Thursday, 1 December 2011

Notes from "The Future" by Miranda July


After a long time
a long long time
I gave up.
Not waiting anymore.
As it turns out, living is just the beginning.
And so the beginning is over
I am cat of nobody
I'm not even cat
I'm not even I.
It's warm,
it's light,
it goes on and on and on and on….

Notes from "Kika" by Pedro Almodovar


Notes from "Little Birds" by Anais Nin



Wednesday, 30 November 2011

Dance


Notes from the 'Naked Lunch' by William Burroughs


"We friends, yes?"
  The shoe shine boy put his hustling smile and looked up into the Sailor's dead, cold, undersea eyes, eyes without a trace of warmth or lust or hate or any other feeling the boy had ever experienced in himself or seen in another, at once cold and intense, impersonal and predatory.

Wednesday, 23 November 2011

Notes from "Illuminations - The films of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi



programme:
Mario Giacomelli: Contacts, 1993, 35mm, black and white, 13'
Animali Criminali, 1994, 16mm, colour, silent, 7'
Lo Specchio di Diana (The Looking Glass of Diana), 1996, video, colour, soundtrack by Keith Ulrich, 31'


History and memory
Body and embodiment
Death and cinema

Materiality of film (textures, speed, temporal disturbances, colour) that leads to the imaginary, experienced as a haunting.
Photographers as explorers
Cinematographic pornography
Symbology of fascism - invisible hand puts one creature against another (Animali Criminali)
The image with the grammar of cinema
Secrets on top of secrets on top of secrets
Cinematic archaeology
Ships of the desert = camera
Mussolini : Everyone wants to touch his hands but he's wearing gloves (forms of behaviour)
Sensory cinematography - the 'touch' (contact, missing contact)

Friday, 18 November 2011

from "snow white terror tale"


You can see 
and you can hear
but from inside the tomb of your mind
no breath will escape your lips
no tears your eyes
to the world you are dead
And soon, even your precious father will forget you were ever alive
But you my dear
you will have all the eternity
to remember

Wednesday, 2 November 2011

Sunday, 30 October 2011

Notes from "The face of Garbo" by Roland Barthes

...when the face represented a kind of absolute state of flesh...

[...]

...are two faintly tremulous wounds.

[...]

She herself knew this: how many actresses have consented to let the crowd see the ominous maturing of their beauty. Not she, however; the essence was not to be degraded, her face was not to have any reality except that of its perfection, which was intellectual even more than formal. The Essence became gradually obscured, progressively veiled with dark glasses, broad hats and exiles: but it never deteriorated.

[...]

A mask is but a sum of lines; a face on the contrary, is above all their thematic harmony. Garbo's face representes this fragile moment when the cinema is about to draw an existential from an essential beauty, when the archetype leans towards the fascination of mortal faces, when the clarity of the flesh as essence yields its place to a lyricism of Woman.

[...]

...the passage from awe to charm.

[...]

As a language, Garbo's singularity was of the order of the concept, that of Audrey Hepburn, an event.


Friday, 28 October 2011

Notes from 'Feel Flows : The Films of Phil Solomon' @ Tate


'Nocturne'
private made public, but available
non-ironic montage
the compulsion to be with others in language (observation made to someone texting on mobile right after 'Nocturne')
the world ending with water, fire and ice
night photography
lighting as the essence of film
everyone suspect to sentimentality. Hollywood to blame.
economy of gesture
metaphor
aura as light
night as a field where your eye moves across

nathaniel dorsky
joseph cornell


Films screened :
'What's out Tonight is Lost', 1983, 16mm, colour, silent, 8 min
'Psalm I : The Lateness of the Hour, 2001, 16mm, colour, silent, 10min
'Nocturne', 1980, 16mm, b/w, silent, 10min
'Seasons...', 2011, 16mm, colour, silent, 15min
'Remains to be seen' 1989/94, 16mm, colour, sound, 17min