Truth and Infinity
“What is generally termed reality is, to be precise, a frothy nothing.”
Hugo Ball
The froth just keeps getting bigger.
“I allowed the old fortresses of art to be besieged by dreams. Dreams are mightier than atom bombs, what are the flights of supersonic aircraft compared to the flights of saints, dreamers and poets?”
“We do not wish to imitate nature, we do not wish to reproduce. We want to produce. We want to produce the way a plant produces its fruit, not depict. We want to produce directly, not indirectly.”
Hans Arp
“Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted.”
Max Ernst
“The tricks of today are the truths of tomorrow.”
Marcel Duchamp
“The opening night of a film is a sad night for a director. If the film is a success, he will look around at the group of friends who were responsible for making it so and realise that he will never work together again with all these same people and with the same spirit that infused the group during the preceding weeks and months. If on the contrary the film is a dud, he will begin picking it apart from that same opening night onward, finding errors everywhere.”
“…for a director who has grown up with film, video is a technique that offers no resistance. The lighting is always sufficient, the camera movement incredibly light and facile – too facile- and what is more, if you don’t like what you just did you can simply erase and start again from scratch, which means the possibilities are infinite. This means you work without tension, without the familiar atmosphere of being on the edge, constantly at risk. The problem, of course, is that that sense of risk, is precisely what characterises the work in a good film.”
Andrzej Wajda
The second quote could be summed up thus, because life happens spontaneously, risk is involved, a film that purports to represent life must embrace this experience in its creation.
“The hour when it is no longer day but night has not yet come is a delightful one for expansive temperaments. Then the glow of twilight casts its soft tints or its strange reflections over everything and encourages a reverie which blends vaguely with the play of light and shade. The silence which reigns nearly always at this moment endears it more especially to artists, who reflect, stand back from their work (which they can no longer continue) and pass judgement on it, intoxicating themselves with a theme whose inner meaning then suddenly flashes on the mind’s eye of genius.”
Balzac
