things will go on and one day it will all be over.

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. 

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  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

bill.

“Gilda got married and went away. None of us saw her anymore. There was one good thing: Laraine had a party one night, a great party at her house. And I ended up being the disk jockey. She just had forty-fives, and not that many, so you really had to work the music end of it. There was a collection of like the funniest people in the world at this party. Somehow Sam Kinison sticks in my brain. The whole Monty Python group was there, most of us from the show, a lot of other funny people, and Gilda. Gilda showed up and she’d already had cancer and gone into remission and then had it again, I guess. Anyway she was slim. We hadn’t seen her in a long time. And she started doing, “I’ve got to go,” and she was just going to leave, and I was like, “Going to leave?” It felt like she was going to really leave forever.

So we started carrying her around, in a way that we could only do with her. We carried her up and down the stairs, around the house, repeatedly, for a long time, until I was exhausted. Then Danny did it for a while. Then I did it again. We just kept carrying her; we did it in teams. We kept carrying her around, but like upside down, every which way—over your shoulder and under your arm, carrying her like luggage. And that went on for more than an hour—maybe an hour and a half—just carrying her around and saying, “She’s leaving! This could be it! Now come on, this could be the last time we see her. Gilda’s leaving, and remember that she was very sick—hello?”

We worked all aspects of it, but it started with just, “She’s leaving, I don’t know if you’ve said good-bye to her.” And we said good-bye to the same people ten, twenty times, you know.

And because these people were really funny, every person we’d drag her up to would just do like five minutes on her, with Gilda upside down in this sort of tortured position, which she absolutely loved. She was laughing so hard we could have lost her right then and there.

It was just one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in my life. I’ll always remember it. It was the last time I saw her.”

we write "and for the first time" so often.

În clasa a şaptea, când am primit de la doamna dirigintă Istoria Literaturii Universale în 3 volume potrivit de groase, mi-am pus în minte să citesc integral toţi autorii prezentaţi acolo, pe rând, să nu pierd nimic, pentru că ori e tot ori e nimic, îmi ziceam de parcă aş fi ştiut ce zic.  Şi nu ştiam cu ce să încep şi mi-am zis, might as well start from the end, why not, şi am început de la litera z şi singurul autor cu z de acolo era Zola şi prima carte de el care mi-a căzut sub ochi la biblioteca din oraş a fost Fecunditate, groasă carte, promiţătoare, mi-am zis, încep bine, chiar dacă de la sfârşit. Şi-aşa a fost, am sfârşit de cum am început, pentru că atunci când am ajuns la pasajul cu vătraiul pe post de instrument de tortură menit sa vindece femeile fecunde a trebuit să o las din mână şi să merg în grădină să dau afară mărul roşu pe care tocmai îl mâncasem de prânz. Şi era aşa un măr mare şi roşu, un măr care-ţi scraşnea printre dinţi şi-ţi zemuia toată gura. A fost păcat de el. Nu poţi să termini ce începi de la sfârşit, am învăţat atunci.