Each work of art is not an act of resistance and yet, in a certain sense, it is.

"What is the relation between the work of art and communication?

None whatsoever. The work of art is not an instrument of communication. The work of art has nothing to do with communication. The work of art strictly does not contain the least bit of information. To the contrary, there is a fundamental affinity between the work of art and the act of resistance. There, yes. It has something to do with information and communication as acts of resistance. What is this mysterious relation between a work of art and an act of resistance when men who resist have neither the time nor sometimes the necessary culture to have the least relation to art? I don't know. Andre Malraux develops a beautiful philosophical concept; he says something very simple about art; he says it is the only thing that resist death. Let's return to where we began: What does one do when one does philosophy? One invents concepts. I think this is the basis of a beautiful philosophical concept. Think -- What resists death? One need only see a statuette from three thousand years before our time to find that Malraux's response is a rather good one. From our point of view, we could then say, rather less elegantly, that art is what resists even if it is not the only thing that resists. Where does such a close relation between the act of resistance and the work of art come from? Each act of resistance is not a work of art while, in a certain sense, it is all the same. Each work of art is not an act of resistance and yet, in a certain sense, it is."

- Having an Idea in Cinema (On the Cinema of Straub-Huillet), Gilles Deleuze

Romance

JMS: When we met in 1954, I was attending the Lycee Voltaire, but only for eight days.
DH: Three weeks.
JMS: Was I? Well, three weeks. Then I left…
DH: You didn’t. You were told it would be better to leave…
JMS: I was kicked out. I was even told why. I knew too much about Hitchcock and that disturbed the class. I was watching her from a distance. We weren’t sitting that close to each other. I didn’t know her. I was just watching her. And every time she uttered something, the others would ask me - why me? - what she’d said. I had to translate. It was taken for granted that I understood.
DH: And did you understand?
JMS: Ah! That’s a mystery! One will never know. They must have noticed that I had fallen madly in love at first sight, and so they thought: he must understand what she says.

- Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, in Où gît votre sourire enfoui? / Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (Pedro Costa, 2001)

via Kevin Lee's lovely essay on the film


***

To the Foot From Its Child

To the Foot From Its Child
by Pablo Neruda, translated by Jodey Bateman


A child's foot doesn't know it's a foot yet
And it wants to be a butterfly or an apple
But then the rocks and pieces of glass,
the streets, the stairways
and the roads of hard earth
keep teaching the foot that it can't fly,
that it can't be a round fruit on a branch.
Then the child's foot
was defeated, it fell
in battle,
it was a prisoner,
condemned to life in a shoe.

Little by little without light
it got acquainted with the world in its own way
without knowing the other imprisoned foot
exploring life like a blind man.

Those smooth toe nails
of quartz in a bunch,
got harder, they changed into
an opaque substance, into hard horn
and the child's little petals
were crushed, lost their balance,
took the form of a reptile without eyes,
with triangular heads like a worm's.
And they had callused over,
they were covered
with tiny lava fields of death,
a hardening unasked for.
But this blind thing kept going
without surrender, without stopping
hour after hour.
One foot after another,
now as a man,
or a woman,
above,
below,
through the fields, the mines,
the stores, the government bureaus,
backward,
outside, inside,
forward,
this foot worked with its shoes,
it hardly had time
to be naked in love or in sleep
one foot walked, both feet walked
until the whole man stopped.

And then it went down
into the earth and didn't know anything
because there everything was dark,
it didn't know it was no longer a foot
or if they buried it so it could fly
or so it could
be an apple.

ethical problems

"Criminals are never very amusing. It's because they're failures. Those who make real money aren't counted as criminals. This is a class distinction, not an ethical problem."
- Orson Welles*

* attributed; trying to find the citation...

scenes from America

On Feb. 9, a man scrawled a message on the roof of his house in a suburb of Los Angeles: "I Want 2 Be Heard." Then he barricaded himself inside when deputies showed up to evict him, surrendering after a few hours. In October, a woman in San Diego chained herself to her front porch after the bank that held her mortgage refused to renegotiate the terms. She remains in her home, but has received a second eviction notice.

[...]

"This is a cold place in the winter and I will not give people a death sentence for not paying their debts," Sheriff Jones said in an interview. "These are human beings, responsible middle-class people who fell on hard times, and I just can't toss them out onto the streets."

[...]

"I may lose my home, but I'm only leaving in handcuffs," Ms. Millington said.

[...]

In an interview, Ms. Kaptur said, "I'm thrilled that the American people are rising up and exercising the power that Wall Street has taken away from them."

um modo de filmar muito correcto

"There is a Portuguese director that I like very much, Pedro Costa, who has a very appropriate way of filming. One time, he told me that I film the rich, and he films the poor. I told him that I film souls - and there are souls as much in the rich as in the poor."
- Manoel de Oliveira

[«Há um realizador português de que gosto muito, o Pedro Costa, que tem um modo de filmar muito correcto. Uma vez, ele disse-me que eu filmava os ricos, ele filmava os pobres. Respondi-lhe que eu filmo as almas – e as almas tanto há nos ricos como nos pobres.»]

Many thanks to André for this.

Overton window

never thought I’d live to see the day « ads without products

Swanberg promises

For those of you thinking that I might have a response to Glenn's thoughts on the work of Joe Swanberg (and Filmbo's followup, plus other assorted defenses and critiques in the works)... well, watch this space.

Update: Craig weighs in. And I can't wait to join the fray.

Kluge Marx Joyce Eisenstein etc

Alexander Kluge's 570-minute adaptation of Karl Marx's Das Kapital, News from Ideological Antiquity. Marx – Eisenstein – Das Kapital, has been released and is now available only on DVD for under 30 Euros.

I don't see any evidence that there are English subtitles on the disc, but even so -- this is a truly monumental release from one of the most impressively skilled and radical filmmakers.

You can read more about it here.

to reflect concretely on a limited amount of work

"It’s not important to know then all, but just to know a few well. You don't need to know all the museum when you go to a museum, but only a few paintings. In my case, in fact, for example, I know three paintings by Cezanne very well. It didn't do me any good at all to the museum all the time, but to reflect concretely on a limited amount of work. That’s culture, as they say. It does not consist of having it all, but in having reflected concretely on a few things."
- Jean-Marie Straub

"The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance."
- Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust

"Comme l’on serait savant si l’on connaissait bien seulement cinq á six livres!"
("How wise one might be if one knew only some half-dozen books well!")
- Gustave Flaubert, in a letter to his mistress Louise Colet, 17 February 1853

(the full paragraph: "Tantôt j’ai fait un peu de grec et de latin, mais pas raide. Je vais reprendre, pour mes lectures du soir, les Morales de Plutarque. C’est une mine d’érudition et de pensées intarissable. Comme l’on serait savant, si l’on connaissait bien seulement cinq á six livres!")

inspired by a debate with Miguel Marías (here).
(some information gleaned/confirmed here)

Distribution is War

read this, think of the weakening nation-state as the studio distribution model.

Power, Moral Values, and the Developing Mind: Frederick Wiseman's High School, 1968)

My post on Frederick Wiseman's 1968 film High School is up at The Auteurs' Notebook. I'm really very proud of this piece, which ties together the Athens riots of 2008, Foucault's thoughts on the relationship between power and force, Wiseman's documentary stylistic choices, the changing denotation of the word 'tyranny' in ancient Greece, the psychology of moral development, and the student revolts and social changes of 1968.

Please do read it.


IN MEMORY OF ALEXANDROS GRIGOROPOULOS.