Through A Glass Darkly

A few days ago, at a table, where ymM was also sitting, I dared to argue... it was a small gathering of four of us after having watched Cuaron's recent "Children of Men"; we were, you know, chatting on film and philosophy (how the latter shall be handled in the former), strangely lost somewhere around the discussion on the decadent environment in Turkey... Anyway, there, under these utterly hollow circumstances, in front of everybody, I dared to argue that Bergman is, to put it politely, not as important as people usually consider him to be.

Of course, it was just for the sake of provocation but the whole thing failed. No one at the table took me seriously, and the chat went on. Monsieur F., sipping his cold white wine, explained us why Turkey will soon turn into South Africa. Mobs will shot "blacks" on streets. We did not oppose, it was too late and too mellow, and too hot.

After two days, Bergman died. I cannot imagine a more terrible position that a self-proclaimed cinephile can put himself into.

But there is more.

After years of deferral, resistance to the urge of swallowing his filmography wildly, I had finally given up, the day before this small gathering, I watched "Smiles of a Summer Night" after breakfast, "Wild Strawberries" in the afternoon, with tea and biscuits, and finally "Seventh Seal", as it deserves, just before midnight. When I went to bed, completely baffled, it was different, i was able to say to Salkim. Dreyer, Tarkovsky, something; but different. Then during the weekend, we watched "Through a Glass Darkly" and "Winter Light" (the first two films of his famous trilogy; "Silence" which I haven't seen yet, is the last part). He was still alive then and we were falling in love with him. And he died.

***

Two personal reasons why I finally decided to "go back" to Bergman --you always have this bizarre "feeling", even if you haven't seen one minute of his films before, that you have to know his films if you want to think seriously on cinema-- were his constant engagement with the question of God (not "existing" yet always somewhere there) and that he chose the life of solitary artist, on a small island off coast of Sweden (Faro, which I believe he discovered for "Through a Glass Darkly").

dissertation title #36: David Lynch, or the Feminization of Alfred Hitchcock

the saint, as always, proves inspirational

bruegel with buñuel

[This is a visual posting of Bruegel's "The Peasant Wedding" (1568) and a still from Buñuel's Viridiana (1961). In their juxtaposition, the two images summarizes both the enjoyment of the ceremony and the impossibility of the sexual relationship that the wedding celebrates or perhaps substitutes for. This posting goes for... Anyways, they know who they are. Şerefe.]

A non-all David Lynch

Unfortunately, perhaps due to the general difficulty in accessing to a screening of Inland Empire, the contributors of this list were not able to engage in a conversation on Lynch's latest installment of his post-noir non-all cinema. In any case, from its use of digital camera to its commerically suicidal 3hrs long non-narrative "plot", the movie is a big "fuck you" to the Hollywood system. Well, let's now pay attention to what Lynch himself thinks about the commericalization of cinema:



[Many thanks to Jared who brought this clip to my attention.]

With all due respect to the interval, or, courting a science of the image

In defiance of all pretentions of purpose and/or usefulness...the first G.Frege post:

Lately I have daydreamed over how to conceive of the specific economy that is embedded in the act of quotation. Could we perhaps call it the sister of appropriation (as Lacan calls truth the sister of jouissance)?

Flaubert, September 1852: "Beauty may become a useless sentiment and art something between algebra and music."

I hope our blog, over time, moves in the direction of the latter. Nevertheless...I felt encouraged to post images:


Agamben, July 1975: "For [Aby] Warburg, the attitude of artists toward images inherited from tradition was conceivable in terms neither of aesthetic choice nor of neutral reception; for him it is a matter of confrontation--which is lethal or vitalizing, depending on the situation--with the tremendous energies stored in images, which in themselves had the potential either to make man regress into sterile subjection or to direct him on his path toward salvation and knowledge."

Hollis Frampton, September 1971: "A still photograph is simply an isolated frame taken out of the infinite cinema."


Deleuze, March 1970: "There is no apprentice who is not the Egyptologist of something."