Saturday, August 27, 2005

Some quotes from Sam Rohdie

Here are some quotes from Sam Rohdie's PROMISED LANDS:

-The films are prismatic, faceted, like a gemstone, without a privileged surface. And all surfaces falsely reflective. (3)

-Bergson's writing exemplifies the thoughts he has of time passing and thoughts passing in time. His words permeate, leave ripples, traces like the traces of light, vibrations and tails of movements. His writing is crisp and sensual like Antonioni's images, clear, unstable, impermanent. You watch the image and the objects in it being transformed, fading in, becoming other. Bergson thought the movement of thought with a writing that moved accordingly. / It has the qualities of Proust and Kafka and Joseph Roth. (5)

-Bergson, when a student at the Sorbonne, had been employed by Albert Kahn as his private tutor. [...] Kahn was the son of a cattle dealer, a traditional Jewish occupation since the 1400s. He had no formal higher education. (6)

-Rodin did not like photography. In it nothing moved, he said. (8)

-When Kahn returned from Japan and China, he established a geographical archive of photographs (autochromes) and films, Les archives de la planète, a vast record of the world (72,000 autochromes, 180,000 metres of film), the necessity for which Kahn insisted upon because the world was disappearing, and disappearing in the instant it was being photographed as a consequence of technologies to which photography belonged. (9-10)

-Mourning is a condition of modernism. (13)

-Godard remarked that the cinema resembles sculpture and music. (15)

-Geography was photographic (visual) and photography was geographical (objective). (17)

-In Rouch's film COCORICO the main character, M. Poulet, travels in the West African bush in his ramshackle Citroën to buy chickens for sale in town. He returns with a few mangy specimens. Along the way he finds witches, liars, inventors, charlatans and bricoleurs like himself. He fords rivers on rafts, picks up hitch-hikers, dismantles his car, experiences magic, makes friends, listens to stories and sleeps under the stars. Like many of Rouch's films, this is a road movie. (20)

-I want to travel like M. Poulet, even to accepting some of the discomforts. (20)