Isaiah Berlin (again) - ‘I was, and remain…a convinced gradualist’
Surely that is not always the right response.
Can I be alone in my longing for inarticulacy, for a cinema that refuses to join all the dots? For an arrhythmia in gesture, for a dissonance in shape? For the context of cinematic frame, a frame that in the end only cinema can provide, for the full view, the long shot, the space between, the gaps, the pause, the lull, the grace of living.
Perhaps it is to do with memory and the sense that we are increasingly being pulled into a vast orchestrated project of amnesia. We discovered cinema in the same moment in history when we rediscovered - through Freud - the significance of our dreams. Now we are displacing and distorting - with our passion for genetics, neuroscience, cognitivism - the ineffable element of the dream within the machine. Our dreams are the place where we can remember that which we never realized we knew. And the prism through which we can reflect these visions - the trick of the light, that alchemy of smoke, of mirrors, so much more than the sum of its parts - is what the cinema is.
The state of cinema IS a dream state. No known address. Occupied, dictated, created by no one. When it comes to moving goal posts, what art form could be described as more flexible than film? As ever, it’s all up for grabs. And evolution, as ever, is the name of the game.
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Alexander Sokurov - ‘In reality, greatness and power are incompatible.’
and on Tarkovsky:
“I never wanted to be his student. I loved him as a person. His death was the biggest loss of my life. I was half his age, but he treated me as an equal, with unlimited warmth and trust. I was embarrassed by it. It felt like admiration I could never actually deserve.”