#film excerpt

[fairydrowning]

Born to be a protagonist in a ghibli movie, forced to be irl.

[tendermimi]

Euripides, Herakles (tr. Anne Carson) / Tom à la ferme, dir. Xavier Dolan

[funeral]

A work of art always entails the creation of new spaces and times (it’s not a question of recounting a story in a well-determined space and time; rather, it is the rhythms, the lighting, and the space-times themselves that must become the true characters).

A work should bring forth the problems and questions that concern us rather than provide answers. A work of art is a new syntax, one that is much more important than vocabulary and that excavates a foreign language in language. Syntax in cinema amounts to the linkages and relinkages of images, but also the relation between sound and the visual image. 

The Brain is the Screen: Interview with Gilles Deleuze

[thismustbeso]

Kirei? The Terror of Beauty (2004), Katsuya Matsumura / I Will Tell this Story to the Sun Until You Remember that You are the Sun, Erin Slaughter / Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), dir. Steve Miner

[harukokittie]

I think at some base level my molecules instinctively recognized yours, as you stood across from me at the noisy karaoke bar, cigarette hanging off your lips. The lights flashed purple, blue and green. Super novas bursting across your features, that smile, the one that makes me forget to breathe already touching the ends of your mouth. The world around us has stopped it’s progress forward to let us mingle once more as old friends. Atoms bouncing from one another in Recognition. Touched as celestial dust once and now as earth bound flesh. I think I knew then that the stars had whispered your name to me every night since the very moment I’d learned I could listen. Here lay the proof… when I reached towards you, hands like kids gloves reaching shoulders in embrace. I saw eternity.

[filmnoirsbian]

Spilled Inktober day 17: inspired by a Clive Barker story

[la-cocotte-de-paris]

Returning to Paris, I had to pay. With rage in my heart and often tears in my eyes (the makeup artist Chakatouny lamented each morning my poor appearance, and couldn't make me look any better), I made one film — just one — to guarantee the freedom of a person I loved. I was ugly, terrible; everything in me refused to be. I still remember the look of my [screen] partner Raymond Rouleau (who knew Igor and the causes of my breakdown) studying me and trying in vain to give me a little encouragement!

— Edwige Feuillère reflecting on the making of Mam'zelle Bonaparte (1942) and aiding the escape of her fiancé (named here as Igor) from Nazi-occupied France

(From Les Feux de la mémoire by Edwige Feuillère, 1977. Translated by me. ♡)

[micahdotgov]

hot. who said that

[orchard-bliss]

Then what in the hours of your life is love? It’s here, and gone, and it gives its name to everything.

Dancing At The Blue Iguana, (2000).

[doubledaybooks]

Read an excerpt from THE NICKEL BOYS by Colson Whitehead

Elwood received the best gift of his life on Christmas Day 1962, even if the ideas it put it in his head were his undoing. Martin Luther King At Zion Hill was the only album he owned and it never left the turntable. His grandmother Hattie had a few gospel records, which she only played when the world discovered a new mean way to work on her, and Elwood wasn’t allowed to listen to the Motown groups or popular songs like that on account of their licentious nature. The rest of his presents that year were clothes – a new red sweater, socks – and he certainly wore those out, but nothing endured such good and constant use as the record. Every scratch and pop it gathered over the months was a mark of his enlightenment, tracking each time he entered into a new understanding of the Reverend’s words. The crackle of truth.

They didn’t have a TV set but Dr. King’s speeches were such a vivid chronicle -- containing all that the Negro had been and all that he would be -- that the record was almost as good as television. Maybe even better, grander, like the towering screen at the Davis Drive-In, which he’d been to twice. Elwood saw it all: Africans persecuted by the white sin of slavery, Negroes humiliated and kept low by segregation, and that luminous image to come, when all those places closed to his race were opened.

The speeches had been recorded all over, Detroit and Charlotte and Montgomery, connecting Elwood to the rights struggle across the country. One speech even made him feel like a member of the King family. Every kid had heard of Fun Town, been there or envied someone who had. In the third cut on Side A, Dr. King spoke of how his daughter longed to visit the amusement park on Stewart Ave in Atlanta. Yolanda begged her parents whenever she spotted the big sign from the expressway or the commercials came on TV. Dr. King had to tell her in his low, sad rumble about the segregation system that kept colored boys and girls on the other side of the fence. Explain the misguided thinking of some whites -- not all whites, but enough whites – that gave it force and meaning. He counseled his daughter to resist the lure of hatred and bitterness and assured her that “Even though you can’t go to Fun Town, you are as good as anyone who gets to go to Fun Town.”

That was Elwood -- good as anyone. A hundred miles south of Atlanta, in Tallahassee. Sometimes he saw a Fun Town commercial while visiting his cousins in Georgia. Lurching rides and happy music, chipper white kids lining up for the Wild Mouse Roller Coaster, Dick’s Mini Golf. Strap into the Atomic Rocket for a Trip to the Moon. A perfect report card guaranteed free admission, the commercials said, if your teacher stamped a red mark on it. Elwood got all A’s and kept his stack of evidence for the day they opened Fun Town to all God’s children, as Dr. King promised. “I’ll get in free every day for a month, easy,” he told his grandmother, lying on the front room rug and tracing a threadbare patch with his thumb.

Excerpted from The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. Copyright © 2019 by Colson Whitehead. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

[theaskew]

Chocolat. A Screenplay by Robert Nelson Jacobs.

[tendermimi]

psychosexualism in tom à la ferme (2013) / michel-marc bouchard ‘tom a la ferme’, sonya vatmosky ‘pseudomonarchia lacrimae’, ocean vuong ‘no one knows the way to heaven’, richard siken ‘little beast’

[funeral]

Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body

[thismustbeso]

On Two Predators Meeting

Muscle (1989), dir. Hisayasu Satō / A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller 1932-1953, Anaïs Nin / Seeds (1968) , Andy Milligan / Rosary (1914), Anna Akhmatova /

/ باب الحديد (Bāb al-Ḥadīd / Cairo Station), 1958

Power Politics, Margaret Atwood / Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), dir. Steve Miner

[contremineur]

LOUISE: If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things? IAN: Maybe I’d say what I feel more often. I… I don’t know.

from Arrival (dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2016)

[sharpenededges]

“It doesn't stop raining”. It seems the perfect excuse to lost together in the surrealistic depths of cinematographic work from Yorgos Lanthimos while the artificial lights create waves on your hair.