vision

[vision]

Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.

— Walter Benjamin

[vision]

I’m not interested in realism. All my films hinge on the fantastic. I’m not a documentarian; a film is first and foremost a dream, and it’s absurd to copy life in an attempt to produce an exact re-creation of it. Transposition is more or less a reflex with me: I move from realism to fantasy without the spectator ever noticing.

Jean-Pierre Melville

[vision]

It was made like a piece of automatic writing. I was filming Le Joli mai, completely immersed in the reality of Paris 1962, and the euphoric discovery of “direct cinema” (you will never make me say “cinema verité”) and on the crew’s day off, I photographed a story I didn’t completely understand. It was in the editing that the pieces of the puzzle came together, and it wasn’t me who designed the puzzle. I’d have a hard time taking credit for it. It just happened, that’s all.

Chris Marker on La Jetée

[vision]

We do not move in one direction, rather do we wander back and forth, turning now this way and now that. We go back on our own tracks . . .' That thought of Montaigne's reminds me about something I thought of in connection with flying saucers, humanoids, and the remains of unbelievably advanced technology found in some ancient ruins. They write about aliens, but I think that in these phenomena we are in fact confronting ourselves; that is our future, our descendants who are actually traveling in time."

Andrei Tarkovsky

[vision]

If I were a total cynical bullshitter, I’d go around trying to make everybody think that I knew what the future was going to be too. But I’ve never really seen the predictive part as being what I really do. Unfortunately, the predictive part is traditionally a large part of how we market science fiction and the people who write it. “Listen to her, she knows the future.” It’s a really ancient kind of carny pitch, but it’s not what I think science fiction really does. I think science fiction gives us a wonderful toolkit to disassemble and reexamine this kind of incomprehensible, constantly changing present that we live in, that we often live in quite uncomfortably. That’s my idea of our product, but it’s not necessarily a smart publicist’s idea of my product.

William Gibson

[vision]

"Kafka distinguishes two series of technical inventions: those that tend to restore natural communication by triumphing over distances and bringing people together (the train, the car, the airplane), and those that represent the vampirish revenge of the phantom where there is reintroduced 'the ghostly element between people' (the post, the telegraph, the telephone, wireless telegraphy)."

Gilles Deleuze

[vision]

It is a difficult balance one has to keep between the creation of situations to go through and the development of a narrative technique to share one’s perspective. In this process, life overcomes art at some point, and art perverts life.

Antoine D'Agata

[vision]

In fashion, the more a model acts like a model, the less successful the pictures are for me. And it’s kind of the same with the hustlers and the pole dancers: the more self-conscious they are and try to give me what they think I want, the less interesting it is. The way I work is to decide that something is interesting and figure out how to make an image of it.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

[vision]

Whether they are photographs involving a great deal of preconception or not, I think there is something in the way that I try to do it that does involve things that I don’t even understand. There are aspects to it that I know have some meaning; they have sublimated intentions and hidden motivations. That’s where the photographer’s personality comes in, if you’re the kind of person who sublimates things, that’s how it comes out in your work.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

[vision]

(Taken with instagram at Under the Williamsburg Bridge)

[vision]

I don't invent characters. I invite strangers. Out of my subconscious. Then cut them slack, to see what they'll do.

GreatDismal aka William Gibson

[vision]

For me, the promise of independent film is the ability to experiment. Because the money is independent. And so the fact that you can do that is extremely exciting. I think the best way to get recognition is to do something out there, to push the edges. Unless you hit it—and do something really traditional really well, it’s going to be nothing. Because you’re not going to compete with everything else that’s out there and has movie stars and is done technically better. So unless you think you can really nail that traditional style or that’s just your style, I would encourage filmmakers to fucking break down walls, break down rules and make the film their own.

Darren Aronofsky

[vision]

I'm interested in commerce. The excuse for bigness is that songs demand to be heard if they're any good. And without the kind of momentum of being in a big rock 'n' roll band, you won't get your songs heard."

Bono

[vision]

Edward Albee

The only moment of clear objectivity that I can find is at the moment of critical heat—of self-critical heat when I’m actually writing. In the two or three or four months that it takes me to write a play, I find that the reality of the play is a great deal more alive for me than what passes for reality. I’m infinitely more involved in the reality of the characters and their situation than I am in everyday life. 

[vision]

I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels.

J.G. Ballard

[vision]

Slipstream

A slipstream world, or story, cannot be figured out. Moreover, this is not due to any incapacity on the part of the protagonist but because (it seems) we have forgotten how to do the figuring out.

–– Graham Sleight 

[vision]

I rather shun this getting cleared out and, with my nature, could hardly expect anything good of it. Something like a disinfected soul results from it, a monstrosity, alive, corrected in red like the page of a school notebook.

Rilke (on psychoanalysis)