in this manner, we, like them, will have met

-"I know that tonight we'll make love and that soon afterwards I will die, but I know we'll see each other again."

Amazed, the young man asks her:
-"We'll meet after our deaths?"

-"Of course not," she replies. "I don't believe in such things. We'll meet in a different way: you, or another man, will come across another woman, not me, like we have tonight, and they will live the same story, and, in this manner, we, like them, will have met."


- from Raúl Ruiz's The Lost Domain, via his Poetics of Cinema 2, via acquarello

The Possible Masterpieces

"How's this for a dialogue subject?: a film you have enshrined as the possible masterpiece you haven't gotten around to seeing for so long that now it serves a purpose in its unseen state-- the potentially great experience you postpone repeatedly." - John, in a comment on Michael Atkinson's post Edge of Darkness

For me, this experience is more frequently one of influence. I will often read extensively about a film without having seen it - especially one that seems to connect to my way of seeing the world though cinema. I then carry an idea of this film that lives up to the promises of the articles -- in ways that I am forced to imagine. Inevitably this film marks me in the form I have created, without my ever needing to experience it. In some ways this is like seeing a film that mostly slips from your memory, one you reconstruct in your own image, according to the film's theoretical possibility (which remains even when details fade). It is the project of the film (rather than the film itself) that thus marks me, inspiring me to attempt the same project without relying on stolen details. In some cases (say, the films of Philippe Garrel) a film's unavailability on DVD can be a blessing, a push toward independence and an inspiration that restricts its own possibility as the subject of homage.

Memory

My memory for events, for the pieces of my life that I've lived through, is fragmentary. I attach myself to moments, replaying them to relive them. They differ from the moments of cinema, which can be replayed the same way each time, infinitely revisitable, the same yet each time unique. The cinema is memory as I'd prefer it to be, life as I'd prefer it to be - full of the possibility of living in a moment again.

* Inspired by Girish's post The Cinema In Your Head

cinema

"We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten." - Cesare Pavese