A moving prism

The Trial, Orson Welles - 1962 » Narrator: Before the law, there stands a guard. A man comes from the country, begging admittance to the law. But the guard cannot admit him. May he hope to enter at a later time? That is possible, said the guard. The man tries to peer through the entrance. He'd been taught that the law was to be accessible to every man. "Do not attempt to enter without my permission", says the guard. I am very p owerful. Yet I am the least of all the guards. From hall to hall, door after door, each guard is more powerful than the last. By the guard's permission, the man sits by the side of the door, and there he waits. For years, he waits. Everything he has, he gives away in the hope of bribing the guard, who never fails to say to him "I take what you give me only so that you will not feel that you left something undone." Keeping his watch during the long years, the man has come to know even the fleas on the guard's fur collar. Growing ch...

This land is yours. Viva Zapata, (1952) / Elia Kazan But you must protect it.   It won't be yours long if you don't protect it.   If necessary, with your lives, and your children with their lives.  Don't discount your enemies. They will be back.  And if your house is burned, build it again.  If your corn is destroyed, replant. If your children die, bear more.  If they drive you out of the valley, live on the mountain, but live.  You always look for leaders, strong men without faults. There aren't any. There are only men like yourselves. They change. They desert. They die. There are no leaders but yourselves. A strong people is the only lasting strength.

» She was being brutally saved. Redemption without delay! But is one saved by a coup de grace? Or else hit, thrown, struck down!? - By going, my poor fairy, my myopia, you are withdrawing from me the ambiguous gifts that filled me with anguish and granted me states that those who see do not know, she murmured. - Do not forget me. Keep forever the world suspended, desirable, refused, that enchanted  thing I had given you, murmured myopia. - If I forget thee, oh Jerusalem, may my right eye, etc. - Ah! I see coming in place of my diffuse reign a reign without hesitation. - I shall always hesitate. I shall not leave my people. I belong to the people of those who do not see. [...] - Savoir, Helene Cixous

Words are loneliness. I left a couple of words for you on the tablecloth last night – you covered them with your elbows. — Tropic of Cancer , Henry Miller

» All of us are infected today with an extraordinary egoism. And that is not freedom; freedom means learning to demand only of oneself, not of life and others, and knowing how to give: sacrifice in the name of love. I don’t want the reader to misunderstand me: what I am talking about is freedom in an ultimate, moral sense. — Sculpting in Time , Tarkovsky; p 180

Image: It is rude to stare , Antoine Monmarché Today the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each oth er and without realising that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other’s eyes and yet deny the existence of each other. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal. — Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman, 1960