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“We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and to the cold machine. A new form of writing will be necessary. I have thought of that and I can feel what is coming. But I rather like it. This swift change of scene, this blending of emotion and experience … in life, too, changes and transitions flash before our eyes, and emotions of the soul are like a hurricane. The cinema has divined the mystery of motion. And that is greatness.”

Leo Tolstoy discussing cinema with Isaak Teneromo in August 1908, as reported in the New York Times on January 31st 1937.

The article also reports that Tolstoy was planning to write “a play for the screen” likely to have “a terrible and bloody theme.”

I really rather wish Tolstoy had written a horror film - and that he could have lived to see Das Cabinet des Doktor Caligari. He would have loved it.

(quote via confusionis - my notes)

(via byronic)

petervidani: “The simplest and most radical thing that Ridley Scott did with Blade Runner was to put urban archeology in the frame. It hadn’t been obvious to mainstream American science fiction that cities are like compost heaps — just layers and layers of stuff. In cities, the past and the present and the future can all be totally adjacent. In Europe, that’s just life — it’s not science fiction, it’s not fantasy. But in American science fiction, the city in the future was always brand-new, every square inch of it.” — William Gibson, on Blade Runner

petervidani:

“The simplest and most radical thing that Ridley Scott did with Blade Runner was to put urban archeology in the frame. It hadn’t been obvious to mainstream American science fiction that cities are like compost heaps — just layers and layers of stuff. In cities, the past and the present and the future can all be totally adjacent. In Europe, that’s just life — it’s not science fiction, it’s not fantasy. But in American science fiction, the city in the future was always brand-new, every square inch of it.”

— William Gibson, on Blade Runner

(via kateoplis)

Tracy Lord: You hardly know him.  C. K. Dexter Haven: To hardly know him is to know him well. Last night, after a day of rain, a visit to the doctor (Iona is healthy and strong), and an intense afternoon of teaching, Mrs. Tragos and I decided that life was calling for a screening of Philadelphia Story, which…this seems to be a running theme lately…I’d never seen.

Tracy Lord: You hardly know him. 

C. K. Dexter Haven: To hardly know him is to know him well.

Last night, after a day of rain, a visit to the doctor (Iona is healthy and strong), and an intense afternoon of teaching, Mrs. Tragos and I decided that life was calling for a screening of Philadelphia Story, which…this seems to be a running theme lately…I’d never seen.

Last night, Mrs. Tragos and I recovered from our week of travel with a home screening of Casablanca. There’s something about loving this movie that makes me feel like the universe isn’t such a disinterested place after all. I mean, there are perverse people out there, and people with standards higher or more nuanced than mine. But basically: people like this movie. I especially like Captain Renault, who gets the best lines and deserves them. But there’s more to it than that. I once, for reasons I still don’t understand, felt compelled to write down a four-quadrant moral system. My stupid, schematic but mollifying idea was that each decision (in the context of dilemma) could be broken down into four spheres: The right-right thing to do The wrong-wrong thing to do The wrong-right thing to do The right-wrong thing to do The first two are pretty simple. Save a drowning child, or cede your bus seat to a woman with a baby, and you’re doing the right-right thing. Conversely: murder an innocent, or push an old man off the bus, and there’s no doubt about the wrongness at work. But numbers 3 and 4 get much more interesting. Wrong-right actions are explicitly right, but done for reasons that are dubious, ideological, obvious, or dumb. They are decisions made within the context of skewed priorities or blind faith. They hew to bald categories of thought, and to ideas fixed from the start. Right-wrong actions look wrong, but are really right. They’re often subject to the disapproval and disfavor of laws, governments, acquaintances, co-workers, mores, and ideologies. But they are down deep the product of both our weaker and our better selves. They are, schematically, the stuff of anti-heroes and conventionally construed rebellion. But really, they are the stuff of life, the warp and woof of our own messy reactions to ambiguity and doubt. Renault is a man of great wrong-right inclinations, and I love to trace his arc through the narrative of Casablanca.  As Rick says: “Oh, he’s just like any other man, only more so.” … Postscript: I have made a pledge to myself to make an effort to record the books I read, and shows and movies I watch from time to time. I am shooting for 50%, as always.

Last night, Mrs. Tragos and I recovered from our week of travel with a home screening of Casablanca. There’s something about loving this movie that makes me feel like the universe isn’t such a disinterested place after all. I mean, there are perverse people out there, and people with standards higher or more nuanced than mine. But basically: people like this movie.

I especially like Captain Renault, who gets the best lines and deserves them. But there’s more to it than that.

I once, for reasons I still don’t understand, felt compelled to write down a four-quadrant moral system. My stupid, schematic but mollifying idea was that each decision (in the context of dilemma) could be broken down into four spheres:

  1. The right-right thing to do
  2. The wrong-wrong thing to do
  3. The wrong-right thing to do
  4. The right-wrong thing to do

The first two are pretty simple. Save a drowning child, or cede your bus seat to a woman with a baby, and you’re doing the right-right thing. Conversely: murder an innocent, or push an old man off the bus, and there’s no doubt about the wrongness at work.

But numbers 3 and 4 get much more interesting.

Wrong-right actions are explicitly right, but done for reasons that are dubious, ideological, obvious, or dumb. They are decisions made within the context of skewed priorities or blind faith. They hew to bald categories of thought, and to ideas fixed from the start.

Right-wrong actions look wrong, but are really right. They’re often subject to the disapproval and disfavor of laws, governments, acquaintances, co-workers, mores, and ideologies. But they are down deep the product of both our weaker and our better selves.

They are, schematically, the stuff of anti-heroes and conventionally construed rebellion. But really, they are the stuff of life, the warp and woof of our own messy reactions to ambiguity and doubt.

Renault is a man of great wrong-right inclinations, and I love to trace his arc through the narrative of Casablanca. 

As Rick says: “Oh, he’s just like any other man, only more so.”

…

Postscript: I have made a pledge to myself to make an effort to record the books I read, and shows and movies I watch from time to time. I am shooting for 50%, as always.

“After forty years of writing fiction, after exploring various roads and making diverse experiments, the time has come for me to look for an overall definition of my work. I would suggest this: my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight fromt he structure of stories and from language.”

Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (via goyago)

I came at this quotation right after seeing Man on Wire, the recent documentary about Philippe Petit’s just-plain-stunning high-wire walk between the World Trade Center towers in 1974.

There were fine moments of carpe diem enthusiasm and sheer visual amazement. But there was also a sense that Petit’s struggle against gravity, legal strictures, received mores and the like were more than patterned rebellions. They were, in some way, attempts to subtract weight that vacillated between the literal and metaphorical in ways that still leave me confused and curious.

Have you seen this movie yet? What am I trying to say here?