5:06pm (1 note)
US/UK Sales of The Tibetan Book of the Dead
“There can be no better diagram depicting the populace’s quest for enlightenment”.
(Hollow Earth : Social Trends 1950-2010)
5:12pm (12 notes)
10x10 Knight’s Tour used by Georges Perec to descibe the rooms of a Paris apartment building in Life: A User’s Manual.
Sophie Calle’s studio (2009)
What images keep you company in the space where you work?
In my studio there is a stuffed giraffe that I bought when my mother died, to replace her. Her name is Monique too, and she looks at me from on high with sadness and irony, just like my mother did.
I don’t think my mother would have chosen to return as a stuffed giraffe in the studio of her daughter, but she is dead.
Frontier of Dawn has been taken in some quarters as a new departure for Garrel, because of its supernatural element. In fact, even this is not quite the case: phantoms, appearing in dream visions … have … haunted Garrel’s previous work. And the crucial film in this regard, the short Rue Fontaine (1984) – an imaginative recreation of the filmmaker’s relationship with Seberg in the ‘70s, at the time of Les Hautes Solitudes (1974) – was explicitly linked by Garrel, in a diary entry written twenty-five years ago, to a literary source of inspiration that is still clearly on his mind today: ‘As in Théophile Gautier’s Spirite, the woman who has suicided appears to the young man in the mirror and calls him to his death’.
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- Where does this story of an apparition come from?
- My friend Frédéric Pardo, the late painter, gave me a novel by Théophile Gautier, Spirite, the story of a woman who appears in a mirror after killing herself and summons a man to the afterlife. In Gautier’s story, she had never met the man. She fantasized about him, entered a convent and committed suicide the day she realized she would never have him. One day, when the man is about to get married, the woman appears to him and tells her story. I thought this tale of an apparition was very beautiful but at the same time, not very cinematographic. Then I started thinking about telling the story of a woman committing suicide, reappearing in a mirror and luring towards death the man she had an unhappy affair with. I am a rationalist but I think the supernatural is a rich vein in cinema, if it is used the way the surrealists used it. The supernatural is useful to make art flourish. If you make a film about tables turning, it works really well. I didn’t want to use digital special effects or synthesis images. I preferred Jean Cocteau-style makeshift effects.
5:03pm (1 note)
adrian martin; cinema; garrel; hauntology; suicide; literature;
3:59pm (2 notes)
negarestani; cyclonopedia; hidden writing; inauthenticity; misauthorship;