kiaupaite

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the flow of life

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The way you perceive the duration is different too, depending on pleasure or depending on how busy you are. Why does a day pass so quickly sometimes and why is it so slow another time? I don’t have the answer. I’m trying to create situations where people think of that notion but I don’t have the answer to it. It’s more of a question.

james benning

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Why is there boredom when time is uneventful? How comfortable are we looking inside ourselves? Are our senses awake enough to see the vast number of things that are happening in front of us? Benning demands attention because art should demand attention, because in many of his most static works there are indeed a lot of things happening. It’s us who need to be awake.

This poetry of landscapes, the unraveling of the uneventful has made James Benning one of the most daring experimental filmmakers of his time. So it’s time for us to respect his art, and enjoy.

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El laberinto

The stories that Cristóbal tells in The Labyrinth are all firsthand experiences. The film was built around one sound recording I made in 2012, one year after our first meeting. That shooting was a strong moment, materializing hours of discussion in other contexts. It was the first line of the film to come, from which everything unfolded.

Hand-crafting was key while editing this film, the playfulness of assembling the materials. I realized while doing it that asking for the permission to use these images was to de-politize them. The act of appropriation makes sense, on its own. If those US TV series have colonized our imaginaries why would I go and ask them if they would allow my criticism? It’s not delinquency but détournement, it’s political.

2018 ‧ Short ‧ 21 mins

Written & directed by: Laura Huertas Millán

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When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me — it still sometimes happens — and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. . . . That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. . . . That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. . . . That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it's much more meaningful. . . . The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful. - Ann Druyan

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All the contemporary writing these days is about loss, Robert has said once. There’s not enough time to be unafraid. 

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Bill Taylor, the Godfather of self taught art

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Movies are made out of darkness as well as light; it is the surpassingly brief intervals of darkness between each luminous still image that make it possible to assemble the many images into one moving picture. Without that darkness, there would only be a blur. Which is to say that a full-length movie consists of half an hour or an hour of pure darkness that goes unseen. If you could add up all the darkness, you would find the audience in the theater gazing together at a deep imaginative night. It is the terra incognita of film, the dark continent on every map. In a similar way, a runner's every step is a leap, so that for a moment he or she is entirely off the ground. For those brief instants, shadows no longer spill out from their feet, like leaks, but hover below them like doubles, as they do with birds, whose shadows crawl below them, caressing the surface of the earth, growing and shrinking as their makers move nearer or farther from that surface. For my friends who run long distances, these tiny fragments of levitation add up to something considerable; by their own power they hover above the earth for many minutes, perhaps some significant portion of an hour or perhaps far more for the hundred-mile races. We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured. Heartbreak is a little like falling in love, in the way it charges everything with a kind of incandescence, as though the beloved has stepped away and your gaze now rests with all the same intensity on all the items of the view that close-up person blocked.

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'The way the animals live, everybody envies them, because look, a cat, when it walks--did you ever see a cat making an aesthetic mistake. Did you ever see a badly formed cloud? Were the stars ever miss-arranged? When you watch the foam breaking on the seashore, did it ever make a bad pattern? Never. And yet we think in what we do, we make mistakes. And we're worried about that. So there came this point in human evolution when we lost our innocence' - A.W.

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swimming.

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henri cartier-bresson

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st. thomas kirche In yesterday's garden I wanted to preserve the way night allowed darkness to form a secret entryway out of the trees. My eyes struggled to see their outlines against the dirt path leading into dimness, but I didn't try too hard anyway. I'm limited to what I know, and what I know is that I ache at the sight of things fading. Look at you next to me, fading against the muted lushness of 9pm. I remembered while writing this that there was a single star that night, just above the darkest head of one tree, which may not have even been there, instead a dusty blue. All the contemporary writing these days is about loss, robert hass said once. There's not enough time to be unafraid. But efforts to think beyond that which I know are only compliance with that which I am afraid of. What comforts me is that I could barely make out the hue of your skin against the sand. How it stretched underneath us, a path between two slopes of green. It seemed it would always be there. by Joan Lee

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As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty