[Posted this a couple of days ago, but the site quickly ran aground. It's up and running again, smoothly, for good. The issue is now a little smaller, but such is the problem of editing...]A new journal, a collaboration between Edwin Mak and myself. This has been gestating for a long time, and another issue will follow with very little haste — with infinite patience, as Deleuze wrote of Straub-Huillet. In the meantime, please enjoy and share — we'd appreciate it.
The future city was ruled by an authority able to make anybody disappear. When people from the past were found, a light was shone at them, and images were projected onto a screen — from the past, until their arrival in the future. Once those images appeared, the ghosts disappeared.--Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, 2010.Nabua is only light and memory. There are natural illuminations from the sun and from fire. The lights seep through the doors and windows and burn the rice fields. There are artificial ones like fluorescent tubes and LED lights like dots of recollections. And there are simulated bolts of lightning that destroy the peaceful landscape and unearth the spirits.--Apichatpong Weerasethakul, The Memory of Nabua (via), 18/02/2009.
Having the luxury to behold the simplest things can often be a revelation in itself.--Peter Hutton, interviewed in A Critical Cinema 3 (California UP, 1998), p.246.In film nothing is deemed so holy that it might or ought to be safeguarded from being absorbed into the general flow of movement. Everything film shows is translated into movement and thereby profaned.--Boris Groys, Art Power (MIT Press, 2008), p.71.Yes, I've seen Empire a couple of times. It's an experience, there are many things that happen. At first, when watching the film with other people, everybody's sort of sceptical, they think: this will be so boring, that they will be leaving soon, but at least they have to see something... And then, as time goes by, they begin to relax, to enjoy, to just watch the screen when nothing really much happens. There's some dust, and then, one hour or so into the film, maybe an hour and a half, the light comes up! This huge, incredible event happens when the building lights up. So, of course, everybody applauds, it's a great moment. And then, again, you relax, and you watch, there's some light activity, the building is there, it becomes like a meditation. Those who stay until the end, they all say it is a very meditative, very relaxing, unique experience: just accept what's there, don't ask from it anything, because the activity is really the most, most minimal. There is nothing else like that in cinema.
[Ryland asked me to contribute a little something to &review — here it is. This text is for a video extract, about the curtain above. Update — now in print!]Too often nowadays, we receive movies in degraded form. We might get to see more, but what we see in them lacks light and weight — it's getting more difficult to talk about anything material. But sometimes objects retain something of their real mass. An instance here, in a shot at the end of a film by Peter Hutton. It's a third-hand encode, but for once, in the curl of fabric, there's a memory of ribboned film, the pastness of an event: '...for we see that everything grows less and seems to melt away with the lapse of time and withdraw its old age from our eyes. And yet we see no diminution in the sum of things' (Lucretius).The film's about the city of Łódź, its everyday sights and sounds: streets, walls, industry, workers, vagabonds, monuments. Hutton's made many of these on 16mm, portraits of cities, rivers, the sea: always silent, without narrative, never minimalist. Occasionally they're projected at festivals or in galleries, but the rest of the time they circulate underground in this basest of forms — unspooling as variable bitrates, not shadowplays. What remains is a mutable image pointed to an opening between two rooms, a camera in one and open to the other. The surface of the screen is greyed, faint, veiled by analogue flickers and colour warp, functioning like gauze. A net curtain billows in the wind, once and twice: at last, a semblance of light, a bleached sheet, a ghost of movement, a travelling of atoms. Clothes, curtains, leaves, they're the only way you can see the wind in movies. And the only way we'll remember them too.
People sometimes assume that the films' Robinson came from Céline, whereas the name was suggested to me by Kafka’s Amerika, in which Robinson and Delamarche are a couple of itinerants who describe themselves as out-of-work mechanics. Paul Scofield once sent me a postcard of August Sander's photograph Itinerants (1929). In Paul’s absence, I had the idea that one of the two men it depicts slightly resembled him, and perhaps, even more slightly, Harun Farocki, who plays the character Delamarche in Klassenverhältnisse, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s adaptation of the novel. In the film, Robinson is played by Manfred Blank, who I thought slightly resembles the other man in Sander’s photograph. In Kafka’s novel, another character says: ‘I don’t even believe that his name is Robinson, for no Irishman was ever called that since Ireland was Ireland.'--Patrick Keiller, interviewed by Andrew Stevens, The Future of Landscape, July 2010.
The water is grey and blue, wide as an inlet of the sea. A ray of white light, falling from high in the sky, obliterates this sham scene."Grasp the world," instead of extracting impressions from it; work with objects, characters, events, in reality, and not in impressions. Kill metaphor.--Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (Minnesota UP), 1986, p.101.
Well, cinema is, or should be, the art of space. Even though a film exists only if that space is able to become time. But the basic work is space. As Mallarmé said: “Nothing will take place, but the place.”--a new interview with Jean Marie-Straub: Speaking of Revolutions, October 2010.
