however imperceptible:
so much more vast than anything we tiny,
choiceladen wee human beans could ever hold.

When i saw Tropical Malady in Cannes - the
first of his films i had seen - i thought that the
reels had been switched accidentally. I actually
sat up and looked for an official in the aisle.
A modern, tentatively-poised relationship evolving.
Cut to a mysterious creature glimpsed hunted?
- through the trees of a forest, incessantly,
for the rest of the film. How could this be
so? I felt myself blush, caught out, indecent:
how could it be that falling in love itself could
be purposefully unspooling in its raw, natural
order in front of this civilised audience? For isn't
this what the first steps towards the fever
of love are exactly - the malady of the title – but
stepping into the haze of the intoxicating jungle?
Going barefoot and without a hat? Heart in
your throat and sweat prickling up everywhere?

Eventually the forest, this film murmurs.
Inevitably, inexorably, the forest.

When i discovered Blissfully Yours, i saw that
this question of sacredness is no random guess
on Apichatpong's part, or even mine. My memories
are clearer of this film, somehow, not only
because i saw it more recently: because i was
ready for the forest, gagging for it, in fact, but i
can offer only sense memories from the tip of
my taste buds:

The skin of a young Burmese man peels
away. He is illegally in Thailand and must pretend
to be mute and to have fictional family
relations with two women, one older and one
younger (we are mute, shaded, delicate, alien as
he is as we enter into this film). Once they leave
society behind, the details buzz:

His dearly loved wife and child, only referred to
in a letter home in voice over.

The reference to the girl's abusive boyfriend,
superimposed on the screen like a doodle, like a
tattoo.

The moment when the mother of the drowned
child submerges herself in the daytime river
fully clothed.

We know she wants another child.
We watch her fuck in the forest.
We look for the longing in her face, in her legs.

The ants invade the discarded picnic: nothing
but nature is certain.

Now she watches the young lovers.
She cries
in her brown midlife underpants.

She steals a smoke
the river gurgles by
the girl teases her lover's cock out of its fly and
caresses it awake.

Nothing but nature is certain.
Flies settle on the faces of people, bird calls mesmerize
the atmosphere.
All this and nothing more: no drama, no mise
en scene, no brouhaha.
Just human animals breathing in and out and
taking their place in the day.

Eventually, by the last few frames, we are in the
girl's ecstatic reverie.
We are in that head.

That is our arm, flung up across the bank.
That's tonight's - our - sunset drawing in.

That is me looking up and into the camera.

I wish we could show my children these films,
although i know we won't for some years. I feel
they would settle them, give them a divining
rod for the future, when the light might trick
them into thinking editing is the answer to a
sense of real power in life.

But i am patient. It's bigger children that
need these archeological remnants of sentient-cohesive
- possibilities, of post-choice harmony,
these reminders of the natural order of gesture,
of faith, of acceptance.

Alongside the medieval space programme
that is the cinema of Bela Tarr, i would suggest
that Apichatpong is one of the very few truly
modern filmmakers working today, far beyond
the pale of both narrative tradition and postmodern
experiment. The forest binds the soul
and holds it, safe and wild, in his cinema. I am
deeply besotted with that particular wilderness.

Coordinated swoon, my pal,
Tilda

Two Letters (Mark Cousins/Tilda Swinton) Part I

These are taken from the book on Weeresethakul recently edited by James Quandt and published through FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen in Vienna. It was hard not to be moved by the intimacy and sincerity of this correspondence between Mark Cousins and Tilda Swinton, and since there's not much review/excerpt from the book online, I decided to transcribe this wonderful piece of communication. You can order the book through Amazon. I will post the Tilda Swinton's part shortly.

Dear Tilda,
So we are to write something on Apichatpong
Weerasethakul.
I am sitting in my flat in Edinburgh, Scotland.
The clouds are racing across the dawn sky.
I am in long johns and a big cardigan because
my heating has broken down. I can think of no
better way of starting the day than writing
about Apichatpong. Why? Because I am not up
to speed yet. The phone hasn't started going,
the e-mails haven't started blinking, my mind is
relatively empty and unburdened.

I know that the pace and brouhaha of even
this relatively relaxed European capital city will
soon impress itself upon me - its pace and
brouhaha will become mine in half an hour or
so - but before they do, I am sitting here with
pictures of Apichatpong fIlms in my head. They
are fIlms that you know well but we have hardly
talked about them. I imagine you in L.A., where
you are today, a place so different from this
place, and wonder what images you will have in
year head when you read this or start to respond
to it. What moments will flicker onto the screen
in your mind?

As I see my first image, I realize that flicker is
the wrong word. Apichatpong's movies do the
opposite of flicker. They are not delicate like
butterflies, like Lillian Gish in D.W Griffith
movies, like Anna Karina's eye lashes in Vivre sa
vie. The first scene I remember in the first
Apichatpong movie I saw, in the Bazin cinema
in Cannes, is from Tropical Malady. A guy takes
a piss. When he's finished, his friend licks his
fingers. Everything iliey have done so far is calm
and gentle. The film even looks slightly
undercranked, as they used to say (I know it
isn't). And they are photographed with such
quietude, such lack of flicker or dither. Yet the
scene is an electric bolt. When I saw it then and
when I see it in my mind now, I think of the
scene where the guy has a shit in Wim Wenders'
Kings of the Road. It was an electric bolt
too. Both were completely new to me. I'd seen
neither before in the movies, or in life. And
there they were, up on screen, rock solid proof
that when filmmakers really look, when iliey
tear away the fIlters and fIlm something really
simple, the effect is an electrifying punctum, as
the sainted M. Barthes would say.

I left Cannes that year, in search of Apichatpong
movies, like a bullet out of a gun. The
next one I saw was Mysterious Object at Noon. Its
'exquisite corpse' structure has cast its spell on
a doc I am making in Iraq at the moment, but
the image from it that comes to mind this
morning, as the clouds race across the sky
(it's a bit brighter now, I no longer need my desk
lamp on), is a simple one near the beginning of
the film. A woman who sells tuna fish from her
van to villagers is sitting in the back of that van,
telling us the moving story of her semi-slavery
as a girl. She is on the verge of tears: the sort of
scene we've seen many times before. Then, as
she finishes, without a cut (I believe) and rather
too brutally, it seems to me, a voice - which I
presume is Apichatpong's - asks her to tell a
story. And immediately she does. The story begins
the series of improvisations that make up
the body of the film. But what I love about this
moment is the directness of the gear change
between her recounting a painful memory and
the filmmaker deciding that the film should
now lift off the ground of realism, as it were,
into fantasy and childish invention. Soon we are
in the realm of the moon, and the mysterious
object of the title. Apichatpong, if it is he, does
not come across as entirely patient in this moment.
It's as if he is straining to get on to the
metaphysical part of the story but, as I would
see as I watched more of his movies, this gear
change is one of the things that's unique to him
in contemporary cinema. The closest I can
compare it to from the past are the moments in,
say, An American in Paris, where speech suddenly
rises into song.

My next image comes from Blissfully Yours,
which was sent to me from Second Run DVD,
who constantly introduce me to great movies I
haven't seen. I'm thinking of the languor of the
picnic scene, which is slower than life. The girl
and the boy are on a cliff, overlooking a landscape.
The colours are pale because of the
brightness of the sun, the heat of the day, the
humidity in the air. Suddenly hand-Written Thai
words and draWings appear onscreen, as if the
movie has become a note-book or diary, as if
there is space between incidents, as part of the
slow beat of the film's clock, to sketch. Aren't
picnics times to draw? Apichatpong seems to
think so. The only times in my life that I've ever
watched a fly or a ladybird crawl along a blanket,
or through grass, are on picnics or, after
picnics, lying in the sun. At this moment, in this
film, I would not have been surprised if I'd seen
a ladybird crawl across the screen.

And even as I think of those sketches on that
film, I'm onto Apichatpong's Syndromes and a
Century. I've seen it only once, on DVD, after
two glasses of wine. Maybe for this reason it is
its shape more than indiVidual images that
come to my mind. I remember it like a Henry
Moore sculpture, twisting and torqUing. Perhaps
this is because, in its second half, downstairs
in the over-lit hospital, the camera drifts towards a
funnel that leads to a pipe. Is it being
sucked into that pipe? This seemed purely sculptural
to me. As I think of this scene, the movies
of David Lynch come to mind. If they are
"black Lynch," this one is "white Lynch." The
hospital is like a beast, and we are in its belly. We
expect a Lynchian roar.

It's bright now. The Edinburgh traffic noise
has increased and the day has properly begun. I
send you these few thoughts and images via
e-mail and on the movie thermals, to L.A., and
can't wait to hear your thoughts or your images.
I knowJames Quandt wanted our comments
as the introduction to his book on Apichatpong,
but given that the movies are all brokeback, that
they're diptychs that start again half way
through and the credits can come somewhere in
the middle, maybe our introductory piece could
come somewhere in the middle? Handwritten
like the sketches in Blissfttlly Yours? Or maybe
not since both our handwritings are illegible.

Over to you comrade,
Mark

manifesto of neo-futurism

Found it here

MANIFESTO OF NEO-FUTURISM
“An Exultation of Urban Noise”

1. This is for use by the addressee(s) only. If you are the intended recipient, please notify us immediately.
In the dead of noise all we can hear above our heartbeats is the screaming
silence of the swarm.
Lull.
Mutation and recombination.
Every throng is all and constant.

2. SPEEDDATING
We have crawled sclerotically into the near present. Terrorised by our own futures, denying our own song.
Commoner.
Reproducer.
Feverish cities.
We must embrace the virus. Disease and risk. Multiply. Feed
the urban appetite for collapse.
Mass.

3. BY THE LOOK OF THINGS FROM THE GROUND
We intend to proclaim our anxiety, our failures, our fears, celebrate self-loathing, and joyously affirm our lack. We will set ourselves up to fall ¬– blissfully.

4. CHOOSING PAINT DRYING; THE END IS POSSIBLY IN SIGHT
Our barbarous beauty is swathed by a utility fog – the artist must throw up the hard yellow veil of health & safety: Danger’s song will be sung. NOW, now we intend to holler our passion for vigorous incompetence. We have pre-put ourselves. Clamour for the irregularised space of unaccountability, where we are free to open ourselves up to dreams and deliriums.

5. GLITTER OF KNIVES; CONSENSUS
Do not tolerate. Nothing should be tolerated. Repressive tolerance leads to stress, stress leads to conflict. Tragedy, pain a human becomes or peril Unrequited, further enduring.

6. OFFROADING
Deals await you or your Gold. We are all disabled by our lust. Be inspired by the dysfunctional consumer. He cannot help himself.
We don’t know what we wished, we have no vision, we only see the searing colours.
We reject the quest for redemptive purity in this age of environmental apocalypse, and magnificently wrestle our own filth in the wet labs of executive swamps. Ours is a dirty revolt.

7. NEXT UP
We will enchant the passage of the dragging route.
Delight the creeping pace of travel.

8. MAYBE JUST ONE WORD WILL DO IT?
Each gesture serves to commemorate the last.
A celebrant’s training montage: Sound-bitten-interactivity-niche-sexuality-architectural-vanity-project-creative-quarter/hub/cluster-regeneration-inclusivity-choice … We urge you to cry your own.

9. PACIFIER DELIVERABLE KITS
Art will not save the world.


© Rowena Easton of The Neo Futurist Collective
Brighton, 20th February 2008

Bruno Dumont and Hadewijch

I have yet to write my blurbs about Hadewijch. I found the film quite interesting, and a noteworthy turning point in Dumont's career. It delves into lots of contemporary ramification about religious extremism (clash/friction of religions) departing from a historical/fictional account on a fairly unknown Christian mystic Hadewijch and her writings. I saw the film at its premiere in Toronto this year. I took some photos of Dumont after the screening while discussing with Piers Handling of TIFF. This photo stands out as a bit obligue and abstract, but has a mysterious tag as well hence paralleling the film in a way.

I've cross-posted this with my other blog Filmarylin.

Shirin

Shirin has been an absolute flat-out discovery for me among 2009's titles. Quotations come from Kiarostami's own description of the movie. I had waited such long time to catch up with this on big screen, alas, for the reasons unknown, it never made it to North American distribution if I am not mistaken. Kudos go to the BFI for plunging to release this gem on DVD. The disc contains an amazing extra feature as complementary to the film that is called 'Taste of Shirin', that could pass easily a sort of 'making of'. This would be a great new year investment for those interested in seeing this.

Offscreen. How did it occur to you to make such a movie?

Abbas Kiarostami. It was a response to an old temptation, a very old one dating back to the days when I had become a director. It was all about watching the audiences. I believe it has its root in the fact that, in the absence of an audience, no production could be dubbed a production on its own. It is not that I want to grease the palms of audiences. I don’t seek to lift the stature of the audience at the expense of the production. What I am saying is that the moment an audience is affected by a movie, the creation is that special moment, not the film itself. There is no such thing as a movie before the projector is switched on and after the theatre’s lights are turned off. A film which consists of many frames that is placed in a box, or works by a digital system, etc., is nothing like a painting or statue to prompt us to think of it as a mass or an identity. I believe the identity of the silver screen hinges on audiences, in such a moment that it sees its audience. So a production takes shape in the moment we see the audience. In other words, at a certain juncture audiences and the movie become one.

I believe this work features two movies. I mean, we don’t look at the production in the abstract; rather, we look at its impact on audiences. This is a very old phenomenon evident in some other films I have directed. For instance, in Under the Olive Trees the moment there is an argument between Ms. Shiva and Hussein with the construction worker who has dropped the bricks, we see the traffic jam without actually seeing it. I mean on their faces we see the whole atmosphere without seeing the actual congestion. It is the case in several recent productions of mine. We see the film through the impact it has on people who are watching a movie.

I had a very radical feeling and wanted to watch the audience in private. To me watching people is more interesting than anything else. This is a very old feeling. It has nothing to do with directing. It is a deep and bold gaze; similar to that of children in the cradle, quite straightforward. There are moments in this film which are just like a gift to me. It is a blessing to be able to look at someone so closely to detect feelings on their faces.

Offscreen: What reaction do you think your movie will draw?

AK: I cannot guess. “I don’t care at all” is quite a cliché these days because many directors begin to use that expression after a very brief experience in filmmaking. The fact that I have never uttered that sentence over the years makes me feel comfortable saying it right now. I am not saying I don’t care whether they like the film or not. What I am saying is that their not liking the movie won’t affect my feelings about it. I believe I have already answered this question without answering it, by watching the film several times; whenever someone has watched the film, I have watched it too. It comes despite the fact that I have never watched my own movies, even once. Actually, Close-up is an exception. I have watched it three or four times.

This film has a lot to explore. That is why when I watch it again I find something new which invites me to watch it again.

More of it can be found on wonderful Canadian film journal Offscreen.

http://www.offscreen.com/biblio/pages/essays/shirin_kiarostami/

Art of Junk Food

Allan S Weiss' has strived to publish a culinary/gastronomic alphabet at Cabinet a few years back. I was just having a read through their sold out issues and upon stumbling the piece I was quite intrigued by the Junk Food section. It's very well worth pondering more on the point he is making whether junk food could ever inspire the so-called haute cuisine. Although, it's not quite clear why we should thrive for this kind of anticipation, it's made me wonder why the phenomena of junk food has found more space in art (Warhol, pop-art, Oldenburg, etc..) or cinema or literature than the 'art of making food' itself.

J

Junk food. Cultural studies has motivatedvast amounts of writing on fast food andjunk food conceived as a major sociologicalphenomenon; they are occasionallyalso considered in culinary terms, either asa counter-ideal opposed to the heightsof “transcendental” cuisine, or as a meansto argue for the total subjectivization ornonhierarchization of culinary values. However—while usually avoiding arguments onthese matters, since they originate in a verydifferent, indeed antithetical universe ofvalues from my own—I still await the wordof a great chef who claims any inspirationwhatsoever from such food. Furthermore,in response to criticisms of hierarchicalæsthetic judgments, quite frankly, I havenever yet heard anybody say, “Hey, let’sgo out for an awful meal.” The notion of“taste,” when practically utilized in regardto food, almost always implies good taste.I wish to insist that this position is not at alla manifestation of culinary snobbism, sincethe very poorest of peasant foods—in factmuch less expensive, more nourishing, andsimpler than fast food, and still just as ubiquitousand widely appreciated—have inspiredhaute cuisine from its inception. Consider onion soup, cabbage soup, and that provençalgarlic soup whose name so poeticallyindicates a zero-degree of the culinary arts,aïgo bouïllido, “boiled water.”

From "Ingestion: A personal gastronomic alphabet, part II", Cabinet, Issue 2

nudities

Can't wait to read Agamben's new book. This excerpt is taken from the translator's own blog.

"The nudity of the human body is its image; that is, the trembling that makes this body knowable, though it remains, in itself, ungraspable. Hence the unique fascination that images exercise over the human mind. Precisely because the image is not the thing, but the thing’s knowability (its nudity), it neither expresses nor signifies the thing. Nevertheless, inasmuch as it is nothing other than the giving of the thing over to knowledge, nothing other than the stripping off of the clothes that cover it, nudity is not separate from the thing: it is the thing itself."

[An excerpt from Giorgio Agamben's Nudities, forthcoming in Stanford University Press.]

little expressionless animals II

"You asked me once how poems informed me," she says. Almost a whisper—her microphone voice. "And you asked whether we, us, depended on the game, to even be. Baby?"—lifting Faye's face with one finger under the chin—"Remember? Remember the ocean? Our dawn ocean, that we loved? We loved it because it was like us, Faye. That ocean was obvious. We were looking at something obvious, the whole time." She pinches a nipple, too softly for Faye even to feel. "Oceans are only oceans when they move," Julie whispers. "Waves are what keep oceans from just being very big puddles. Oceans are just their waves. And every wave in the ocean is finally going to meet what it moves toward, and break. The whole thing we looked at, the whole time you asked, was obvious. It was obvious and a poem because it was us. See things like that, Faye. Your own face, moving into expression. A wave, breaking on a rock, giving up its shape in a gesture that expresses that shape. See?"

little expressionless animals

"You hear stories, though," Muffy says. "About these lonely or somehow disturbed people who've had only the TV all their lives, their parents or whomever started them right off by plunking them down in front of the set, and as they get older the TV comes to be their whole emotional world, it's all they have, and it becomes in a way their whole way of defining themselves as existents, with a distinct identity, that they're outside the set, and everything else is inside the set." She sips. -David Foster Wallace, "Little Expressionless Animals"

Bronson (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2009)

I finally got around to see Bronson upon its recent DVD&blu-ray releases in the UK. The film overall was quite enjoyable as a bio-pic yet in the act of its dramatic execution it was perpetuating a bit pretentious, uber-glossed and highly stylized plaster of filmmaking. (As one who is familiar with Refn's Pusher series would have expected) Rather than laying out a bloodfeast of violence, it was focussing more on the main character's self-parodic thereby self-indulgent theatritical performance of his recounting of his own past. This foray however seems to be persevering the most enjoyable core of the film, by the time film moves into a final thread where quoting other films becomes more explicit (hence obnoxious) than ever -hence launching a sort of parody throughout that reveals something less interesting than its initially set premises. Thus, Bronson seems to get failed in the act of gesturing into other films throughout its final momentum instead of digging more into different layers of the Bronson character. Remarkable lead performance by Tom Hardy deserves to be cited though. Angeresque camp color scheme as well.. Overall, after Pusher series, a good move for Refn into English language. But to say the least, does it really stand out? I am not sure... 6.5/10

de-hal

"Deha caliskanliktir." Dehayi belirleyen en onemli olgulardan birisi onun hayatin zemin katina biraktigi silik ayak izleridir. Bu izlerin silikligi ona olan uzaklikla ya da bakisin olusmaya basladigi anda dahil oldugu bir duzenekle ilintili degildir. Aksine hatirlayisin koyu pariltisiyla, ve belki bunun sonucunda kisiye getirdigi sonsuz tembellik hissiyle ilgilidir. Kendini dinleyisin ortaya cikardigi bu sezgisel an, hic beklenmedik bir duzlemde de kendisini ortaya cikarabilir. Iste boyle anlar, donusmeye baslayisin gune sizdigi ve sonsuzlugun bakisiyla kesistigi durgunlukla beslenen aralara yerlesir. Sonsuzlugun kendi kendisine hatirlattigi olum kanisi bu yazgida hic de beklenmedik degildir. Yeni bir yaziya ya da caliskanliga ulasmanin gundelik ve mekanik edimi belki de bu baglantida baslamalidir.

"But genius is the power to labor better and more availably. Deserve thy genius: exalt it."
Emerson

From Gehr

"A still has to do with a particular intensity of light, an image, a composition frozen in time and space.
A shot has to with variable intensity of light, and internal balance of time dependent upon an intermittent movement and a movement within a given space dependent upon persistence of vision...
A still as related to film is concerned with using and losing an image of something through time and space. In representational films sometimes the image affirms its own presence as image, graphic entity, but most often it serves as a vehicle to a phot0-recorded event. Traditional and established avant-garde film teach film to be an image, a representing. Bu film is a real thing and as a real thing it is not an imitation. It does not reflect on life, it embodies the life of the mind. It is not a vehicle for ideas or portrays of emotion outside of its own existence as emoted idea." (Ernie Gehr, Programs Notes, Film Culture no. 53-55 (Spring 1972)

What is to be Done? -- Jean Luc Nancy

What is to be done, at present? The question is on everybody's lips and, in a certain way, it's the question people today always have lying in wait for any passing philosopher. Not: What is to be thought? But indeed: What is to be done? The question is on everybody's lips (including the philosopher's), but witheld, barely uttered, for we do not know if we still have the right, or whether we have the means, to raise it. Perhaps, we think more or less discreetly to ourselves, perhaps the uncertainty of 'what is to be done?' is today so great, so fluctuating, so indeterminate, that we do not need even to do this: raise the question.

Especially if the question were to presuppose that one already knows what is right to think, and that the only issue is how one might then proceed to act. Behind us theory, and before us practice - the key thing is knowing what it is opportune to decide in order to embark on specific action. But this is what is presupposed most ordinarily by the question. And 'what is to be done?' means, in that case, 'how to act' in order to achieve an already given goal. 'Transforming the world' then means: realising an already given interpretation of the world, and realising a hope.

But we do not know what it is right for us to think, or even properly to hope. Perhaps we no longer even know what it is to think nor, consequently, what it is to think 'doing', nor what 'doing' is, absolutely.

Perhaps, though, we know one thing at least: 'What is to be done?' means for us: how to make a world for which all is not already done (played out, finished, enshrined in a destiny), nor still entirely to do (in the future for always future tomorrows).

This would mean that the question places us simultaneously before a doubly imperative response. It is necessary to measure up to what nothing in the world can measure, no established law, no inevitable process, no prediction, no calculable horizon -absolute justice, limitless quality, perfect dignity -and it is necessary to invent and create the world itself, immediately, here and now, at every moment, without reference yesterday or tomorrow. Which is the same as saying that it is necessary at one and the same time to affirm and denounce the world as it is -not to weigh out as best one can equal amounts of submission and revolt, and always end up halfway between reform and accomodation, but to make the world into the place, never still, always perpetually reopened, of its own contradiction, which is what prevents us from ever knowing in advance what is to be done, but imposes upon us the task of never making anything that is not a world.

What will become of our world is something we cannot know, and we can no longer believe in being able to predict or command it. But we can act in such a way that this world is a world able to open itself up to its own uncertainty as such.

These are not vague generalities. I am writing these lines in January 1996. France's December strikes showed clearly the whole difficulty, not to say aporia, that exists in 'what is to be done?' once all guarantees are suspended and all models become obsolete. Resignation in the face of the brutalities of economic Realpolitik clashed with feverish or eager words that hardly took the risk of saying exactly what was to be done. But between the two, something was perceptible: that it is ineluctable to invent a world, instead of being subjected to one, or dreaming of another. Invention is always without model and without warranty. But indeed that implies facing up to turmoil, anxiety, even disarray. Where certainties come apart, there too gather the strength that nor certainty can mathch.

Translated by Leslie Hill

Termite Art

"It sums up much of what a termite art aims at: buglike immersion in a small area without point or aim, and, over all, concentration on nailing down one moment without glamorizing it, but forgetting this accomplishment as soon as it has been passed; the feeling that all is expendable, that it can be chopped up and flung down in a different arrangment without ruin." (Manny Farber, Negative Space, p. 144)

Amras I

"Our watchfulness weighed upon our mood and constricted our understanding... We did not look out of the windows, but we heard enough sounds to be afraid... Our heads, when we stuck them into the open, were exposed to the vicious gusts of the foehn; the welter of air hardly left us room to breathe...  It was early March... We heard many birds and did not know what kind of birds... The waters of the Sill plunged into the depths before us and noisily separated us from Innsbruck, the city of our forebears, and this from the world that become so insufferable to us... (...) -we had always loved what came hard to us, despised what came easy- withdrawn ever more deeply into our raging heads, we padded our tower with grief." (Thomas Bernhard, Amras, p. 4) 

three monkeys

Keep going with Flaubert's Parrot:

"A week ago I saw a monkey in the street jump on a donkey and try to wank him off—the donkey brayed and kicked, the monkey's owner shouted, the monkey itself squealed—apart from two or three children who laughed and me who found it very funny, no one paid any attention. When I described this to M. Bellin, the secretary at the consulate, he told me of having seen an ostrich trying to rape a donkey. Max had himself wanked off the other day in a deserted section among some ruins and said it was very good."
Letter to Louis Bouilhet, Cairo, January 15th, 1850

flaubearing around

"When the Yakuts, a Siberian people, meet a bear, they doff their caps, greet him, call him master, old man or grandfather, and promise not to attack him or even speak ill of him. But if he looks as though he may pounce on them, they shoot at him, and if they kill him, they cut him in pieces and roast him and regale themselves, repeating all the while, 'It is the Russians who are eating you, not us.'" (Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot)

chroma (jarman)

All colour smells of turpentine and rich linseed oil pressed 

from the pale blue flax fields. Local colour from coloured

fields. The cricket bat dupped with the brush. Death hangs

around the brush - pigs' bristle, squirre, sable, and the can-

vas prepared with rabbit skin glue. (p. 4)

chroma 2

My book is dedicated to Harlequin, Tatterdemalion, Rag,

Tag and Bobtail, in his red, blue and green patches. Mercurial

trickster, black-maskcd. Chameleon who takes on

cvery colour. Aerial acrobat, jumping, dancing, turning

somersaults. Child of chaos.

Many hued and wily

Changing his skin

Laughing to his fingertips

Prince of thieves and cheats

Breath of fresh air.

Doctor: And how did you manage to reach the moon?

Harlequin: Well ... it was like this ...

(Louis Duchartre, The Italian Comedy)

chroma

Brilliant, gorgeous, painted, gay,

Vivid, flaunting, tearaway,

Glowing, flaring, lurid, loud,

Screaming, shrieking, marching, proud,

Mellow, matching, deep and sombre,

Pastel, sober, dead and dull,

Constant, colourful, chromatic,

Party-coloured and prismatic,

Kaleidoscopic, variegated,

Tattooed, dyed, illuminated,

Daub and scumble, dip and dye,

High-keyed colour, colour lie.

Derek Jarman

Best DVDs of the Year (2008)

1) Bruce Baillie Volume I. (Tung, Mass for the Dakota Sioux, Valentin de las Sierras, Castro Street, All My Life released by Canyon Cinema as limited edition)

1) Sharunas Bartas- Korridorus (Moskwood Media)

2) Avant que j'oublie (Blaq Out)

3) La France (Editions Pelléas)

4) Jose Luis Guerin- Pack José Luis Guerín

5) The Wire Complete Series (HBO)

6) Valerie and her Week of Wonders (Second Run)

7) Red Desert (BFI)

8) Bill Douglas Trilogy (BFI)

9) Vampyr (Criterion)

10) La vie de Jesus (Eureka) 

friendship

"I am over forty years old. Is that old? It was, but now that you're here, Jacob, it means youth, all green and budding, this being forty. With you, you heart of a boy, fresh life, life itself for the first time, came over me and into me. Here in this office, you see, I was desperate, I was dying up, I had positively buried myself. I hated the world, hated it, hated it. All this being and moving and living, I hated it unspeakably and avoided it. Then you came in, fresh, silly, impolite, cheeky, and blossoming, fragrant with unspoilt feelings, and quite naturally I gave you a mighty ticking-off, but I knew, the moment I saw you, that you were a magnificient fellow, flown down, I felt, from heaven for me, sent to me and given to me by an all-knowing God. Yes, it was you I needed, and I always smiled secretly when you came in from time to time to pester with your delightful cheek and clumsiness, which looked to me like successful works of art. Oh, no, not to pester, but to infatuate me. Stop it, Benjamenta, stop it. -Tell me didn't you ever notice that we two were friends? Don't say anything." (Robert Walser, Jacob von Gunten, p.167)

Cop(e)ying

The power of a country road when one is walking along it is different from the power from the power it has when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of a text when it is read is different from the power it has when it is copied out. The airplane passanger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands, and of how, from the very scenery that for the flier is only the unfurled plain, it calls forth distances, belvederes, cleaings, prospects at each of its turns like a commander deploying soldiers at a front. Only the copied text thus commands the sould of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of daydreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command. The Chinese practice of copying books was this an incomparable guarantee of literary culture, and the transcript a key to China's enigmas. (Walter Benjamin, One Way Street, p. 447-448)

The ways of literary being

"As a final observation, I should like to add that if it is impossible today for anyone to feel innocent, if in whatever we do or say we can discover a hidden motive -that of a white man, or a male, or the possession of a certain income, or a member of a given economic system, or a sufferer of a certain neurosis -this should not induce in us either a universal sense of guilt or an attitude of universal accusation.

When we become aware of our disease or of our hidden motives, we have already begun to get the better of them. What matter is the way in which accept our motives and live through the ensuing crisis. This is the only chance we have of becoming different from the way we are- that is, the only way of starting to invent a new way of being." (Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature, p. 100)

lower regions

How fortunate I am, not to be able to see in myself anything worth respecting and watching! To be small and stay small. And if a hand, a situation, a wave were ever to raise me up and carry me to where I could command power and influence, I would destroy the circumstances that had favored me, and I would hurl myself down into the humble, speechless, insignificant darkness. I can only breathe in the lower regions. [Robert Walser, Jacob von Gunten, p. 155)

Best of 2008

I got to see lots of films this year. Basically, I have been to 3-4 major festivals all over Canada (TIFF, FNC, FNN  along with lots of minor theme oriented festival) and managed to catch up with the majority of the I have been curious about since Cannes and Berlinale. There are still films I am looking to see but this is the list I can come up with for the moment. I am planning to write more detailed capsules about the films later on -as soon as I have more free time.

1) José Luis Guerín- En la ciudad de Sylvia

2) Jaimie Rosales- La soledad

3) Arnaud Desplechin- Un conte de Noël

4) Bakur Bakuradze- Shultes

5) Thanos Anastopoulos- Diarthosi

6) So Yong Kim- Treeless Mountain

7) Sergei Dvortsevoy- Tulpan

8) Heng Yang- Bingleng

9) Steve McQueen- Hunger

10) Ozcan Alper- Sonbahar

Honorable Mentions:

Ramin Bahrani- Chop shop

Don Hertzfeldt- I Am So Proud of You 

Carlos Reydegas- Silent Light

Rodrigo Moreno- El Custodio

Hou hsiao-hsien- Flight of the Red Balloon

Antonio Campos- Afterschool

Darren Aranofsky- The Wrestler

Ulrich Seidl- Import/Export

Kelly Reichardt-Wendy&Lucy

Rafa Cortes- Yo

Claire Denis- 35 Rhums

Gustavo Spolidoro- Still Orangutans

Rodrique Jean- Lost Song

Philippe Grandrieux- Un Lac

Nuri Bilge Ceylan- Three Monkeys

Oliver Assayas- Summer Hours

Nathaniel Dorsky- Saraband

Sam Taylor Wood- Love you no more

François-Jacques Ossang- Ciel éteint! 

Danny Boyle- Slumdog Millionaire

Lucrecia Martel- Headless Woman

Ari Folman- Waltz with Bashir

Martin McDonagh- In Bruges

Jonathan Demme- Rachel Getting Married

Mike Leigh- Happy go Lucky

Very much looking to see:

Lisandro Alonso- Liverpool

Clint Eastwood- Gran Torino

Luc Bourdon- Memories of Angels

Terence Davies- Of Times and City

Yesim Ustaoglu- Pandora's Box