The Oscar For Best Quote

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)


"Biography lends to death a new terror."

"Wisdom comes with winters."

"One's real life is often the life that one does not lead."

"Only the shallow know themselves."

"I love acting. It so much more real than life."

Oscar Wilde

American Prometheus

Alexander ('Lex') Joseph Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum) - Ep. 15, 'Nicodmeus', Smallville: Season One

'It is my good fortune that after the whole millennia of error and confusion I have rediscovered the way that leads to a Yes and a No.

I teach the No to all that makes weak - that exhausts.

I teach the Yes to all that strengthens, that stores up strength, that justifies the feeling of strength.

So far one has taught neither the one nor the other: virtue has been taught, mortification of the self, pity, even the negation of life. All these are the values of the exhausted.

Prolonged reflection on the physiology of exhaustion forced me to ask to what extent the judgements of the exhausted had penetrated the world of values.

My result was as surprising as possible, even for me who was at home in many a strange world: I found that all of the supreme value judgements - all that have come to dominate mankind, at least that part that has become tame - can be derived from the judgements of the exhausted.

Under the holiest names I pulled up destructive tendencies; one has called God what weakens, teaches weakness, infects with weakness. I found that the "good man" is one of the forms in which decadence affirms itself.

That virtue of which Schopenhauer still taught that it is the supreme, the only virtue, and the basis of all virtues - precisely pity I recognised as more dangerous that any vice. To cross as a matter of principle selection in the species and its purification of refuse - that has so far been called the virtue par excellence.

One should respect fatality - that fatality that says to the weak: perish!

One has called it God - that one resisted fatality, that one corrupted mankind and made it rot. One should not use the name of God in vain.

The race is corrupted - not by its vices but by its ignorance; it is corrupted because it did not recognise exhaustion as exhaustion: mistakes about physiological states are the sources of all ills.

Virtue is our greatest misunderstanding.

Problem: How did the exhausted come to make the laws about values? Put differently: How did those come to power who are the last? How did the instinct of the human animal come to stand on its head?'

From 'European Nihilism' (The Will to Power) by Friedrich Nietzsche

Smarter Than Jesus

'Genius and ideal state in contradiction. Socialists desire to produce a good life for the greatest number. If the enduring homeland of this good life, the perfect state, were really achieved, it would destroy the earth from which a man of great intellect, or any powerful individual grows: I mean great energy. When this state is achieved, mankind would have become too feeble to produce genius any longer. Should we not therefore wish that life retain its violent character, and that wild strengths and energies be called forth over and over again? Now, a warm, sympathetic heart desires precisely the elimination of that wild and violent character, and the warmest heart one can imagine would yearn for it most passionately; though this same passion would have its fire, its warmth, even its existence from that wild and violent character of life. The warmest heart, then, desires the elimination of its rationale and its own destruction; that is, it wants something illogical; it is not intelligent. The highest intelligence and the warmest heart cannot coexist in one person, and a wise man who passes judgement on life also places himself above kindness, considering it only as something to be evaluated along with everything else in the sum of life. The wise man must oppose the extravagant wishes of unintelligible kindness, because he cares about the survival of his type, and the eventual genesis of the highest intellect. At least he will not further the establishment of the "perfect state", if there is room there only for feeble individuals. Christ, on the other hand, whom we like to imagine as having the warmest of hearts, furthered men's stupidity, took the side of the intellectually weak, and kept the greatest intellect from being produced: and this was consistent. We can predict that his opposite, the absolute wise man, will just as necessarily prevent the production of a Christ.'

From 'Signs of Higher and Lower Culture' (Human, All Too Human) by Friedrich Nietzsche

Blake's Bedfellows

Tracey Emin (b. 1963) - My Bed, 1998


The Garden of Love

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gown were walking their rounds,
Binding with briars my joys and desires.

William Blake (1757-1827)


Links:

Tracey Emin.co.uk
Jeanette Winterson on Tracey Emin
Stuckism - Tracey Emin
On The Couch With Tracey Emin (Guardian Unlimited)
Tracey Emin (Guardian Unlimited)
Burned Into The Memory (Guardian Unlimited)
Two Go Mad In Margate (Guardian Unlimited)
Tate Online - Tracey Emin
Tracey Emin - Professor of Confessional Arts (EGS)
Tracey Emin - h2g2 (BBC)
Tracey Emin with Barry Barker (University of Brighton)
Tracey Emin at White Cube
Tracey Emin at Lehmann Maupin
Tracey Emin - The Saatchi Gallery


The Week in Review

Film:

The Blood of a Poet - d. Jean Cocteau (1930)
Jean Cocteau: Autobiography of an Unknown - d. Edgardo Cozarinsky (1984)
Orpheus - d. Jean Cocteau (1949)
Testament of Orpheus - d. Jean Cocteau (1959)
Villa Santo Sospir - d. Jean Cocteau (1952)

Television:

Smallville: Series Two

Books:

Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Will to Power - Friedrich Nietzsche
Human, All Too Human - Friedrich Nietzsche

Art:

Screenings: International and International New Media Works - NGV

Music:

Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) - Gustav Mahler
Pierrot Lunaire - Arnold Schoenberg
The Rite of Spring - Igor Stravinsky
Turangalila Symphonie - Olivier Messiaen
The Unanswered Question - Charles Ives

You Still Lookin' At Me?

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). The most recently discovered portrait photograph of Vincent van Gogh, found in the collection of his cousin, Anton Mauve. Research suggests that it was taken when Vincent was working in Goupil's in The Hague, so he would have been between sixteen and twenty years of age.


"The noeme of Photography is simple, banal; no depth: "that has been". I know our critics: What! a whole book (even a short one) to discover something I know at first glance? Yes, but such evidence can be a sibling of madness. The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence - as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence, The image, says phenomenology, is an object-as-nothing. Now, in the Photograph, what I posit is not only the absence of the object; it is also, by one and the same movement, on equal terms, the fact that this object has indeed existed and that it has been there where I see it. Here is where the madness is, for until this day no representation could assure me of the past of a thing except my intermediaries; but with the Photograph, my certainty is immediate: no one in the world can undeceive me. The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest, shared hallucination (on the one hand "it is not there", on the other "but it has indeed been"): a mad image chafed by reality."

Roland Barthes

"'But I don't want to go among mad people, ' Alice remarked.
'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat. 'We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'
'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.'"

Lewis Carroll

"In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom!"

J. G. Ballard

"The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness."

Jean Cocteau

"Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither limit nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise."

Michel Foucault

Show Me The Music

Wassily Kandinsky (1966-1944) - Composition X, 1939


"Great art presupposes the alert mind of the educated listener."

"You cannot expect the Form before the Idea, for they will come into being together."

"I never was very capable of expressing my feelings or emotions in words. I don't know whether this is the cause why I did it in music and also why I did it in painting. Or vice versa: That I had this way as an outlet. I could renounce expressing something in words."

"Whether one calls oneself conservative or revolutionary, whether one composes in a conventional or progressive manner, whether one tries to imitate old styles or is destined to express new ideas - one must be convinced of the infallibility of one's own fantasy and one must believe in one's own inspiration."

"At this time I was able to draw a circle which deviated very little when you checked it with a compass. I could draw really very well, but I think I lost this capacity. But I had the idea that this sense of measurement, of measurements, is one of the capacities of a composer, of an artist. It is probably the basis of correct balance and logic within, if you have a strict feeling of the sizes and their mutual relationship."

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)

Rhizome

Simon Patterson (b. 1967) - The Great Bear (detail), 1992

''Rhizome' describes the connections that occur between the most disparate and the most similar of objects, places and people; the strange chains of events that link people: the feeling of 'six degrees of separation', the sense of 'having been here before' and assemblages of bodies. Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the 'rhizome' draws from its etymological meaning, where 'rhizo' means combining form and the biological term 'rhizome' describes a form of a plant that can extend itself through its underground horizontal tuber-like root system and develop new plants. In Deleuze and Guattari's use of the term, the rhizome is a concept that 'maps' a process of networked, relational and transversal thought, and a way of being without 'tracing' the construction of that map as a fixed entity. Ordered lineages of bodies and ideas that trace their originary and individual bases are considered as forms of 'arborescent thought', and this metaphor of a tree-like structure that orders epistemologies and forms historical frames and homogeneous schemata, is invoked by Deleuze and Guattari to describe everything that rhizomatic thought is not.

In addition, Deleuze and Guattari describe the rhizome as an action of many abstract entities in the world, including music, mathematics, economics, politics, science, art, the ecology and the cosmos. The rhizome conceives how every thing and every body - all aspects of concrete, abstract and virtual entities and activities - can be seen as multiple in their inter-relational movements with other things and bodies. the nature of the rhizome is that of a moving matrix, composed of organic and non-organic parts forming symbiotic and aparallel connections, according to transitory and as yet undetermined routes. Such a reconceptualisation constitutes a revolutionary philosophy for the reassessment of any form of hierarchical thought, history or activity.

In a world that builds structures from economic circuits of difference and desire, Deleuze responds by reconsidering how bodies are constructed. He and Guattari argue that such structures constrain creativity and position things and people into regulatory orders. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari staged the entire book as a series of networked rhizomatic 'plateaus' that operate to counter historical and philosophical positions pitched toward the system of representation that fixes the flow of thought. Instead, through a virtuoso demonstration of the relational energies able to be configured through often disparate forms and systems of knowledge, they offer the reader an open system of thought. Rhizomatic formations can serve to overcome, overturn and transform structures of rigid, fixed or binary thought and judgement - the rhizome is 'anti-genealogy'. A rhizome contributes to the formation of a plateau through its lines of becoming, which form aggregate connections. There are no singular positions on the networked lines of a rhizome, only connected points which form connections between things. A rhizomatic plateau of thought, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, may be reached through the consideration of the potential of multiple and relational bodies and ideas. The rhizome is any network of things brought into contact with one another, functioning as an assemblage machine for new affects, new concepts, new bodies, new thoughts; the rhizomatic network is a mapping of the forces that move and/or immobilise bodies.

Deleuze and Guattari insist bodies and things ceaselessly take on new dimensions through their contact with different and divergent entities over time; in this way the concept of the 'rhizome' marks a divergent way of conceptualising the world that is indicative of Deleuzian philosophy as a whole. Rather than reality being thought of and written as an ordered series of structural wholes, where semiotic connections or taxonomies can be compiled from complete root to tree-like structure, the story of the world and its components, Deleuze and Guattari propose, can be communicated through the rhizomatic operations of things - movements, intensities and polymorphous formations. In opposition to descendent evolutionary models of classification, rhizomes have no hierarchical order to their compounding networks. Instead, Deleuzian rhizomatic thinking functions as an open-ended productive configuration, where random associations and connections propel, sidetrack and abstract relations between components. Any part within a rhizome may be connected to another part, forming a milieu that is decentred, with no distinctive end or entry point.

Deleuze apparatus for describing affective change is the 'rhizome'. Deleuze viewed every operation in the world as the affective exchange of rhizomatically-produced intensities that create bodies: systems, economies, machines and thoughts. Each and every body is propelled and perpetuated by innumerable levels of the affective forces of desire and its resonating materialisations. Variations to any given system can occur because of interventions within cyclical, systematic repetition. As the rhizome may be constituted within an existing body - including existing thoughts one might bring to bear upon another body - the rhizome is necessarily subject to the principles of diversity and difference through repetition, which Deleuze discussed in his books Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition.

Deleuze acknowledges Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of the eternal return as the constitution of things through repeated elements (existing bodies, modes of thought) that form a 'synthesis' of difference through the repetition of elements. 'Synthesis' is also described by Deleuze and Guattari as an assemblage of variable relations produced by the movement, surfaces, elusions and relations of rhizomes that form the bodies (desiring machines) through composite chains of previously unattached links. As a non-homogeneous sequence, then, the rhizome describes a series that may be composed of causal, chance, and/or random links. Rhizomatic connections between bodies and forces produce an affective energy or entropy. As Deleuze describes in his work on David Hume, the interaction of a socially, politically, or culturally determined force and any given body both produces and uses associations of ideas. The discontinuous chain is he medium for the rhizome's expanding network, just as it is also the contextual circumstance for the chain's production.

Rhizomatic writing, being, and/or becoming is not simply a process that assimilates things, rather it is a milieu of perpetual transformation. the relational milieu that the rhizome creates gives form to evolutionary environments where relations alter the course of how flows and collective desire develop. There is no stabilising function produced by the rhizomatic medium; there is no creation of a whole out of virtual and dispersed parts. Rather, through the rhizome, points form assemblages, multiple journey systems associate into possibly connected or broken topologies; in turn, such assemblages and typologies change, divide, and multiply through disparate and complex encounters and gestures. The rhizome is a powerful way of thinking without recourse to analogy or binary constructions. To think in terms of the rhizome is to reveal the multiple ways that you might approach any thought, activity, or concept - what you always bring with you are the many and various ways of entering into any body, of assembling thought and action through the world.'

Felicity F. Colman

Arborescent Schema

Mike + Doug Starn (b. 1961) - Structure of Thought 15 (from Absorption + Transmission), 2005-7


'The arboreal schema is one of Deleuze's many potent and prominent biological and organic images. His criticism, and his use of the schema, is scattered across his corpus, at various times targeting approaches to philosophy, psychiatry, literature, science, theoretical criticism and even everyday living. The notion of an arborescent or tree-like schema is Deleuze's counterpoint to his model of the rhizome, which he uses to challenge tendencies in thinking and to suggest ways of rehabilitating 'thought' as a creative and dynamic enterprise.

Deleuze's model of the tree-like structure appears to be quite simple. Typically, at its top, is some immutable concept given prominence either by transcendental theorising or unthinking presumption. In Deleuze's work on epistemology and ontology, he identifies Plato's Forms, the models of the subject espoused by René Descartes and Immanuel Kant, as well as the 'Absolute Spirit' of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as examples. All other concepts or particulars are organised vertically under this concept in a tree/trunk/root arrangement. The ordering is strictly hierarchical, from superior to subordinate, or transcendent to particular, such that the individual or particular element is conceived as less important, powerful, productive, creative or interesting than the transcendent.

The subordinate elements, once so arranged, are unable to 'move' horizontally in such a way as to establish creative and productive interrelationships with other concepts, particulars or models. Rather, their position is final, according to an organising principle implied or determined by a superior concept.

Furthermore, the tree is a self-contained totality or closed system that is equal just to the sum of its parts. Relations between elements of the system are interior to and inherent within the model. They are stable or even essential in so far as, first, the superior concept is the all-powerful defining force that dictates the position or meaning of all else in the system and, second, the tendency is to think of the system either as complete in itself or else unconnected to other systems in any meaningful way. The tree is 'fixed to the spot' and static. Any remaining movement is minimal and internal to the system rather than exploratory or connective. Because the creative potential of disorder and inter-connectivity is precluded, the potential inherent in conceptualising and thinking in this manner is very limited.

Deleuze's model calls to mind the porphyrian tree, a device used by the philosopher Porphyry to show how reality and our concepts are ordered and how logical categorisation proceeds. The concept of 'Substance' can be placed at the top of the tree, and dichotomous branching at each level obtained by adding a specific difference such that, at the lowest level, some individual can be identified as a sub-set of 'Substance'.

This version of the arboreal model also highlights something of its complexity and ontological importance for Deleuze. The difference evident between particulars is subsumed by the similarity that defines them in terms of superior concepts in general and the transcendent concept (Substance) in particular. Rather than deriving concepts from individual particulars (or interactions between them), an abstract concept is used to organise individuals and determine their meaning relative just to the organisational hierarchy. Difference has to be added back to each element in order to define it as a particular, rather than having individual elements serve as the starting point for conceptualisation. In contrast, Deleuze holds that lived experience comprises particularity and uniqueness in each moment, experience and individual, the inherent differences of which ought always to be acknowledged. By positing the concept over the particular, thinking of the arboreal kind abstracts from lived experience in its very structure.

For Deleuze, thinking in such a way stifles creativity, leaves superior concepts relatively immune to criticism and tends to close one's mind to the dynamism, particularity and change that is evident in lived experience. Not only is such thinking necessarily abstract, it also serves to protect the status quo and relieve dominant concepts and positions from productive critique.'

Cliff Stagoll

La Rocoquette

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) - The Swing, 1766

"Fragonard's scenes of frivolity and gallantry are considered the embodiment of the Rococo spirit. A pupil of Chardin and later Boucher, he won the Prix de Rome and from 1756 to 1761 was in Italy, where he developed a particular admiration for Tiepolo and the late Baroque style. In this period he specialized in large historical paintings.

Returning to Paris, he soon changed this style, adopting instead the erotic subjects then in vogue and for which he is chiefly known, of which The Swing is the most famous.

This picture became an immediate success, not merely for its technical excellence, but for the scandal behind it. The young nobleman is not only getting an interesting view up the lady's skirt, but she is being pushed into this position by her priest-lover, shown in the rear.

In this same spirit are some other famous pictures, The See-Saw, Blindman's Bluff, The Stolen Kiss, and The Meeting. After his marriage in 1769, he began painting children and family scenes (usually called genre painting) and even returned to religious subjects. He stopped exhibiting publicly in 1770 and all his later works are commissions from private patrons.

To many, this painting embodies the entire spirit of the ancien regime on the eve of the revolution."

(Boston College Website)

"Pleasure is the object, duty and goal of all rational creatures."

Voltaire

"The essence of pleasure is spontaneity."

Germaine Greer

"Take life too seriously, and what is it worth? If the morning wake us to no new joys, if the evening bring us not the hope of new pleasure, is it worthwhile to dress and undress?"

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The inward pleasure of imparting pleasure - that is the choicest of all."

Nathaniel Hawthorne

"I do not agree that an age of pleasure is no compensation for a moment of pain."

Thomas Jefferson

"All fits of pleasure are balanced by an equal degree of pain or languor; it is like spending this year part of the next year's revenues."

Jonathan Swift

"The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain."

Aristotle

"Physical pleasure is a sensual experience no different from pure seeing or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit fills the tongue; it is a great unending experience, which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing. And it is not our acceptance of it that is bad; the bad thing is that most people misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant at the tired spots of their lives and as distraction instead of a rallying toward exalted moments."

Rainer Maria Rilke

"I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex."

Oscar Wilde

"Men seldom give pleasure where they are not pleased themselves."

Samuel Johnson

The Plural Of Apocalypse

Andreas Gursky (b. 1955) - May Day III, 1998

The Hollow Men

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us - if at all - not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer -

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency

And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Anthems Of Ecstasy

9 Songs (2004) - d. Michael Winterbottom (b. 1961)


i like my body when it is with your

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new

e. e. cummings (1894-1962)

The Week in Review

Films:

9 Songs - d. Michael Winterbottom (2004)
Broken Flowers - d. Jim Jarmush (2005)
La Captive - d. Chantal Ackerman (2000)
Les Choristes - d. Christophe Barratier (2004)
Code 46 - d. Michael Winterbottom (2003)
The Ister - d. David Barison and Daniel Ross (2004)
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou - d. Wes Anderson (2004)
Perdita Durango - d. Alex de la Iglesia (1997)
Trial of Joan of Arc - d. Robert Bresson (1962)
Welcome to Sarajevo - d. Michael Winterbottom (1997)

Television:

Smallville: Series One

Ep. 1: Pilot
Ep. 2: Metamorphosis
Ep. 3: Hothead
Ep. 4: X-Ray
Ep. 5: Cool
Ep. 6: Hourglass
Ep. 7: Craving
Ep. 8: Jitters
Ep. 9: Rogue
Ep. 10: Shimmer
Ep. 11: Hug
Ep. 12: Leech
Ep. 13: Kinetic
Ep. 14: Zero
Ep. 15: Nicodemus
Ep. 16: Stray
Ep. 17: Reaper
Ep. 18: Drone
Ep. 19: Crush
Ep. 20: Obscura
Ep. 21: Tempest

Reading:

Landscape and Memory - Simon Schama (1995)

Listening:

Space Oddity (1969) - David Bowie
Hunky Dory (1971) - David Bowie
The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars (1972) - David Bowie
Station To Station (1976) - David Bowie
Low (1977) - David Bowie
Heroes (1977) - David Bowie

The Ghosts Of Innocence

Loretta Lux (b. 1969) - Girl with Marbles, 2005

"I use children as a metaphor for a lost paradise."

Loretta Lux

"Childhood: the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth - two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age."

Ambrose Bierce

"I'd give all the wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life's decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer day."

Lewis Carroll

"Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections in the next."

Cesare Pavese

"Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow."

George Eliot

A Certain Nothingness

René Magritte (1898-1967) - The Treason of Images, 1928-9

'In order to understand Sartre's thought regarding the imagination, it is necessary to examine first an aspect of Husserl's phenomenology, the noetic/noematic structure of awareness. According to Husserl, it is a fact that we can be aware of the same object in different ways, of different objects in the same way, and also of different objects in different ways. For example, with respect to the object, I can perceive a table, a pen, and a framed picture; with respect to the mode of awareness, I can perceive a table, I can imagine a table, and I can remember a table - in each case, the same table. Husserl termed the object of awareness the noema and the mode of awareness of the object, the noesis. To understand Husserl's phenomenology on the problem of the imagination it is important to keep in mind that when I perceive this table or when I imagine this same table, I am aware of the same noema in two different modes. Of course, the image of he table is not the table, but by means of my apprehending the image of the table I have a secondary apprehension of the table itself. Sartre concerns himself with studying the essential difference between perception and imagination with respect to the modes in which each of these presents its object, rather than distinguishing as Husserl does between a primary and secondary apprehension. The object of perception is posited as real; that is, the object perceived is, in virtue of its being perceived, taken to be a real object. But in the case of the imagination either the object is posited as non-existent, as absent, as exiting elsewhere, or, in the neutral case, the object simply may not be posited as existing at all. Thus the characteristic possessed by an image that distinguishes the image from the object of perception is that, according to Sartre, the image ". . . involves a certain nothingness":

Alive, appealing and strong as an image is, it presents its object as not being. This does not prevent us from reacting to the image as if it were before us . . .

Regarding this distinction between perception and imagination, Sartre makes two observations. The first is that, in the case of perception, the object perceived is given against a background of total reality; the object is, as it were, the figure, and reality is the ground. The top of the desk now visible is part of the desk, itself part of what is in the room, and so on. In contrast to this mode of givenness of the perceived object is that of the imagined object. Instead of being given against the ground of the totality of the real, the imagined object is given (to take only one of the four possible modes listed above) precisely as absent, which is to say, the imagined object is given as something which is nothing in relation to the background of real things.

In virtue of this nothingness of the imagined object, it is necessary to take up the question: How is the nature of consciousness to be construed so that it will be possible to understand how consciousness can posit an image; that is, how consciousness can bring before itself an object that is nothing in relation to the contents of reality? It is Sartre's contention that, if consciousness were but one event among others in the world, and if it were also in thoroughgoing casual interaction with these other events, that there could be no awareness of images as images, as representations:

If we assume a consciousness placed at the very bosom of the world as one existence among others, we must conceive it hypothetically as completely subjected to the action of a variety of realities - without its being able to avoid the detail of these realities by an intuition which would embrace their totality. This consciousness could therefore contain only real modifications aroused by real actions and all imagination would be prohibited to it, exactly in the degree to which it would be engulfed by the real.

Sartre's thesis is that, in order for an image to be entertained as an image, consciousness must set the image over against the totality of the real, since the image is not one real item among others but merely a representation. But, in order for the imagination to posit the image as over against reality, it is necessary that consciousness not be "engulfed in the real" and determined in all its aspects by the causal efficacy of reality upon it. Consciousness has to disentangle itself from reality in order to posit the image as nothing in relation to the real, since, if such a disentanglement were not effected, the image could only be one other real item among others. As such, it would not be an image, but merely another item presented to consciousness because of the activity on consciousness of the other events that constitute reality. And it is just this ability to set itself over against the totality of the real that constitutes the freedom of consciousness:

For a consciousness to be able to imagine it must be able to escape from the world by its very nature, it must be able to by its own efforts to withdraw from the world. In a word it must be free.

This freedom from reality, this escaping from the world, is conceived by Sartre as definable correlatively to a (Heideggerian) being-in-the-world. In other words, consciousness can withdraw from the world on the ground of a logically prior being in the world. Consciousness, which has now been shown to be in essence imaginative, posits the image as a nothing in relation to the real in which consciousness is basically engaged but which, in virtue of its imaginativeness, it can transcend. . .

[The] concept of meaning for Sartre rests on his theory of imagination and therefore on the nature of freedom. Although consciousness is a being-in-the-world, there is yet a sense in which the concept of the world is not fundamental but rather derivative from the fact of the imaginativeness of consciousness. Simply stated, Sartre's point is that

The imaginary thus represents at each moment the implicit meaning of the real.

The real is what is simply there for awareness. Therefore, to apprehend the real as world, as a meaningful articulation of data, it is necessary that the real, the simply there, be surpassed toward the imaginary. The sense of this notion of surpassing toward the imaginary is that the situation directly confronted perceptually receives definition by having placed (metaphorically) alongside it an imaginative consciousness which is in an essential respect a reverse of the perceived situation. For example, I note the absence of my dictionary not simply because the dictionary is not perceptually encountered in the bookcase, but also because the imaginativeness of my consciousness places beside what I do perceive in the bookcase the image of the dictionary, an image which presents the dictionary as being absent. The real is what I immediately confront; the world is that same situation, meaningfully articulated by the imagination and set over against the consciousness that is there engaged:

. . . imagination, far from appearing as an actual characteristic of consciousness turns out to be an essential and transcendental condition of consciousness.

As well as of freedom in the world . . . '

From Existentialism as Philosophy by F. Molina

Signatures Of The Soul

Jenny Saville (b. 1970) - Reverse, 2003


"The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which have become permanent."

Marcel Proust

"A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction."

Oscar Wilde

"You use a glass mirror to see your face. You use works of art to see your soul."

George Bernard Shaw

"Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?"

Pablo Picasso

"I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several."

Rainer Maria Rilke

Sex Please, We're British

Jake and Dinos Chapman (b. 1966) - Death II, 2004 (painted bronze)


"There is a liberal theory that art disinfects eroticism of its latent subversiveness, and pornography that is also art loses its shock and its magnetism, becomes 'safe'. The truth of this is that once pornography is labelled 'art' or 'literature' it is stamped with the approval of an elitist culture and many people will avoid it on principle, out of fear of being bored. But the more the literary arts of plotting and characterisation are used to shape the material of pornography, the more the pornographer himself is faced with the moral contradictions inherent in real sexual encounters. He will find himself in a dilemma; to opt for the world or to opt for the wet dream?

Out of this dilemma, the moral pornographer might be born.

The moral pornographer would be an artist who uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual licence for all the genders, and projects a model of the way such a world might work. A moral pornographer might use pornography as a critique of current relations between the sexes. His business would be the total demystifaction of the flesh and the subsequent revelation, through the infinite modulations of the sexual act, of the real relations of man and his kind. Such a pornographer would not be the enemy of women, perhaps because he might begin to penetrate to the heart of the contempt for women that distorts our culture even as he entered the realms of true obscenity as he describes it.

But the pornographer's more usual business is to assert that the function of flesh is pure pleasure, which is itself a mystification of a function a great deal more complex, apart from raising the question of the nature of pleasure itself. However, the nature of pleasure is not one with which the pornographer often concerns himself; for him, sexual pleasure is a given fact, a necessary concomitant of the juxtaposition of bodies.

It is at this point that he converts the sexed woman, living, breathing, troubling, into a desexed hole and the breathing, living, troubling man into nothing but a probe; pornography becomes a form of pastoral, sex an engaging and decorative activity that may be performed without pain, soil, sweat or effect, and its iconography a very suitable subject for informal murals in public places. If, that is, the simplest descriptions of sex did not also arouse such complex reactions.

And that is because sexual relations between men and women always render explicit the nature of social relations in the society in which they take place and, if described explicitly, will form a critique of those relations, even if that is not and never has been the intention of the pornographer.

So, whatever the surface falsity of pornography, it is impossible for it to fail to reveal sexual reality at an unconscious level, and this reality may be very unpleasant indeed, a world away from official reality."

From The Sadeian Woman by Angela Carter

Don't Put The Blame On Mame

Michelangelo di Ludovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475-1564) - Adam and Eve (The Sistine Chapel), 1509-1512


"Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall."

William Shakespeare

"Sin is geographical."

Bertrand Russell

"Praise is the bait of sin."

Plato

"To sin is a human business, but to justify sins is a devilish business."

Leo Tolstoy

"Other men's sins are before our eyes, but our own are behind our backs."

Seneca

One Species (January Special)

René Magritte (1898-1967) - Portrait d'Edward James (La Reproduction Interdite), 1937


'Over the last thirty or more centuries, many things have undoubtedly been said about human beings. Yet these were often the products of reflection. What I mean by this is that Descartes, when he wanted to know what man is set about subjecting the ideas which occurred to him to critical examination. One example would be the idea of mind and body. He purified these ideas; he rid them of all trace of obscurity and confusion. Whereas most people understand spirit to be something like very subtle matter, or smoke, or breath (consistent, in this regard, with primitive peoples), Descartes showed admirably that spirit is something altogether different. He demonstrated that its nature is quite other, for smoke and breath are, in their way, things - even if very subtle ones - whereas spirit is not a thing at all, does not occupy space, is not spread over a certain extension as all things are, but on the contrary is entirely compact and indivisible - a being - the essence of which is none other than to commune with, collect and know itself. This gave rise to the concepts of pure spirit and pure matter, or things. Yet it is clear that I can only find and, so to speak, touch this absolutely pure spirit in myself. Other human beings are never pure spirit for me: I only know them through their glances, their gestures, their speech - in other words, through their bodies. Of course another human being is certainly more than simply a body to me: rather, this other is a body animated by all manner of intentions, the origin of numerous actions and words. These I remember and they go to make up my sketch of their moral character. Yet I cannot detach someone from their silhouette, the tone of their voice and its accent. If I see them for even a moment, I can reconnect with them instantaneously and far more thoroughly than if I were to go through a list of everything I know about them from experience or hearsay. Another person, for us, is a spirit which haunts a body and we seem to see a whole host of possibilities contained within this body when it appears before us; the body is the very presence of these possibilities. So the process of looking at human beings from the outside - that is, at other people - leads us to reassess a number of distinctions which once seemed to hold good such as that between mind and body.

Let us imagine what becomes of this distinction by examining a particular case. Imagine that I am in the presence of someone who, for one reason or another, is extremely annoyed with me. My interlocutor gets angry and I notice that he is expressing his anger by speaking aggressively, by gesticulating and shouting. But where is this anger? People will say that it is in the mind of the interlocutor. What this means is not entirely clear. For I could not imagine the malice and cruelty which I discern in my opponent's looks separated from his gestures, speech and body. None of this takes place in some other-worldly realm, in some shrine located beyond the body of the angry man. It really is here, in this room and in this part of the room, that the anger breaks forth. I would accept that the sense in which the place of my opponent's anger is on his face is not the same as that in which, in a moment, tears may come streaming from his eyes or a grimace may harden on his mouth. Yet anger inhabits him and it blossoms on the surface of his pale or purple cheeks, his blood-shot eyes and wheezing voice . . . And if, for one moment, I step out of my own viewpoint as an external observer of his anger and try to remember what it is like for me when I am angry, I am forced to admit that it is no different. When I reflect on my own anger, I do not come across any element that might be separated or, so to speak, unstuck, from my own body. When I recall being angry at Paul, it does not strike me that this anger was in my my mind or in my thoughts but rather, that it lay entirely between me who was doing the shouting and that odious Paul who just sat there calmly and listened with an ironic air. My anger is nothing less than the attempt to destroy Paul, one which will remain verbal if I am a pacifist and even courteous, if I am polite. The location of my anger, however, is in the space we both share - in which we exchange arguments instead of blows - and not in me. It is only afterwards, when I reflect on what anger is and remark that it involves a certain (negative) evaluation of another person, that I come to the following conclusion. Anger is, after all, a thought; to be angry is to think that the other person is odious and this thought, like all others, cannot - as Descartes has shown - reside in any piece of matter and therefore must belong to the mind. I may very well think in such terms but as soon as I turn back to the real experience of anger, which was the spur to my reflections, I am forced to acknowledge that this anger does not lie beyond my body, directing it from without, but rather that in some inexplicable sense it is bound up with my body.

There is something of everything in Descartes, as in the work of all great philosophers. And so it is that he who draws an absolute distinction between mind and body also manages to say that the soul is not simply like the pilot of a ship, the commander-in-chief of the body, but rather that it is very closely united to the body, so much so that it suffers with it, as is clear to me when I say that I have toothache.

Yet this union of mind and body can barely be spoken of, according to Descartes; it can only be experienced in everyday life. As far as Descartes is concerned, whatever the facts of the matter may be - and even if we live what he himself calls a true melange of mind and body - this does not take away from my right to distinguish absolutely between parts that are united in my experience. I can still posit, by rights, and absolute distinction between mind and body which is denied by the fact of their union. I can still define man without reference to the immediate structure of his being as he appears to himself in reflections: as thought which is somehow strangely joined to a bodily apparatus without either the mechanics of the body or the transparency of thought being compromised by their being mixed together in this way. It could be said that even Descartes' most faithful disciples have always asked themselves exactly how it is that our reflection, which concerns the human being as given, can free itself from the conditions to which it appears to have been subject at the outset.

This leaves us with a very different view of the human being and humanity from the one with which we began. Humanity is not an aggregate of individuals, a community of thinkers, each of whom is guaranteed from the outset to be able to reach agreement with the others because all participate in the same thinking essence. Nor, of course, is it a single Being in which the multiplicity of individuals are dissolved and into which these individuals are destined to be reabsorbed. As a matter of principle, humanity is precarious: each person can only believe what he recognises to be true internally and, at the same time, nobody thinks or makes up his mind without already being caught up in certain relationships with others, which leads him to opt for a a particular set of opinions. Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful (which is not in dispute here) but also when it comes to happiness. There is no way of living with others which takes away the burden of being myself, which allows me to not have an opinion; there is no 'inner' life that is not a first attempt to relate to another person. In this ambiguous position, which has been forced on us because we have a body and a history (both personally and collectively), we can never know complete rest. We are continually obliged to work on our differences, to explain things we have said that have not been properly understood, to reveal what is hidden within us and to perceive other people. Reason does not lie behind us, nor is that where the meeting of minds takes place: rather, both stand before us waiting to be inherited. Yet we are no more able to reach them definitively than we are to give them up.

It is understandable that our species, charged as it is with a task that will never and can never be completed, and at which it has not necessarily been called to succeed, even in realtive terms, should find this situation both cause for anxiety and a spur to courage. In fact, these are one and the same thing. For anxiety is vigilance, it is the will to judge, to know what one is doing and what there is on offer. If there is no such thing as benign fate, then neither is there such a thing as its malign opposite. Courage consists in being reliant on oneself and others to the extent that, irrespective of differences in physical and social circumstances, all manifest in their behaviour and their relationships that very same spark which makes us recognise them, which makes us crave their assent or their criticism, the spark which means we share a common fate. It is simply that this modern form of humanism has lost the dogmatic tone of earlier centuries. We should no longer pride ourselves in being a community of pure spirits; let us look instead at the real relationships between people in our societies. For the most part, these are master-slave relationships. We should not find excuses for ourselves in our good intentions; let us see what becomes of these once they have escaped from inside us. There is something healthy about this unfamiliar gaze we are suggesting should be brought to bear on our species. Voltaire once imagined, in Micromégas, that a giant from another planet was confronted with our customs. These could only seem derisory to an intelligence higher than our own. Our era is destined to judge itself not from on high, which is mean and bitter, but in a certain sense from below. Kafka imagines a man who has metamorphosed into a strange insect and who looks at his family through the eyes of such an insect. Kafka also imagines a dog that investigates the human world which it rubs up against. He describes societies trapped in the carapace of customs which they themselves have adopted. In our day, Maurice Blanchot describes a city held fast in the grip of its laws: everyone is so compliant that all lose the sense of their difference and that of others. To look at human beings from the outside is what makes the mind self-critical and keeps it sane. But the aim should not be to suggest that all is absurd, as Voltaire did. It is much more a question of implying, as Kafka does, that human life is always under threat and of using humour to prepare the ground for those rare and precious moments at which human beings come to recognise, to find, one another.'

From 'Man Seen from the Outside' (in The World of Perception) by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Tears Are The Ashes Of Emotion

Pierre et Gilles (b. 1949 & 1953) - La Madone au Coeur Blessé, Lio, 1991


The Weeping Song (1990) - Nick Cave (b. 1957)

Go son, go down to the water
And see the women weeping there.
Then go up into the mountains;
the men, they are weeping too.
Father, why are all the women weeping?
They are all weeping for their men.
Then why are all the men there weeping?
They are weeping back at them.

This is a weeping song,
A song in which to weep
While all the men and women sleep.
This is a weeping song
But I won't be weeping long.

Father, why are all the children weeping?
They are merely crying, son.
O, are they merely crying, father?
Yes, true weeping is yet to come.

This is a weeping song,
A song in which to weep
While all the little children sleep.
This is a weeping song
But I won't be weeping long.

O father, tell me, are you weeping?
Your face seems wet to touch.
O, then I am sorry, father,
I never thought I hurt you so much.

This is a weeping song,
A song in which to weep
While we rock ourselves to sleep.
This is a weeping song
But I won't be weeping long.
No, I won't be weeping long.

Paradise Is Not A Box Of Chocolates

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) in Basel, c. 1875

"In heaven all the interesting people are missing."

"No price is too high for the privilege of owning yourself."

"To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity."

"Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughter."

"If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss gazes back at you."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

You've Got To Pick-A-Pocket Or Two, Boys

Robert Bresson (1901-1999) - Pickpocket, 1959

"There is a prominent credit at the start of Pickpocket to the mysteriously named Kassagi, who is not only part of the cast as ‘Accomplice 1’ but, even more importantly, ‘Technical Adviser for the Thieves' Gestures’. And what gestures they are! Nimble fingers that steal into breast pockets, a hand that drops a wallet in a split-second beat down to another hand (his own or someone else's), swift movements that transfer an object from a newspaper to a bag to a coat...

Robert Bresson may well have found Kassagi in the criminal underworld. Cinematographer Leonce-Henry Burel tells the story of a day on set when, due to complex outdoor filming, several gendarmes were present to supervise crowds and traffic. At the end of the day, Kassagi took these cops to the pub - where he revealed to them every key, wallet and watch he had surreptitiously stolen from them while they worked. After the film wrapped, Kassagi was too well known to return to a life of crime. Instead, he started on a successful career as a music hall and cabaret entertainer. His magic skill of prestidigitation moved from streets and train stations to the showbiz stage.

Pickpocket is all about the transformation of an identity. Michel (Martin Lasalle) represents the fanciful temptation of living 'beyond the law'. Depending on what you bring to the film, this character is an archetype derived from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or French existentialist philosophy; or he is a rebel-hero who anticipates the restless anarchism of any period in any country since. Babette Mangolte, who made the wonderful documentary Pickpocket’s Models, first saw the film a year before the events of May 1968; for her it expressed “what it is to be a student in Paris and also the desire to be a criminal, which is a profound insight into people's desires.”

For this reason, Michel is also a superb figure of cinema. He is single-minded, obsessed, driven; but also an ascetic, bookworm intellectual (and hence the model for Paul Schrader's leading men from Taxi Driver to Light Sleeper. He is caught up in an escalating thrill that Bresson captures so well in each new, extravagant round of thievery - culminating in a veritable group-ballet of three pickpockets which rivals the finest piece of Hollywood musical choreography. He is an amalgam of both Gangster (increasingly suspicious and paranoid, like Scorsese's Henry Hill in Goodfellas) and Artist (always pre-visualising, rehearsing, staging ...directing).

Pickpocket exists to take this fascinating character through the gauntlet of his own fixated, solipsistic desire ...but to where, exactly? Commentators on the film have given this destination at the end of Michel’s journey many names, often with a religious ring: Grace, Fate, Predestination, Redemption. Filmmaker Marco Bellocchio puts it in simpler, earthier terms: “The madness of a man is defeated by a beautiful woman who is not mad”. Michel's last-moment swerve towards humanity (and normality) has been copied in a hundred subsequent films, almost never convincingly. What secret Bressonian ingredient are they lacking or missing?

Whatever it is can surely be found in those thieves’ gestures. Pickpocketing is, quite literally, the movement, the action, of something mysterious in the world. It is physically visible, and yet swifter than the camera-eye or viewer-eye can register; now you see it, but you don't. Bresson, with the close-up inserts of details he loves so much, abstracts this action of theft: there is no longer a criminal and a victim, but only parts of bodies, dancing, interchangeable, fused into a rhythm that calls up the lush music of Lulli. You can call this movement of a trans-personal force in the world something Divine, a Spirit or Soul; or you can quit the heavenly metaphors and think of it as the movement of Eros, a chaste but thrillingly intense sexuality within the bustling, metropolitan everyday. But the greatness of Bresson’s best films lies in the way that we can never finally adjudicate between, or even separate, the material and the spiritual, the ecstasy of the transcendent and the ecstasy of the flesh.

A preliminary text from the auteur advises us that the style of Pickpocket is “not that of a thriller”. He's kidding, isn't he? Bresson had already made one of the most thrilling, suspenseful films in cinema history (the Resistance prison movie A Man Escaped, 1956), and he would do it again in Pickpocket. It is hard to imagine Bresson had not seen the opening of Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street (1953), and impossible for a film buff not to think ahead to Jean-Pierre Melville's maniacally detailed ‘crime procedurals’, like Le Samourai (1967). But Bressonian suspense, it is true, has nothing much to do with Hollywood’s, or Hitchcock’s, techniques. Bresson worked with a savagely pared ­down economy of elements focused on with blinding concentration; that is what we would be prone, these days, to call 'minimalism', if it did not rocket the narrative of Pickpocket forward with an elliptical pace that is completely exhilarating.

Disarming, too. There is something almost outrageous in Bresson’s stylisations - that famous method, system or syntax which belongs authentically to him and nobody else. Take a look and listen to the first three shots: after the preliminary image of Michel writing his life-account, there is a dissolve to a woman's gloved hand (it, too, could be criminal!) daintily transferring money from a purse to a male hand; this old chap, now shown full-body, walks over to a betting booth, as the sound (even more than the image or setting) informs us that we are at a racetrack; this man, at the end of his action, turns and shoots a sudden suspicious glance off-screen. Cut to Michel, static but alert and nervy. What we need to know about his state of mind is instantly 'punched in' via voice-over narration: “I was now determined. But would I be bold enough?” In around twenty seconds, the plot is already flying.

This little introductory vignette perfectly encapsulates everything about Bresson’s style: its 'hard cuts' on looks and glances as well as its ‘soft dissolves’ that link objects across diverse times, scenes and spaces; its driven will to skip as much superfluous incident, exposition and explanation as possible (later, we won't even see Michel’s two years of “gambling and women” in London); and its penchant for what filmmakers call ‘the reveal’ (Michel is always discovering strange things in his path: his best friend in his humble apartment, Jeanne’s baby on the floor...)

Perhaps the most controversial element of Bresson’s style, yesterday as today, is the use of what he termed ‘models’: non-professionals who rigorously had any tics or mannerisms of expressivity knocked out of them during endless rehearsals. In their blankness, paradoxically, they become full, reflective of everything around them, as well as the desires we project onto them. The model-legacy in cinema is evident in everything from Alain Cavalier to Ivan Sen, and not always happily. Even in Bresson’s own work, models can too easily become just zombies or sleepwalkers. But in Pickpocket, there is life in these models: Lasalle, looking a little like Montgomery Clift, is like a spring coiled tight, eyes darting, shoulders hunched forward, ever-ready for action; and Marika Green (mother of Eva Green, star of Bertolucci's The Dreamers) is the sort of tough, terse, impossibly sublime beauty that Bresson often found - the film casts only a sidelong glance at Jeanne's story, but it is still a fascinating one, poised enigmatically between the ethereal and the carnal.

There is another master of legerdemain hidden within Pickpocket - with a strange (and hitherto unremarked) Australian connection. A book circulates between Michel, his friend Jacques and the Chief Inspector- The Prince of Pickpockets, written by Richard S. Lambert in 1930 - and its subject, George Barrington, is discussed several times. Barrington was an extravagant criminal legend in London; when he was finally arrested and deported to Australia in 1851, his mere presence was enough to win the colony the dubious title of ‘The Continent of Pickpockets’. But Barrington turned his life around; moving swiftly to the side of the Law, he became Superintendent of Convicts at Parramatta - and the author of an admired book on penal colony history (as well as his autobiography). Suzanne Rickard describes this strange figure in Australian history as “archetypal ...a folk hero in elegant dress, the implicit model of the universal sinner, saved from himself by the generous act of transportation, and provided with a new life and new identity.” That works well as a description of Michel.

As a film artist, Robert Bresson devoted his life to offering us his 'generous acts of transportation'. Durgnat jusged the "emotional intensity" of his work to be "generated by his terse, almost secretive, style". Kassagi, Michel, Barrington, Bresson: all of them artists, showmen, inspired and driven thieves in the bright daylight, involved in something spectacular, secretive - magical."

The Prince of Pickpockets – Adrian Martin (2005)


Links:

Pickpocket - Rick J Thompson

Bressonian - Adrian Martin

The Narrative Cracks: Emotion in Robert Bresson - Bill Mousoulis

Bresson - Kent Jones

Bresson: Destinies Making Themselves in a Work of Hands - M C Zenner


The Week in Review:

Films:

All About Eve - d. Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1950)
Of Human Bondage - d. John Cromwell (1934)

Television Series:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Series Seven

Ep. 1: Lessons
Ep. 2: Beneath You
Ep. 3: Same Time, Same Place
Ep. 4: Help
Ep. 5: Selfless
Ep. 6: Him
Ep. 7: Conversations with Dead People
Ep. 8: Sleeper
Ep. 9: Never Leave Me
Ep. 10: Bring On the Night
Ep. 11: Showtime
Ep. 12: Potential
Ep. 13: The Killer in Me
Ep. 14: First Date
Ep. 15: Get It Done
Ep. 16: Storyteller
Ep. 17: Lies My Parents Told Me
Ep. 18: Dirty Girls
Ep. 19: Empty Places
Ep. 20: Touched
Ep. 21: End Of Days
Ep. 22: Chosen