"What was once before you - an exciting, mysterious future - is now behind you. Lived; understood; disappointing. You realize you are not special. You have struggled into existence, and are now slipping silently out of it. This is everyone’s experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone’s everyone. So you are Adele, Hazel, Claire, Olive. You are Ellen. All her meager sadnesses are yours; all her loneliness; the gray, straw-like hair; her red raw hands. It’s yours. It is time for you to understand this.
Walk.
As the people who adore you stop adoring you; as they die; as they move on; as you shed them; as you shed your beauty; your youth; as the world forgets you; as you recognize your transience; as you begin to lose your characteristics one by one; as you learn there is no-one watching you, and there never was, you think only about driving - not coming from any place; not arriving any place. Just driving, counting off time. Now you are here, at 7:43. Now you are here, at 7:44. Now you are…
Gone."
Millicent Weems
Synecdoche, New York
(via condescendingupthestairs)
Film : Synechdoche, New York | Directed By : Charlie Kaufman
Minister : “Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won’t know for twenty years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it’s what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but it doesn’t really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved. And the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I feel so fucking sad, and the truth is I’ve felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long I’ve been pretending I’m OK, just to get along, just for, I don’t know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own.
Well, fuck everybody. Amen. ”
Thinking on Film: Mikhail M. Bakhtin
While I am aware that Bakhtin, one of the most influential literary theorists of the 20th century, is commonly understood in opposition to the majority of the “Russian formalists” and other schools of thought, I’m going to talk about him after Saussure, since Bakhtin in my understanding…
"The sign of a truly totalitarian culture is that important truths simply lack cognitive meaning and are interpretable only at the level of “Fuck You”, so they can then elicit a perfectly predictable torrent of abuse in response. We’ve long ago reached that level."
Noam Chomsky in a letter to Alexander Cockburn (via zealotry)
(Source: fyeahnoamchomsky, via zealotry)
(Source: geefitch)
steve mcqueen
We all use our bodies, that’s how we are. We hardly ever talk. In film, people are talking all the time about how they feel and whatnot, and in reality that’s just not the case. We made “Hunger” in the way we did to reflect some kind of reality, and I feel the same way about “Shame.” The whole idea of back story and what could have happened to them — I wanted to make that situation familiar rather than unrecognizable. I wanted it to be about what we know, about what happens to them in everyday life. You meet someone for the first time and you have no idea who that person is really. What they do is present themselves the best way they can, and possibly through a period of time, after getting to know them, through the present you might see the past in them. And that’s exactly what I wanted to do with Sissy and Brandon and the audience.
If you think about the way Bobby Sands used his body, he was in a maximum-security prison in Belfast and within that he created his own freedom by stopping eating. On the other side of the pond in a different decade, Brandon is living in Manhattan in this metropolis of excess and Western freedom. He has a great job, he’s attractive, he has money. Within those possibilities, he creates a prison for himself through his activities with sex. So they are polar opposites, in a way, but they are somehow related. The situation of the body is very much in there. But, see, the body is what we do. In reality we are not Shakespearean actors having long conversations about how we live and whatever. We groan and grunt and get through a day. And often when we do talk, we talk a lot of shit, because it’s a way of filling time, avoiding stuff. If we do talk, possibly to our best friend or our psychiatrist or whatever, most of the time people don’t listen.
I wouldn’t say I was so careful. People have said that before, but I wasn’t careful at all. What I was careful about was where Brandon lived, where he worked, how we would travel to work, where he would get his dry cleaning done, where he would get his takeout food. These things were basically about ritual, about following Brandon and his rituals. So something could be the ugliest building in the world, and I’d have to shoot there, and that’s fine. Actually I love that limitation. It makes me happy to work with it to tell the story. It’s all about the story. I don’t make adverts, I’m not choosing wonderful locations. I’m choosing the reality that this character lives in and works in, how he gets from A to B.
What it does is that, in verse, it talks about the past and the present, and you can see what happens. Brandon, I imagine, would like to leave. He’d like to get out of that situation, but he can’t, he’s brought his boss to see his sister sing. So he’s forced to listen, and it’s the only time he actually listens. Earlier we were talking about listening, and people don’t listen, man. It’s difficult, isn’t it? And people don’t do it.
Sissy is communicating with him in verse, she’s singing the truth — it’s all there in the lyrics — and it evaporates his defenses. It opens doors which are locked inside him, and for that moment he’s opened up, he acknowledges the past. As soon as she stops singing, the doors are locked and the drawbridge goes back up again. That moment can give us so bloody much. We recognize it, we understand. It’s like setting off a dog whistle in the cinema; it’s something we know about although it’s not necessarily talked about or tangible. That’s the power of cinema, that’s what I’m talking about. That’s what cinema can give us, it can go much further on emotional journeys.
(Source: elcineasta)
(Source: onepointperspective, via kristinberlin)
(Source: mpdrolet)
(via jackkelly)
(via jackkelly)
(via jackkelly)
(via jackkelly)
(Source: highlysocialhermit)
