There is nothing more devastating than the
unsurmountable pain of watching someone you love suffer. You try your best to
remedy their sorrow and provide by whatever means possible, delaying the
onslaught of grief, but when someone is decaying before your eyes it’s
impossible not to find yourself slowly deteriorating with them. Void of
suspense or sentiment, Amour unfolds like a long and painful novel, rigid
in its unapologetic nature, and it tears you up inside. It tears you up like
the real death of someone you love does. There’s nothing similar. There’s no
movie similar to this one. In fact, it’s not even a movie, is a chunk of bloody
life, a heart that pulsates slower and slower until the end credits roll down.
There’s no music to it. There’s no music because there aren’t any feelings lacking, feelings that need to be filled artificially, with carefully selected
tones. It’s just the saddest most gut wrenching thing I’ve ever experienced.
And I know I won’t want to see it again.
Saturday, December 22, 2012
Thursday, December 20, 2012
questions about answers.
The boy from school
The boy with whom I only talked about Dostoyevsky and
Metallica
The boy who left
The boy who stopped my nosebleed with a handful of
snow
The boy who always peeled the pomegranates for me
The boy with the bleached hair
The boy with the grey hair
The boy who only watched Romanian comedies
The boy who didn’t speak Romanian
The boy who was nearly as tall as me
The boy who looked like Gael Garcia Bernal in
Blindness
The boy who only liked boys
The boy who lied to me
The boy that I lied to
The boy with the funny name
The boy who gave up
The boy for whom I filled a notebook with short
stories
The boy who said it couldn’t work
The boy outside the old souk of Damascus
The boy who was clinically depressed
The boy who got it all wrong
The boy who actually liked me
The boy who looked at me and saw birds
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
trigger and happy belong together.
The problem with love, or any other feelings of the
sort, is that when you fall into it, it’s like this kind of succulent melting,
but when you fall out of it, it’s not at all like rebuilding ice cubes out of
the juices, but rather evaporation, condensation, and then always the rain
again, but not the one that’s really strong and heavy, which seems like white
noise, except not empty, but the slow and treacherous one, that makes you think
there’s something there, except not.
And on a not quite so different note, the problem with the past is that
it gives you what it didn’t give you when you needed it. Nothing that happens
in the past can be taken away, that’s for damn sure. It’s an amazing gift, in
the end. The issue is that, although the past is done and over and settled (after
all, you can’t get it back, you can just try and gather and live with whatever
good you have gotten from it, spiritually, emotionally and all that), it
reaches out and infects your present. The sneaky little pervert. It makes you
value most the things you lost in that said past. Because when they’re lost,
said things suddenly become perfect in your head again. Like they never rusted.
Like they never broke. Memories make you see them rosier than a newborn’s cheeks.
Brighter day by day. They are made of dreams of how wonderful things could have
been because they don’t suffer the indignity of actually still existing, if you
ask me. Of being real. Of having flaws. Of breaking and deteriorating. Only the
things you no longer have will always be perfect. And that’s really shitty.
Thursday, December 6, 2012
let them think you were born that way.
dear
daughter,
if you’ve inherited my heart
then don’t be ashamed
of how desperate you sometimes feel
or how you stain sheets and shirts
that you are sopping wet
a walking haemmorhage
curious hands in the shower
the first menses of a young girl
a virgin writhing on a bed
you are on fire
you are like your mother.
if you’ve inherited my heart
then don’t be ashamed
of how desperate you sometimes feel
or how you stain sheets and shirts
that you are sopping wet
a walking haemmorhage
curious hands in the shower
the first menses of a young girl
a virgin writhing on a bed
you are on fire
you are like your mother.
so
how could i ever talk about sin or damnation
when you have legs like creaking doors?
you welcome ghosts home
so i know you will know hell intimately
men who like to punch women in the face
who tongue kiss girls who look like their mother
men who hold you down, face in the mattress.
when you have legs like creaking doors?
you welcome ghosts home
so i know you will know hell intimately
men who like to punch women in the face
who tongue kiss girls who look like their mother
men who hold you down, face in the mattress.
daughter
with a soft body
the hardest ones will fall for you
and you will usher them in
seek out their sharp edges
the abrasion
and by the time they’ve finished
you will be bloody and sore
teeth marks on your thighs
your torso a burnt house of worship.
the hardest ones will fall for you
and you will usher them in
seek out their sharp edges
the abrasion
and by the time they’ve finished
you will be bloody and sore
teeth marks on your thighs
your torso a burnt house of worship.
habibti,
you do not deserve it but
you will be loved in fragments and fractions
until you no longer look like yourself
until your mouth is just the shape of his quiet name
oh my little girl
rip him out of your body
you come from a long line of women;
hawa who doused herself in petrol
ayan who pulled out her own teeth
khadija who fell asleep in the river
forgetting is the hardest thing in the world,
remember that.
you will be loved in fragments and fractions
until you no longer look like yourself
until your mouth is just the shape of his quiet name
oh my little girl
rip him out of your body
you come from a long line of women;
hawa who doused herself in petrol
ayan who pulled out her own teeth
khadija who fell asleep in the river
forgetting is the hardest thing in the world,
remember that.
The
letter your mother couldn’t write, Warsan Shire
(our
refinement of the abyss: to oblige us to ask ourselves whether, in truth, we
are falling)
Photo
credit: Armand Seguin, Les fleurs du mal, 1892
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
filmmakers on jean-luc godard
Chantal
Akerman: You
can see him excluding himself from the world in an almost autistic manner. For
people like me, who started doing film because of him, it is a terrible fright.
And the fact that the long evolution that Godard has been through can lead to
this, almost brings me to despair. He was kind of a pioneer, an inventor who
didn’t care much about anybody or anything. And that a man at this stage of his
life isolates himself, should also be a lesson for us other film makers.
Woody Allen:
I think he’s a brilliant innovator. I don’t always love every film he’s made. I think he’s very
inventive, but sometimes his inventions are taken by other people and used
better. But he’s certainly one of the innovators of cinema.
Paul Thomas Anderson: I love Godard in a very film school way. I can’t say
that I’ve ever been emotionally attacked by him. Where I have been emotionally
attacked by Truffaut.
Michelangelo Antonioni: Godard flings reality in our faces, and I’m struck by
this. But never by Truffaut.
Ingmar Bergman:
I’ve never been able to appreciate any of his films, nor even understand them.
Truffaut and I used to meet on several occasions at film festivals. We had an
instant understanding that extended to his films. But Godard: I find his films
affected, intellectual, self-obsessed and, as cinema, without interest and
frankly dull. Endless and tiresome. Godard is a desperate bore. I’ve always
thought that he made films for critics. He made one here in Sweden, Masculin Féminin, so boring
that my hair stood on end.
Luis Buñuel:
I’ll give him two years more, he is just a fashion.
Jean-Luc Godard: I am not an auteur, well, not now anyway. We once
believed we were auteurs but we weren’t. We had no idea, really. Film is over.
It’s sad nobody is really exploring it. But what to do? And anyway, with mobile
phones and everything, everyone is now an auteur.
Werner Herzog:
Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when
compared to a good kung fu film.
Fritz Lang: I
like him a great deal: he is very honest, he loves the cinema, he is just as
fanatical as I was. In fact, I think he tries to continue what we started one
day, the day when we began making our first films. Only his approach is
different. Not the spirit.
Roman Polanski:
In fact the worst thing possible is to be absolutely certain about things.
Hitler, for example, must have been convinced in the certainty of his ideas and
that he was right. I don’t think he did anything without believing in it,
otherwise he wouldn’t have done it to start with. And I think Jean-Luc
Godard believes he makes good films, but maybe they aren’t that good.
Satyajit Ray:
Godard especially opened up new ways of… making points, let us say. And he
shook the foundations of film grammar in a very healthy sort of way, which is
excellent.
Quentin Tarantino:
To me, Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music: they both
revolutionized their forms.
François Truffaut:
You’re nothing but a piece of shit on a pedestal. […] You fostered the myth,
you accentuated that side of you that was mysterious, inaccessible and
temperamental, all for the slavish admiration of those around you. You need to
play a role and the role needs to be a prestigious one; I’ve always had the
impression that real militants are like cleaning women, doing a thankless,
daily but necessary job. But you, you’re the Ursula Andress of militancy, you
make a brief appearance, just enough time for the cameras to flash, you make
two or three duly startling remarks and then you disappear again, trailing
clouds of self-serving mystery.
Orson Welles:
He’s the definitive influence if not really the first film artist of
this last decade, and his gifts as a director are enormous. I just can’t take
him very seriously as a thinker—and
that’s where we seem to differ, because he does. His message is what he cares
about these days, and, like most movie messages, it could be written on the
head of a pin. But what’s so admirable about him is his marvelous contempt for
the machinery of movies and even movies themselves—a kind of anarchistic,
nihilistic contempt for the medium—which, when he’s at his best and most
vigorous, is very exciting.
Wim Wenders: For
me, discovering cinema was directly connected to his films. I was living in
Paris at the time. When Made
in USA opened, I went to the
first show—it was around noon—and I sat there until midnight. I saw it six
times in a row.
Photo: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean-Luc
Godard gather to distribute copies of the Maoist newspaper “La Cause du Peuple”
on the street after it is banned by the government, Paris, 1970.
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