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fitrisiain's review against another edition
5.0
His work ethics, his organized life and thoughts greatly inspire me. So much I can quote from this man, one that best describes his stance is this one: "at a respectful distance from order and disorder". This is the man that welcomed and bent chaos gently.
djoshuva's review
5.0
The cinema must express itself not with images, but with relationships between images, which is not at all the same thing. In the same way a painter doesn’t express himself through color, but through the relationships between colors. A blue is a blue in and of itself, but if it is next to a green, or to a red, or to a yellow, it’s no longer the same blue: it changes. There is an image, then another, and they have relative values: so the first image is neutral, but if put in the presence of another, it vibrates, life erupts from it. And it isn’t just the life of the story, of the characters—it’s the life of the film. Beginning with the moment when the image vibrates, we are making cinema.
It isn’t so hard to understand . . . It’s useless to think that the way to arrive at truth is by way of truth. I try to arrive at truth by way of something mechanical, if you will.
“Every movement discovers us,” said Montaigne. For me, gestures and words aren’t essential to a film. What’s essential is the thing, or the things, that provoke them.
If I’m accused of abstraction, of being abstract, I will say that it’s not a reproach: it’s exactly what the cinema must do, that is to not show things in their ordinary relationships, in their ordinary relation to life, but to take the parts of a whole, isolate them, and put them back together in a certain order. So if I am abstract, if someone has noticed that I am abstract, I congratulate myself, because it’s precisely what I am after: not to take a person whole, but to see what relation his hand has to his face, his hand to an object on the table—and to recreate these relations which are also my own relations, which form my personal life, my inner life. That is: in the end, not to show the audience what I see, but to make the audience feel what I feel, which is not at all the same thing.
People are not aware that to create is first of all to prune, to eliminate. Also: to choose. The worst pitfalls for a film are impurity, profusion, disorder. Too many incompatible things presented at the same time. Dramatic art (which is a completely different creature) is then introduced, and it ruins everything. I force myself to capture reality—pieces of reality, as pure as possible— which I then arrange in a certain order. This might give an uninitiated viewer the impression of an asceticism or even a dryness that he wouldn’t find in ordinary films, and that might surprise him by comparison.
What I do resembles what a gardener does, or a horticulturist: transplanting and propagation. I take seeds from reality and plant them in the film.
I believe very strongly in working intuitively. But only after a long period of reflection. Specifically, reflection regarding composition. It seems to me that composition is very important, that perhaps composition is even the point of origin of a film. That said, the composition can be spontaneous, can spring from improvisation. In any case: it’s the composition that makes the film. Because we’re taking elements that already exist: what matters is the connections between things, their proximity, and in the end, their composition. Sometimes it’s precisely in the relations—which can be very intuitive—that we establish between things that we are able to find ourselves. And I’m thinking of another fact: It’s also by way of intuition that we discover another person. In any case, more so by intuition than by reflection.
I’m convinced that we’re surrounded by people with talent and genius, I’m certain of it, but the chances that life give us . . . it takes so many coincidences for a man to be able to make use of his genius.
I have a feeling that people are much more intelligent, much more gifted—but that life crushes them. Immediately. They get crushed because nothing is more frightening than talent or genius. It makes us uneasy. Parents fear it. So they squash it. And in animals, there must be some very smart ones that we destroy with training, by beating them. . . .
In essence, all art is abstract and, at the same time, suggestive. You can’t show everything. When you show everything, it isn’t art. Art proceeds by way of suggestion. The great challenge for cinematography is, precisely, not to show. The ideal would be to show nothing at all, but that isn’t possible. So we have to show things at an angle, a single angle that is capable of evoking all the other angles, without revealing them. You have to allow the viewer to guess, to want to guess, to be transfixed in a state of attention and expectation . . . You have to preserve the mystery. We live in a state of mystery; that mystery has to manifest on the screen. Effects must always appear before their cause, as happens in life. The great majority of events that we witness are due to unknown causes. We watch their effects, and perhaps we discover their causes much later.
The field of cinematography is immeasurable and full of shadows. I find my way like a blind man in a kingdom of the involuntarily (or, perhaps, voluntarily?) sightless. To capture the real in flight.
If it’s possible to replace an image by one or more sounds, you should do it without hesitation. In essence: aim for the audience’s ear more than for its eye. The ear is far more creative than the eye.
That’s another basic principle, one that very few understand besides the true greats like Chaplin: economy. Make a grand gesture with nothing—that’s the goal. But the habit is to do the opposite and show absolutely everything, whatever it is: everything’s good. Result? No emotion because there’s no economy. Economy in anything. In gestures, for example. A gesture, when one is made, should communicate a lot.
Many people think that the fantastical has to do with unusual characters and exceptional situations. The fantastic is everywhere around us, it’s the face seen from close up—there is nothing more fantastical than the real. For Dostoevsky, the fantastical arose from the husband’s monologue that evoked the past. It’s the same reason I don’t think of what I’ve done as a mixing of present with past. For me, there are no flashbacks, there is no rupture in tone, everything happens in the same temporality.
I don’t think it’s possible to work (on anything) without a method. The absence of a method leads to chaos—in other words, mediocrity.
Adaptations save me a lot of time by bringing me to terms with a producer right away. Why Dostoevsky? Because he’s the greatest.
To be authentic is to be “yourself,” and to make everything pass through “you.”
So as to transform the literary magic of the story into a different type of magic, the magic of feelings. For that to happen, one must resist the picturesque. The only “fairy” is the screen itself.
The adversary is frivolous optimism; it’s the money that’s supposed to make everything ok; it’s the crowd clamoring for things with no value; it’s the primacy of force.
You have to put yourself into a frame of mind where you can discover things without looking for them.
My heroes are like castaways, setting off for an unknown island, like in the days following Adam’s creation.
Many animals have an exquisite sensitivity that we don’t work hard enough to understand. I would like to take better advantage of it. It’s as if our own sensitivity were split in half: our joy and our pain both extended.
It isn’t so hard to understand . . . It’s useless to think that the way to arrive at truth is by way of truth. I try to arrive at truth by way of something mechanical, if you will.
“Every movement discovers us,” said Montaigne. For me, gestures and words aren’t essential to a film. What’s essential is the thing, or the things, that provoke them.
If I’m accused of abstraction, of being abstract, I will say that it’s not a reproach: it’s exactly what the cinema must do, that is to not show things in their ordinary relationships, in their ordinary relation to life, but to take the parts of a whole, isolate them, and put them back together in a certain order. So if I am abstract, if someone has noticed that I am abstract, I congratulate myself, because it’s precisely what I am after: not to take a person whole, but to see what relation his hand has to his face, his hand to an object on the table—and to recreate these relations which are also my own relations, which form my personal life, my inner life. That is: in the end, not to show the audience what I see, but to make the audience feel what I feel, which is not at all the same thing.
People are not aware that to create is first of all to prune, to eliminate. Also: to choose. The worst pitfalls for a film are impurity, profusion, disorder. Too many incompatible things presented at the same time. Dramatic art (which is a completely different creature) is then introduced, and it ruins everything. I force myself to capture reality—pieces of reality, as pure as possible— which I then arrange in a certain order. This might give an uninitiated viewer the impression of an asceticism or even a dryness that he wouldn’t find in ordinary films, and that might surprise him by comparison.
What I do resembles what a gardener does, or a horticulturist: transplanting and propagation. I take seeds from reality and plant them in the film.
I believe very strongly in working intuitively. But only after a long period of reflection. Specifically, reflection regarding composition. It seems to me that composition is very important, that perhaps composition is even the point of origin of a film. That said, the composition can be spontaneous, can spring from improvisation. In any case: it’s the composition that makes the film. Because we’re taking elements that already exist: what matters is the connections between things, their proximity, and in the end, their composition. Sometimes it’s precisely in the relations—which can be very intuitive—that we establish between things that we are able to find ourselves. And I’m thinking of another fact: It’s also by way of intuition that we discover another person. In any case, more so by intuition than by reflection.
I’m convinced that we’re surrounded by people with talent and genius, I’m certain of it, but the chances that life give us . . . it takes so many coincidences for a man to be able to make use of his genius.
I have a feeling that people are much more intelligent, much more gifted—but that life crushes them. Immediately. They get crushed because nothing is more frightening than talent or genius. It makes us uneasy. Parents fear it. So they squash it. And in animals, there must be some very smart ones that we destroy with training, by beating them. . . .
In essence, all art is abstract and, at the same time, suggestive. You can’t show everything. When you show everything, it isn’t art. Art proceeds by way of suggestion. The great challenge for cinematography is, precisely, not to show. The ideal would be to show nothing at all, but that isn’t possible. So we have to show things at an angle, a single angle that is capable of evoking all the other angles, without revealing them. You have to allow the viewer to guess, to want to guess, to be transfixed in a state of attention and expectation . . . You have to preserve the mystery. We live in a state of mystery; that mystery has to manifest on the screen. Effects must always appear before their cause, as happens in life. The great majority of events that we witness are due to unknown causes. We watch their effects, and perhaps we discover their causes much later.
The field of cinematography is immeasurable and full of shadows. I find my way like a blind man in a kingdom of the involuntarily (or, perhaps, voluntarily?) sightless. To capture the real in flight.
If it’s possible to replace an image by one or more sounds, you should do it without hesitation. In essence: aim for the audience’s ear more than for its eye. The ear is far more creative than the eye.
That’s another basic principle, one that very few understand besides the true greats like Chaplin: economy. Make a grand gesture with nothing—that’s the goal. But the habit is to do the opposite and show absolutely everything, whatever it is: everything’s good. Result? No emotion because there’s no economy. Economy in anything. In gestures, for example. A gesture, when one is made, should communicate a lot.
Many people think that the fantastical has to do with unusual characters and exceptional situations. The fantastic is everywhere around us, it’s the face seen from close up—there is nothing more fantastical than the real. For Dostoevsky, the fantastical arose from the husband’s monologue that evoked the past. It’s the same reason I don’t think of what I’ve done as a mixing of present with past. For me, there are no flashbacks, there is no rupture in tone, everything happens in the same temporality.
I don’t think it’s possible to work (on anything) without a method. The absence of a method leads to chaos—in other words, mediocrity.
Adaptations save me a lot of time by bringing me to terms with a producer right away. Why Dostoevsky? Because he’s the greatest.
To be authentic is to be “yourself,” and to make everything pass through “you.”
So as to transform the literary magic of the story into a different type of magic, the magic of feelings. For that to happen, one must resist the picturesque. The only “fairy” is the screen itself.
The adversary is frivolous optimism; it’s the money that’s supposed to make everything ok; it’s the crowd clamoring for things with no value; it’s the primacy of force.
You have to put yourself into a frame of mind where you can discover things without looking for them.
My heroes are like castaways, setting off for an unknown island, like in the days following Adam’s creation.
Many animals have an exquisite sensitivity that we don’t work hard enough to understand. I would like to take better advantage of it. It’s as if our own sensitivity were split in half: our joy and our pain both extended.
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