Landscape Suicide: 02.10

28.2.10

To the derelicts of the earth #2

New York, N.Y. - Raymond Depardon, 1986, 35mm

The filming was done in New York, but what it shows is not this city but rather a hazy diffusion, which softens the three pictures with shadows, as if perceived through the unwashed windowpane of a cafe. The passers-by at the street intersection are nothing but strange, anonymous silhouettes, wandering through a Nietzschean metropolis. No one sees anyone else, and everyone is alone.

--Hartmut Bitomsky on New York, N.Y., The Documentary World, published in Retrospektive catalogue, Goethe Institute, Munich, 1997, p.17.

The object manifests itself through its absence. It has vanished from the film.

New York Portrait Pt. II - Peter Hutton, 1980-81, 16mm

19.2.10

Distance(s) #6

Sisters of the Gion - Kenji Mizoguchi, 1936, 35mm

The Best Years of Our Lives - William Wyler, 1946, 35mm

15.2.10

Artificial light

I blink in uncertainty at this dreamlike luminescence, feeling as though some misty film were blunting my vision. The light from the pale white paper, powerless to dispel the darkness of the alcove, is instead repelled by the darkness, creating a world of confusion where dark and light are indistinguishable. Have you not yourselves sensed a difference in the light that suffuses such a room, a rare tranquility not found in ordinary light? Have you never felt a sort of fear in the face of the ageless, a fear that in that room you might lose all consciousness of the passage of time, that untold years might pass and upon emerging you should find you had grown old and gray?

--Junichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, 1933 (Vintage, 2001), p.34.