My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.Robert Bresson
(Source: criterioncorner)
I’m not ready to join Steven Johnson in suggesting that audiences have become smarter. In certain respects older films are more demanding than contemporary ones. I’d rather say that new conventions are in force, aimed at certain sectors of the audience who are willing to put forth the effort. Ambitious filmmakers may find new ways to fulfill these conventions, balancing novelty with intelligibility. This is the path, I think, that the makers of Tinker Tailor took, and it didn’t prevent the film from earning $17 million at the US box office.
I’ve always kept hierarchy to a minimum. Then an employee said, “Promote me,” and I was forced to reevaluate my organizational structure.
I’ve been having a hard time reading books and finishing movies. I click through websites, vacantly aware that things are going on in the world, accustomed to the placid, oceanic motion of clicking, scanning, and window-resizing. I browse Wikipedia entries, looking through section headers to get an idea of something I know nothing about. I’ve gotten so caught up in the romance of the news cycle, in the ability to have infinite access to infinite information that the cache of my mind dumps out, leaving me empty-headed and forgetful.Body-Checked by a Beep
Several links for (further) Stalker analysis
- Stalker’s meaning in terms of temporality and spatial relations — nostalghia.com
- Andrei Tarkovsky: Truth Endorsed by Life — Sense Of Cinema, Issue 49
- The nostalgia of the Stalker by Peter Green — andreitarkovski.org
- The Thing from Inner Space by Slavoj Žižek (Ljubljana) — artmargins.com
The film [Stalker] needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts.” ― Andrei Tarkovsky
Definite must-read for those, who saw Synecdoche, New York.
The other night James Franco curled up with Amie Barrodale’s story “William Wei” from issue 197. Then he sent us the tape.
Malick’s Song of Himself is also a Song to our Selves, and the Great Self. We are imprisoned, shackled, encaged in modernity in its forms and banal tropes, in our lives and in our arts and entertainments. Isolated. But Malick wants to take us home, where our masks come off and wash away in the collective ocean.
