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We have a huge barrel of wine, but no cups.

That’s fine with us. Every morning

we glow and in the evening we glow again.

Rumi

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Andre Bazin, an aesthetic of reality

But realism in art can only be achieved in one way—through artifice.

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Every form of aesthetic must necessarily choose between what is worth preserving and what should be discarded, and what should not even be considered. But when this aesthetic aims in essence at creating the illusion of reality, as does the cinema, this choice sets up a fundamental contra- diction which is at once unacceptable and necessary: necessary because art can only exist when such a choice is made. Without it, supposing total cinema was here and now technically possible, we would go back purely to reality. Unacceptable because it would be done definitely at the expense of that reality which the cinema proposes to restore integrally. That is why it would be absurd to resist every new technical development aiming to add to the realism of cinema, namely sound, color, and stereoscopy. Actually the “‘art’’ of cinema lives off this contradiction. It gets the most out of the potential for abstraction and symbolism provided by the present

limits of the screen, but this utilization of the residue of conventions abandoned by technique can work either to the advantage or to the detriment of realism. It can magnify or neutralize the effectiveness of the elements of reality that the camera captures. One might group, if not classify in order of importance, the various styles of cinematography in terms of the added measure of reality. We would define as “realist,” then, all narrative means tending to bring an added measure of reality to the screen. 

Reality is not to be taken quantitatively. The same event, the same object, can be rep-resented in various ways. Each representation discards or retains various of

the qualities that permit us to recognize the object on the screen. Each in- troduces, for didactic or aesthetic reasons, abstractions that operate more or less corrosively and thus do not permit the original to subsist in its en- tirety. At the conclusion of this inevitable and necessary “chemical” action, for the initial reality there has been substituted an illusion of reality com- posed of a complex of abstraction (black and white, plane surface), of con- ventions (the rules of montage, for example), and of authentic reality. It is a necessary illusion but it quickly induces a loss of awareness of the reality itself, which becomes identified in the mind of the spectator with its cine- matographic representation. As for the film maker, the moment he has se- cured this unwitting complicity of the public, he is increasingly tempted to ignore reality. From habit and laziness he reaches the point when he himself is no longer able to tell where lies begin or end. There could never be any question of calling him a liar because his art consists in lying. He is just no longer in control of his art. He is its dupe, and hence he is held back from any further conquest of reality.

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the camera of Orson Welles takes in with equal sharpness the whole field of vision contained simultaneously within the dramatic field. It is no longer the editing that selects what we see, thus giving it an a priori significance, it is the mind of the spectator which is forced to discern, as in a sort of parallelepiped of reality with the screen as its cross-section, the dramatic spectrum proper to the scene.

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The necessity inherent in the narrative is biological rather than dramatic. 

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A shot of kind by virtue of its dynamism belongs with the movement of a hand drawing a sketch, leaving a space here, filling in there, here sketching round the subject, and there bringing it into relief. I am thinking of the slow motion in the documentary on Matisse which allows us to observe, beneath the continuous and uniform arabesques of the stroke, the varying hesitations of the artist’s hand. In such a case the camera movement is important. The camera must be equally as ready to move as to remain still. Traveling and panning shots do not have the same god-like character that the Hollywood camera crane has bestowed on them. Everything is shot from eye-level or from a concrete point of view, such as a roof top or window.

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The technique of Rossellini undoubtedly maintains an intelligible succession of events, but these do not mesh like a chain with the sprockets of a wheel. The mind has to leap from one event to the other as one leaps from stone to stone in crossing a river. It may happen that one’s foot hesitates between two rocks, or that one misses one’s footing and slips. The mind does likewise. Actually it is not of the essence of a stone to allow people to cross rivers without wetting their feet any more than the divisions of a melon exist to allow the head of the family to divide it equally. Facts are facts, our imagination makes use of them, but they do not exist inherently for this purpose. 

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facts take on a meaning, but not like a tool whose function has predetermined its form. 

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the unit of cinematic narrative in Paisd is not the “shot,” an abstract view of a reality which is being analyzed, but the “fact.” A fragment of concrete reality in itself multiple and full of ambiguity, whose meaning emerges only after the fact, thanks to other imposed facts between which the mind establishes certain relationships. Unquestionably, the director chose these “facts” carefully while at the same time respecting their factual integrity.

//

the same reason the actors will take care never to dissociate their performance from the decor or from the performance of their fellow actors. Man himself is just one fact among others, to whom no pride of place should be given a priori.

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Houses in Tunbridge, Vermont 

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‘film does not reflect or even record reality; like any other medium of representation it constructs and “re-presents” its pictures of reality by way of the codes, conventions, myths and ideologies of its culture as well as by way of the specific signifying practices of the medium’ (1988: 129).

Graeme Turner

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the piano sounds far away! distant interlude was what she called it

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I am actually so sad because how do you unlove someone. Time? That takes too much time!

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there’s a last time for everything and now we’re here

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