"One human being had seemed to love him and he had denied her life and happiness: he had sentenced her to ignominy, a death of shame."
James Joyce, in Dubliners, A Painful Case [pg 325]
Tarkovsky Now Free to Stream Online!
All seven classics:
- The Sacrifice: https://russianfilmhub.com/movies/the-sacrifice-1986/
- Andrei Rublev: https://russianfilmhub.com/movies/andrei-rublev-1966/
- Ivan's Childhood: https://russianfilmhub.com/movies/ivans-childhood-1962/
Plus his student films:
- There Will Be No Leave Today: https://russianfilmhub.com/.../there-will-be-no-leave.../
- The Killers: https://russianfilmhub.com/movies/the-killers-1956/
Also one where he appears as an actor:
- I Am Twenty: https://russianfilmhub.com/movies/i-am-twenty-1965/
From here.
The strength beneath
Lacking studio financing, Cassavetes mortgaged his house and borrowed from family and friends, one of whom was Peter Falk, who liked the screenplay so much he invested $500,000 in the project. The crew consisted of professionals and students from the American Film Institute, where Cassavetes was serving as the first "filmmaker in residence" at their Center for Advanced Film Studies. Working with a limited budget forced him to shoot scenes in a real house near Hollywood Boulevard, and Rowlands was responsible for her own hairstyling and makeup.
Upon completion of the film, Cassavetes was unable to find a distributor, so he personally called theater owners and asked them to run the film. According to college student Jeff Lipsky, who was hired to help distribute the film, "It was the first time in the history of motion pictures that an independent film was distributed without the use of a nationwide system of sub-distributors." It was booked into art houses in 1974 and shown on college campuses, where Cassavetes and Falk discussed it with the audience. It was shown at the San Sebastián Film Festival, where Rowlands was named Best Actress and Cassavetes won the Silver Shell Award for Best Director, and the New York Film Festival, where it captured the attention of film critics like Rex Reed. When Richard Dreyfuss appeared on "The Mike Douglas Show" with Peter Falk, he described the film as "the most incredible, disturbing, scary, brilliant, dark, sad, depressing movie" and added, "I went crazy. I went home and vomited," which prompted curious audiences to seek out the film capable of making Dreyfuss (who is himself bipolar) ill. (Wikipedia)
Taken from here.
O que tenho para dizer
O que tenho para dizer,
permanece pairando no espaço subcutâneo,
aguardando a folga de um poro.
O que tenho para dizer,
paira como loucas folhas redemoinhando no ar,
sem eira nem beira,
como que aguardando um forte sopro de vento,
que as guie numa direcção qualquer.
O que tenho para dizer,
carece de organização.
Espera no limbo do reino do tácito,
como um significado que ainda não encontrou o seu significado.
O que tenho para dizer,
flutua num caldo visceral que,
intermitentemente e sistematicamente,
insiste em forçar caminho,
na forma de ondas de ansiedade.
O que tenho para dizer,
aguarda uma boleia.
27 Março 2022
Recurrences
E volto a citar Joyce...
Foi para partir à descoberta disto e para o viver na sua plenitude, que James Joyce partiu da sua Irlanda, cortando com as fortes amarras da religião que o criou [também representada pela sua 'mother figure' — com toda a eventual carga simbólica que aí resida].
No entanto... dizem os entendidos... que JJ nunca 'saiu de Dublin'.
Na verdade... Nem nós, nem ninguém...
Certo?
A vida é como as ondas do mar.
Voltam e tornam a voltar à costa.
"To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of beauty we have come to understand — that is art."
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
of art
"To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of beauty we have come to understand — that is art."
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce [pg 183]
of words
[...] "but yet it wounded him to think that he would never be but a shy guest at the feast of the world's culture and that the monkish learning, in terms of which he was striving to forge out an esthetic philosophy, was held no higher by the age he lived in than the subtle and curious jargons of heraldry and falconry. "
James Joyce, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [pg 158]
a rose is a rose is a rose
A prática da religião católica tem permitido aos seus mais fervorosos devotos e aficionados, ao longo dos tempos, elaborar sobre aquilo que seria o Inferno, esse ‘todo-devorador lago de chamas’.
Contra todas as leis da física e da biologia, a infinita capacidade imaginativa humana descreve, por linhas vis, a dimensão da culpa.
Arma para contrariar, ou resfriar a, toda-poderosa, pulsão do prazer.
"Master and Margarita", de Viktor Lazarev
The ambivalence of the man-made
"These mythological personae [Hephaestus and Pandora] suggest the ambivalence about material culture that marked out our civilization from its origins. Western civilization has not chosen between these personae so much as fused them into ambivalence about man-made physical experience. Both Hephaestus and Pandora are artificers. Each of these artificers contains a contrary: a virtuous god who makes worthwhile everyday things yet whose person is ugly and inglorious; a goddess whose things are as beautiful, as desirable, as her body, and as malign. The fusion of these two personae was why Plato could celebrate the virtue of archaic, domesticating technologies yet assert the superior beauty of the immaterial soul; why early Christians could see virtue in acts of carpentering, sewing, or gardening yet scorn the love of material things themselves; why the Enlightenment at once embraced and feared the perfection of machines; why Wittgenstein could call his desire to realize a beautiful, perfect building a sickness. The man-made material object is not a neutral fact; it is a source of unease because it is man-made. "
Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman [pg 283]
Career vs job
"Schools and state institutions, even profit-seeking businesses, can take one concrete step to support vocations. This is to build up skills in sequence, especially through job retraining. Artisanal craftsmen have proved particularly promising subjects for such efforts. The discipline required for good manual labor serves them, as does their focus on concrete problems rather than on the flux of process-based, human relations work. For this very reason it has proved easier to train a plumber to become a computer programmer than to train a salesperson; the plumber has craft habit and material focus, which serve retraining. Employers oftendon't see this opportunity because they equate manual routine with mindless labor, the Animal laborans of Arendt's imagination. But we've seen throughout this book that just the opposite is the case. For good craftsmen, routines are not static; they evolve, the craftsmen improve. "
Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman [pag 266]
Restraint and imagination
Dos limites do perfeccionismo.
O 'processo' à vista.
Cicatrizes de dores de crescimento.
Quando a falta de dinheiro restringe a obsessão pela perfeição e estimula a criatividade e a aprendizagem.
Adolf Loos vs Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Villa Moller vs a casa de Kundmanngasse.
"[Adolf] Loos's need to respond positively to the difficulties he encountered appeared in the errors that occurred during the construction of the Villa Moller. When the foundations were not laid as specified, he could not afford to dig them up and start again; instead, Loos thickened the form of one side wall to accommodate the mistake, making the thickened wall an empathic side frame for the front. The formally pure properties of the Villa Moller were achieved by working with many similar mistakes and impediments Loos had to take as facts on the ground; necessity stimulated his sense of form. Wittgenstein, knowing no financial necessity, had no such creative dialogue between form and error."
Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman [pg 256]
The importance of the sociable expert
"Vimla Patel and Guy Groen have explored the sociable expert by comparing the clinical skills of brilliant but novice medical students to doctors with several years of experience behind them. The experienced doctor, as one would expect, is a more accurate diagnostician. This is due in large part to the fact that he or she tends to be more open to oddity and particularity in patients, whereas the medical student is more likely to be a formalist, working by the book, rather rigidly applying general rules to particular cases. Moreover, the experienced doctor thinks in larger units of time, not just backward to cases in the past but, more interestingly, forward, trying to see into the patient's indeterminate future. The novice, lacking a storehouse of clinical histories, has trouble imagining what might be an individual patient's fate. The experienced doctor focuses on a patient's becoming; raw talent thinks strictly in terms of immediate cause and effect. The craftsman's capacity of prehension, discussed in our chapter on the hand, is thus elaborated in long term medical practice. Treating others as whole persons in time is one mark of sociable expertise."
Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman [pg. 247]
Stoops, street life... and jazz
"On the steps of the tenements, the improvisers observe and experiment with stoops in relation to their own bodies. Like a jazz musician, a tenement dweller who improvises follows rules. The physical materials at hand in the street are givens, like the written melody of fundamental harmonies spelled out for each number in a jazz musician's "cheat book" (cheating because many of these songs are lifted illegally out of copyright). Good jazz improvisation follows rules of economy; variations pick out an element to explore, otherwise they lose focus; the harmonic reversals are disciplined by what came before. [...] Rudofsky thought that this hidden order is how most settlements of poor people develop and that the work of improvising street order attaches people to their communities, whereas "renewal" projects, which may provide a cleaner street, pretty houses, and large shops, give the inhabitants no way to mark their presence on the space."
Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman [pg. 236/237]
da sabedoria
"They're particularly fond of mental pleasures, which they consider of primary importance, and attribute mostly to good behaviour and a clear conscience. Their favourite physical pleasure is health. Of course, they believe in enjoying food, drink, and so forth, but purely in the interests of health, for they don't regard such things as very pleasant themselves — only as methods of resisting the stealthy onset of disease. A sensible person, they say, prefers keeping well to taking medicine, and would rather feel cheerful than have people trying to comfort him. On the same principle it's better not to need this type of pleasure than to become addicted to it. For, if you think that sort of thing will make you happy, you'll have to admit that your idea of perfect felicity would be a life consisting entirely of hunger, thirst, itching,eating, drinking, rubbing, and scratching — which would obviously be most unpleasant as well as quite disgusting. Undoubtedly these pleasures should come right at the bottom of the list, because they're so impure. "
Thomas More, in Utopia [pg 86]
