Surrealism’s proclaims poetry (the subconscience) as the supreme weapon of knowledge and conquest. Wallace Fowlie defines the surrealist as one who tells us what he sees of the world, the philosopher, what he thinks of it, the poet, what he knows. Poetic knowledge is truer than rational knowledge. According to Fowlie the poet-artist is the seer, possessing magic qualities which neither he nor the spectator fully grasps. (Fowlie 45)
Add comment | August 18th, 2008
“A director who does not edit his own film, allows himself to be translated into a foreign tongue.” - Jean Cocteau
Add comment | May 1st, 2008
The pre-Renaissance friends of Giotto, the religious icon painters,
presented their scenes of divine suffering and ecstasy on a surface
that coexisted in the same space as the viewer. Their paintings
were covered with ornamental designs that surrounded the tragic
figures of beatitude and dethroned them from their heavenly
presence by grounding them within a confining surface that
bursts out into the space in which it is exhibited or placed,
denying the viewer any escape from the castigating Gaia that
was the Middle Ages. In the Renaissance the daughter of Chaos
was bound into a suffocating order. Perspective, those points that
lead the eye to accept an illusion of depth, came into its playful
existence. Painters, or should I say draftsmen who played this
game of illusion with precision, like Caravaggio and Bellini,
disintegrated that suffocating surface of the canvas and created
port holes to other dimensions filled with architectural marvels
that dwarfed the figures and objects; the body the painter had
always identified became another object within an architectonic
landscape. Architects like Filippo Brunelleschi played with
perspective within the actual, sometimes blurring the line between
the real and deception with painted ornamental reliefs and lines to
fool the eye. In addition, from antiquity the classical orders Doric,
Ionic, and Corinthian became the sources from which aspirations
became abundant. Renaissance, or “re-birth”, meant the opening
of the eye of an illusory reality but yet in doing so it had to close
the eye of physical actuality. This was a blessing at a time when
humanity needed to lift its gaze beyond its tactile existence, but
even blessings have their limits and a return to the tactile is the
pathway that continually reshapes the continuity of perception
in the arts.
Add comment | April 7th, 2008
“NOTE 4
/What is a novel?/
\The prefatory folly continues: prefatory parenthesis\
Carlo is my father’s name. I choose it for the protagonist of this novel for an illogical reason: in fact, between my father and this ’split’ engineer \technician\ whose story I am preparing to tell there is no possible comparison: my father was an Army officer whose adulthood coincided with the Fascist period and who was an adherent to Fascism (although in the rivalry that arose between Fascism and the Army, he was on the Army’s side): his character which was ready to accept Fascism <--- for as a boy <...> he had been a daredevil and a delinquent, from an aristocratic family —- had been modified by it:> there is noting more united than disorder and order. There is a photograph of my father a seventeen, a little before he left as a volunteer for the Libyan war: he is a handsome boy, strong as a bull, elegant, with the sort of depraved elegance of the son of a rich decadent family — indulged and crude at the same time; in his black hair and eyes there is something /cruel/: it’s his sensuality that looks violent and makes him too severe and almost /fierce/. The purity of his youthful cheeks, <...> the perfection of his body (he was, however, short in stature, a short man) was that of a man who has a big cock…”
(Pasolini 1997, 20-21, Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein.)
Add comment | March 25th, 2008
“The filmmaker does not have a dictionary; he has infinite possibilities. He does not take his signs (im-signs) from a shrine, a protective sheath, or from some baggage, but from chaos, where they are nothing more than possibilities or shadows of a mechanical, oneiric communication. The activity of the cinematographic author, thus toponymically described, is not single, but double. As a matter of fact, he must (I) take the im-sign from the meaningless jumble of possible expressions (chaos), make its individual existence possible, and conceive of it as placed in a dictionary of meaningful im-signs (gestures, environment, dream, memory) (II) fulfill the writer’s function, that is, add to such a purely morphological sign its individualexpressive quality.” - Pier Paolo Pasolini
Add comment | March 20th, 2008
In Pier-Paolo Pasolini’s critical work “The Cinema of Poetry” (from Pasolini’s Heretical Empiricism,1988) he addresses semiotics, not in order to identify cinematic process as a language to be dissected and categorized within a traditional linguistic vernacular, but to define cinematic language as a unique and endlessly renewing process of poetic expression. This expression does not rely on a vocabulary pigeonholed in a dictionary but in the actual everyday chaos that makes up the world of our experiences.
Add comment | March 7th, 2008
A narrative structure that is not based on a classical Greek model is more in line with the segmented experience of today’s world. Today’s techno-science consumer society with its multi-tasking lifestyle presents a vertical (layered) perception of the world around us; remaining fixed to a classical narrative structure (as Hollywood does) seems pointless. To argue this point further, I acknowledge that this type of vertical perception has always existed. Indigenous dialectal languages have been formed out of centuries of philological colonization and are themselves linguistic conglomerates. Pier-Paolo Pasolini speaks of the Italian dialects as having quotidian expressive characteristics. He points to a Neapolitan who speaks a dialect which is accompanied by a highly animated array of gestures and facial expressions. Therefore, the meaning of a word changes based on the gesture or expression which accompanies it.
Add comment | March 6th, 2008
A fragmented approach seems to be a more natural interaction with narrative. The film-maker Alain Resnais said that: “a classic film cannot translate the real rhythm of modern life, modern life is fragmented, everyone feels that”
Add comment | March 4th, 2008
“Even the most cursory observation of film production reveals that the entire field is dominated by two main approaches: the fiction entertainment film, promoted internationally by commercial interests; and the documentary educational film, promoted by individuals and organizations interested in social reform, visual education and cultural dissemination. What is conspicuously lacking is the development of cinema as an art form - concerned with the type of perception which characterizes all other art forms, such as poetry, painting, etc., and devoted to the development of a formal idiom as independent of other art forms as they are of each other.”
-Maya Deren, “Cinema as an Art Form”, 1946
Add comment | March 3rd, 2008
Natu
fila
risciottu quatri
chi pirtusa
l’ombra runa
Striscia
scinni
beddu finu
cu sciatu poi
ricumincia
Birth
string eighteen
frames
Shadow bore
with holes
Strips
down to
fine
breathing
in renew
Add comment | December 8th, 2007