A Torre (2015), de Salomé Lamas.

Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (1818), Caspar David Friedrich. 

Eaux d'artifice (1953), de Kenneth Anger.

é político

"Shadows", EP The King Of Anxiety (2015), Petite Noir. 

e ainda a propósito do papel do actor

Todo o movimento nos descobre (Montaigne). Mas só nos pode descobrir se for automático (não comandado, não querido). 

Notas Sobre O Cinematógrafo, parte II (1960-1974), Robert Bresson, ed. Porto Editora. 

Se uma imagem, vista separadamente, exprime com nitidez qualquer coisa, se ela comporta uma interpretação, não se transformará em contacto com outras imagens. As outras imagens não terão nenhum poder sobre ela e ela não terá nenhum poder sobre as outras imagens. Nem acção, nem reacção. Ela é definitiva e inutilizável no sistema do cinematógrafo. (Um sistema não regula tudo. É o rastilho de qualquer coisa.)

Notas Sobre O Cinematógrafo, parte I (1950-1958), Robert Bresson, ed. Porto Editora. 

é diferente, a realidade

Assim se estreia o cartaz do Cineclube FDUP deste semestre, já na próxima Terça. Tudo bem explicado aqui e ali. 

Robert Bresson is one of the saints of the cinema, and "Au Hasard Balthazar" (1966) is his most heartbreaking prayer. The film follows the life of a donkey from birth to death, while all the time living it the dignity of being itself--a dumb beast, noble in its acceptance of a life over which it has no control. Balthazar is not one of those cartoon animals that can talk and sing and is a human with four legs. Balthazar is a donkey, and it is as simple as that.

(...)

Bresson's most intriguing limitation is to forbid his actors to act. He was known to shoot the same shot 10, 20, even 50 times, until all "acting" was drained from it, and the actors were simply performing the physical actions and speaking the words. There was no room in his cinema for De Niro or Penn. It might seem that the result would be a movie filled with zombies, but quite the contrary: By simplifying performance to the action and the word without permitting inflection or style, Bresson achieves a kind of purity that makes his movies remarkably emotional. The actors portray lives without informing us how to feel about them; forced to decide for ourselves how to feel, forced to empathize, we often have stronger feelings than if the actors were feeling them for us.

Given this philosophy, a donkey becomes the perfect Bresson character. Balthazar makes no attempt to communicate its emotions to us, and it comunicates its physical feelings only in universal terms: Covered with snow, it is cold. Its tail set afire, it is frightened. Eating its dinner, it is content. Overworked, it is exhausted. Returning home, it is relieved to find a familiar place. Although some humans are kind to it and others are cruel, the motives of humans are beyond its understanding, and it accepts what they do because it must. 

(...)

Roger Ebert, ali: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-au-hasard-balthazar-1966

m de março, milímetro e martha

A programação da milímetro em Março é imperdoável. Para toda a informação, aqui.

5 Março
Adeus à linguagem (2014, 70 min.) de Jean-Luc Godard

12 Março
Martha (1974, 116 min.) de R. W. Fassbinder

19 Março
Antes que o diabo saiba que morreste (2007, 120 min.) de Sidney Lumet

26 Março
O Dossier Anderson (1971, 95 min.) de Sidney Lumet

Lola

Lola (1981), de R.W.Fassbinder.

Quando, a propósito da família, se discute a passagem, na História, de um direito fundamentalmente maternal para um sistema de patriarcado, Marx, errante em tantas das suas previsões, acertou pois quando afirmou «casuística inata nos homens, a de mudar as coisas mudando-lhes os nomes! E achar saídas para romper com a tradição sem sair dela, sempre que um interesse directo dá o impulso suficiente para isso». E assim o são aquelas mulheres e aqueles homens, numa cidade que, nas palavras de Von Bohm, se quer em simultâneo moderna e tradicional; numa sociedade que emerge de um pós-guerra, mas que garante que há vícios - aqui a corrupção política, a submissão da mulher ao homem, aquele que pode exigir fidelidade à mulher que se choca com os distúrbios que certos elementos em manifestação fazem à porta da igreja, mas preservando a sua puta e, no caso, uma bastante cara - a ser impreterivelmente mantidos. Há tudo isso, e depois há Lola.

back to the way it was

"Back to the Future I", do álbum Black Messiah (2014), D'Angelo and the Vanguard.

happiness is a warm gun, they said

Happiness is a warm gun, do álbum "Saints" (2001), de Marc Ribot.

da contemporaneidade

My century, my beast, who will manage
to look inside your eyes
and weld together with his own blood
the vertebrae of two centuries? (...)

do poema The Century, de Osip Mandelstam. 

a patently impure fellow

(...) In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1977, speaking therefore as someone at the recognisable apex of an academic career in his country, he describes himself as ‘un sujet incertain’: in Richard Howard’s translation, ‘a fellow of doubtful nature, whose every attribute is somehow challenged by its opposite’. He goes on to say he has had a university career without the degrees that would normally be required for such a trajectory; that he wanted to work within the fields of literary, lexicological and sociological science but only ever wrote essays, ‘an ambiguous genre in which analysis vies with writing’. And although he was involved from the early days in the development of semiotics, he has little right to represent that discipline, he says, because he was so much inclined to ‘shift its definition’, and to work in the ambit of Tel Quel rather than more academic journals. An impure subject, he finally calls himself, ‘a patently impure fellow’. And then he says something that instantly reveals why it is such a pleasure to read him, and why all these reservations and ambiguities are such unmistakable virtues. For all these reasons, he says, he is not going to linger over the honour of being made a professor at the Collège de France and will concentrate on his joy at the occasion, ‘for an honour can be undeserved, joy never is’. You have only to read a sentence like that to know you have found a friend. And you understand the notion of joy better than you did a moment ago.

Or take a sentence like this one, from Barthes’s first book. He is not talking about a writer or a text or a style or an image or a story, but about … a tense. This is the preterite, the past historic, which in French exists only in written texts. It is, Barthes says,

the ideal instrument for every construction of a world; it is the unreal tense of cosmogonies, myths, history and novels. It presupposes a world which is constructed, elaborated, self-sufficient, reduced to significant lines, and not one which has been sent sprawling before us, for us to take or leave (jeté, étalé, offert). Behind the preterite there always lurks a demiurge, a God or a reciter. The world is not unexplained since it is told like a story; each one of its accidents is merely a circumstance, and the preterite is precisely this operative sign whereby the narrator reduces the exploded reality to a slim and pure verb without density, without volume, without spread. (...)

Michael Wood, "Presence of Mind", sobre Carnets du voyage en Chine, de Roland Barthes, ali.