Realism(s) #26

Untitled - Takuma Nakahira, 1971, gelatin silver print (from 35mm negative)

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Takuma Nakahira's Circulation: Date, Place, Events was first exhibited in 1971 as part of the Seventh Paris Biennale. For each of seven consecutive days, Nakahira photographed, developed and exhibited approximately one hundred images of everyday activity in Paris. The photographs were developed at night and exhibited without omission the following day, spread onto the floor of a gallery space after the walls had been covered. A few years later, Nakahira burned most of his earlier negatives and prints, but for unknown reasons these "pieces of reality cut out by means of the camera" were preserved, as documents of a language to come.

History Lesson(s) #14

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In the end, Pavese realised, he didn’t aspire to be a living writer but a dead one. "At bottom, you write to be as if dead, to speak from outside time, to turn yourself into someone everyone remembers." What had he been doing translating Melville, Dickens and Defoe if not seeking the company of the dead?

On 26 August 1950, Pavese had his sister prepare his weekend bag for him and checked into the Hotel Roma in the centre of Turin, a stone’s throw from the railway station. He called four women to see if they would eat with him but everyone was busy. On the flyleaf of his least successful book, Dialogues with Leucò [1947], a series of discussions on myth and destiny, he left the note: "I ask forgiveness and forgive you all. OK? Keep the gossip brief." At some time during the night he took an overdose of painkillers.

He had always maintained that it was a natural human instinct to seek to arrest life and time in a symbol, an image whose transcendent significance freed us from our sense of being trapped in history. He also believed that suicides should impose meaning, not escape from it. So why this particular exit? The last words in the diary, some two weeks before, read: "All this stinks. Not words. An action. I shall write no more." Choosing to die in the Hotel Roma, Pavese removed his suicide from the private sphere, placing himself in the centre of his town, and by implication at the heart of the nation. Society, however, was such that the only significant action that could be performed there without compromising oneself was suicide. His death would protect the great oeuvre he believed he had completed from inevitable trivialisation by the living.

--Tim Parks on Cesare Pavese's diaries (This Business of Living: Diaries 1935-50, trans. A.E. Murch), London Review of Books 32.3, February 2010.

Realism(s) #25

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"get my back off the wall..."

History Lesson(s) #13

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An aside: Emotional capital matters, and breaking bread is, on the whole, more rewarding than the pittance we’re so often given for our work. The truth is there is hardly a career to be had in criticism of any kind, which points again at the first precept. You want to use your energy to contribute to the world, not categorize it. Enough things are broken into bits and pieces, including humans. Therefore, do not ignore the value of being physically present with another human being that you respect, and enjoy.

--Ryland Walker Knight, Critical Precepts for the Writer in 2013. Trust your gut, respect your pleasure.

Realism(s) #24

Un été brûlant - Philippe Garrel, 2011, 35mm

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"I've lost the strength to wait for you to look at me. I've never felt so lonely..."

J.B. #3

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What you’re witnessing in that shot, is the turning of the earth: the light comes across the frame, there are trees casting shadows across the frame, and the sun isn’t moving. The sun doesn’t go around the earth, you all know that, right? The earth actually turns. It gives the illusion like it’s going round the earth. In the shot you see the light move and that’s due to the spinning of the earth, so I’m actually documenting its rotation. I mean, the elements that are in this film: earth, fire, water, wind, those kind of things, that’s what life is about. That’s my favourite shot in the film. I really like the way the light so subtly changes and, near the end, lights up the fool’s gold that’s under the water. You actually see gold sparkling underneath, which is not gold at all...

--James Benning talks about Easy Rider (2012), after the film's first screening in New York last month. Edition Filmmuseum has also recently released Benning's California Trilogy (1999-2001) on DVD.

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Also of interest: The Hour of Power; Vertigo's Winter 2012 issue: In Conversation; on "embodying the truth of a situation"; a Michael Snow compendium; and Life of a Happy Man.

Realism(s) #23, or: paradise lost

Tabu - Miguel Gomes, 2012, 35mm & 16mm

Realism(s) #22, or: you keep me going here and sometimes I even sing, though last night the song didn't go too well

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Yes, I have just looked through the window,
and I have to report to you that it's
snowing, snowing again. So it's all very
promising, very very promising,
my friends. A thin snow, a miserable
snow, but snow.

so I wish you strength and endurance and
faith and humor and trust persistent trust
in angels & everything that really matters and
frees and opens and heals & yes, yes, poetry
poetry of being

whatever happens, whatever is the decision,
I am with you this evening -- this rainy thundering
and very very hot evening writing you this
long line letter with a glass of Veltliner next
to me which means I am thinking also about Peter
and P. Adams besides you -- which means, the present
is mitigated -- as Peter would say -- with the
past.

We are all still here, separately but 
together -- 

Even the flesh is not 
burning.
I want to see the eyes. 
Tell me, tell me -- and do not
turn away.
I want to look into them. But I do not
dare, from fear what's in 
them -- 
as I keep moving ahead,
ahead.

--extracts from three separate letters by Jonas Mekas: a mid-January letter to friends (2002), to Stan Brakhage (June 27, 2002), and A Requiem for the XXth Century (January 3, 2000). All published in a collection of nine letters (first edition of 100) by Calico Grounds (CG18), in May 2012.