Distance(s) #9

Seventh Heaven - Frank Borzage, 1927, 35mm

City Girl - F.W. Murnau, 1930, 35mm

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oh, the night back then! Ten, fifteen stars came out; we could smell the fragrance of millions more.

--Elio Vittorini.

Sicilia!

In En rachâchant [1982], there was an old wooden platform in a school in Saint-Ouen. It was hard to find because they don’t make them anymore. And the cameraman already had an axe in his hand. I held his arm back. That’s cinema. You can’t trust cinema.

--Jean-Marie Straub, Où gît votre sourire enfoui?, 2001.

Might it be dangerous, perhaps? At seven, a boy senses miracles in all things, and in their nakedness of Woman, he has certainty in her as I suppose she, rib of man, has certainty in us. Death exists, but doesn't take anything away from this certainty; it never wrongs man's world of A Thousand and One Nights. A boy asks for nothing but paper and wind, he needs only to launch a kite. He goes outside and launches it; and it is a shout which rises from him, the boy carries it through the spheres with a long, invisible thread, and in this way his faith consummates, celebrates, certainty. But later, what will he do with certainty? Later, one knows the wrongs done to the world, the ruthlessness, the servitude, the injustice among men, and the desecration of earthly life against humanity and against the world. What would one do then, if even still, one had certainty? What would one do? one asks oneself.

--Elio Vittorini, Conversations in Sicily, 1937-8. Trans. Alane Salierno Mason, Canongate, 2004, p. 135-7.

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H: That palm tree is a nuisance.

S: Let it sway.

--Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, editing Sicilia!, Où gît votre sourire enfoui?, 2001.

L'Avventura - Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960, 35mm

It was night over Sicily and the quiet earth: the wronged world was covered with darkness, men were shut in their rooms with lights lit beside them, and the dead, all those who had been killed, had awakened to sit in their tombs, meditating. I stood thinking, and the great night was in me, night on top of night. Those lights below, above, and that cold in the darkness, that ice of a star in the sky - they didn't belong to one night alone, they were infinite; and I thought of the nights of my grandfather, the nights of my father, and the nights of Noah, the nights of a man naked in wine and defenceless, humiliated, less of a man than a little boy, or one of the dead.

--Elio Vittorini, Conversations in Sicily, p.166-7.

Où gît votre sourire enfoui? - Pedro Costa, 2001, DV

Realism(s) #3, or: la mort

Death is nothing but one moment after another, but it is the last. Doubtless no moment is like any other, but they can nevertheless be as similar as leaves on a tree, which is why their cinematic repetition is more paradoxical in theory than in practice. Despite the ontological contradiction it represents, we quite readily accept it as a sort of objective counterpart to memory. However, two moments in life radically rebel against this concession made by consciousness: the sexual act and death. Each is in its own way the absolute negation of objective time, the qualitative instant in its purest form. Like death, love must be experienced and cannot be represented (it is not called la petite mort for nothing) without violating its nature. This violation is called obscenity.

--André Bazin, "Death Every Afternoon" [cont. from], 1958, in Rites of Realism, ed. Ivone Margulies, 2002, p.30.

A child rides a bicycle in the middle of the road. A car driver with mirror sunglasses. A few metres further along, the girl looks back. The car accelerates. A woman leans out of a window and screams in horror. Something terrible happens. One doesn't know why. It just happens. But because it is so linear, one suspects there must be a system behind the incident. The next day, the mystery is solved: "Gangster Runs Down Daughter of Witness for the Prosecution". These are twenty seconds from Fuller's Underworld U.S.A.. The scene is shot very simply and directly, but is the most horrific I have ever seen in a film; it is as if its horror had been carved directly into your eyes.

--Hartmut Bitomsky, Das Kino und der Tod, 1988.

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Underworld U.S.A. - Sam Fuller, 1961, 35mm

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Kiss my hand. That's the hand that killed him.

--Mouchette, Sous le soleil de Satan, Maurice Pialat, 1987.

The objects of a still life: a shotgun and an apple; a candelabrum, a large vase. Mouchette ponders the objects, dances beside them. One gets the sense that these inanimate table items will, at any moment, be rendered active in the scene. There's no close-up or over-emphasising of any detail; in Pialat, it's all about the way the actor chooses to interact with her environment. So while one might not think twice about the heavy thumping sound of the shotgun as Mouchette haphazardly places it back on the table, it is an important aspect of the scene for two reasons: first, as an indicator to the audience that this deadly tool does not alarm her; and second, it makes the ensuing discharge of the gun more palpable. This physicality comes from the sound, not from the silent movement of pointing and aiming. The power of the object comes entirely from this clank and the eventual blast.

--Gabe Klinger, "From Moment to Moment", in Sous le soleil de Satan, MoC, 2010, p. 10.

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Sous le soleil de Satan - Maurice Pialat, 1987, 35mm

Distance(s) #8, or: Dwoskin

Central Bazaar - Stephen Dwoskin, 1976, 16mm

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Moment - Stephen Dwoskin, 1968, 16mm

Notes and Sketches (Walden) #4.

That's what cinema is, single frames. Cinema is between the frames.

light ... movement ... sun ... light ... heart beating ... breathing ... light

J.M.: For Eisenstein it's a collision, to you it's... ?

P.K.: Yes, it can be a collision. Or it could be a very weak succession. There are many, many possibilities. It's just that Eisenstein wanted to have a collision - that's what he liked. But what I wanted to say is: Where is, then, the articulation of cinema? Eisenstein, for example, said: it's the collision of two shots. But it's very strange that nobody ever said that IT'S NOT BETWEEN SHOTS BUT BETWEEN FRAMES. It's between frames where cinema speaks. And then, when you have a roll of very weak collisions between frames -- this is what I would call a shot, when one frame is similar to the next frame, and the next frame, and the next frame, and the next frame, and the next frame -- the result that you get when you have just a natural scene and you film it, this would be a shot. But in reality you can work with every frame.

--Peter Kubelka, interviewed by Jonas Mekas, Film Culture 44, 1967, p.45.

they tell me I should be always searching

but I am only celebrating what I see

Diaries, Notes and Sketches (also known as Walden) - Jonas Mekas, 1969, 16mm

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Also: entrevista con Jonas Mekas, I y II, Lumière 3, 2010.

Notes and Sketches (Walden) #3

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Home Movie Textbook

for Caroline & John

Chapter One: EXERCISES IN TIME

1

Shoot a tree in wind, for ten seconds, continuously. / Shoot a tree in wind, in brief spurts of frames, in order to condense one minute of actual time to ten seconds of filmed time. / See what happens.

2

Shoot a face of a person, for ten seconds, continuously. / Shoot the same face, in brief spurts, in order to have ten seconds of filmed time. / See what happens.

3

Shoot fire (or candle) for ten seconds. Keep the camera focused on fire, steadily. / See what happens.

4

Point a camera at the horizon and turn around fast. / Point a camera at the horizon and turn around very slowly. / See what happens.

5

Shoot a brief spurt (two seconds) of a face; then shoot a brief spurt of a colorful flower, any color; then shoot the face again, briefly; then the flower again. Do this about ten times. / See what happens.

6

Shoot a street (you could do it from a window) busy with traffic. Shoot continuously for ten seconds. / Shoot the same street and traffic in very brief spurts of frames. Get ten seconds of footage. / See what happens.

--Jonas Mekas, extract from “This Side of Paradise”: Fragments of an Unfinished Biography (Paris: Galerie du jour Agnès B., 1999), qtd. in Eyes Upside Down, by P. Adams Sitney, OUP, 2008, p.92-3.

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these are the fragments of paradise

There was a tree in Central Park that I wanted to [film]. I really liked that tree, and I kept filming at the very beginning — when I began. And then I look on the viewer and it’s not the same. It’s just a tree standing there: it’s boring. And then I began filming the tree in little fragments: I fragmented; I condensed ... and then you can see the wind in it; then you can see some energy in it. Then it became something else. Ah, that’s more interesting! That’s my tree! That’s the tree that I like, not just a tree that is naturalistic and boring, not what I saw in that tree when I was looking. I’m trying to get to why I’m looking at what I’m filming, why I’m filming it, and how I’m filming. The style reflects what I feel. ... I’m trying to understand myself, what I do. ... I’m totally ignorant of what I’m doing.

--Jonas Mekas, John Sacret Young Lecture, Princeton University, February 18, 2004, qtd. in Eyes Upside Down by P. Adams Sitney, OUP, 2008, p.91.

Diaries, Notes and Sketches (also known as Walden) - Jonas Mekas, 1969, 16mm

To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.

--Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, 1854.

Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sunrise would kill me,

If I could not now and always send sunrise out of me. /

We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,

We found our own my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak. /

My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,

With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds.

--Walt Whitman, Song of Myself; Leaves of Grass, The First (1855) Edition.

Notes and Sketches (Walden) #2

Diaries, Notes and Sketches (also known as Walden) - Jonas Mekas, 1969, 16mm

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Tung - Bruce Baillie, 1966, 16mm

Notes and Sketches (Walden) #1

In the times of bigness, spectaculars, one hundred million dollar movie productions, I want to speak for the small, invisible acts of human spirit: so subtle, so small, that they die when brought out under the clean lights. I want to celebrate the small forms of cinema: the lyrical form, the poem, the watercolor, etude, sketch, portrait, arabesque, and bagatelle, and little 8mm songs. In the times when everybody wants to succeed and sell, I want to celebrate those who embrace and pursue the invisible, the personal things that bring no money and no bread and make no contemporary history, art history or any other history. I am for art which we do for each other, as friends.

--Jonas Mekas

People, in this city, often have to shoot, in self-defense. With a real gun. I shot my film diaries also out of self-defence, to protect myself from being crushed by the bleakness of the reality around me, defending myself against the attacks on all my senses, on my whole being. Yes, I film out of self-defense. You could look at my diaries also as an attempt to correct the City, the Land, by stressing certain aspects and by suppressing others. That's why I stress Celebration, the celebrative details of life around me - because that's what's lacking here, today. I am making corrections. Artists are correctors of their societies. They try to correct what the politicians and 'social workers' mess up.

--Jonas Mekas, April 8, 1971, reprinted in Le Livre de Walden (eds. Pip Chodorov & Christian Lebrat, 2009).

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

--Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, 1854.

Diaries, Notes and Sketches (also known as Walden) - Jonas Mekas, 1969, 16mm