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I think that if we’ve learned one thing from those perilous years, it’s that dogma, certainty, self-righteousness, sectarianism of all kinds is dangerous and self-defeating. So, to me, the rhythm that we tried to live our lives by and that we urge on our students and others is open your eyes, see the world as it really is. Act. Take some action within the world. Engage. And then, importantly, and something we forgot to do in 1970, doubt. Act and then doubt. Question yourself. What did you do right? What did you do wrong? And then act again. So that rhythm of opening your eyes, seeing the world, acting, doubting, acting, doubting, it seems to me is what ought to power us forward.

—Bill Ayers, former member of the Weather Underground.

In the course of an anthological scene in The Fall, the protestors tensely wait, behind barricaded doors, for the inevitable police assault, while a red flag flies atop Columbia University. Suddenly these students, doomed to failure and violence, begin to dance: their festive demonstration unleashes, in this moment, the forces of collective energy facing repression. A moment of fraternal euphoria amid an ocean of despair, a précis of everything in the human condition that is noble and beautiful.

—Nicole Brenez, “Peter Whitehead: The Exigencies of Joy”, Rouge.

Joy in life comes from finding someone or seeing something that is so REAL to us that we forget ourselves, our solitude, for a second, a minute, years maybe. We escape this absurdity by consciously and deliberately believing in those moments of communion with the world outside of us.

—Peter Whitehead, “I Destroy Therefore I Am“.

[Still from Peter Whitehead's The Fall, 1969.]

It’s not just about owning the jet. It’s about having the money to give you the freedom to do what you want, to say what you want. The more money people have, the more free they are, if they have the right psyche. Having a jet means you’re not queuing up for an hour in Dublin or London airports. Money is pure and utter freedom. If you want to wear shades inside, which I often do, I don’t care what people say about me.

—Donal Caulfield, Irish property developer, The Irish Times, September 27, 2008.

The crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money. Centuries, millennia of near-continuous money creation has left us so destitute that we have nothing left to sell. Our forests are damaged beyond repair, our soil depleted and washed into the sea, our fisheries fished out, the rejuvenating capacity of the earth to recycle our waste saturated. Our cultural treasury of songs and stories, images and icons, has been looted and copyrighted. Any clever phrase you can think of is already a trademarked slogan. Our very human relationships and abilities have been taken away from us and sold back, so that we are now dependent on strangers, and therefore on money, for things few humans ever paid for until recently: food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, child care, cooking. Life itself has become a consumer item. Today we sell away the last vestiges of our divine bequeathment: our health, the biosphere and genome, even our own minds. This is the process that is culminating in our age. It is almost complete, especially in America and the “developed” world. In the developing world there still remain people who live substantially in gift cultures, where natural and social wealth is not yet the subject of property. Globalization is the process of stripping away these assets, to feed the money machine’s insatiable, existential need to grow. Yet this stripmining of other lands is running up against its limits too, both because there is almost nothing left to take, and because of growing pockets of effective resistance.

—Charles Eisenstein.

[Picture from Robert Bresson's L'Argent (1980).]

I’m going to say it in an extreme way — for discussion, at least to think about it. I am afraid that we are getting weary of this planet. We are using it up, its resources and its wonder. And as we humans are more separate from, and dominant over all other living things, we are driven to find ever higher levels of diversion and stimulation. We are inseperable from our technology. It has become an extension of our nervous system. We depend on that technology to project us into a new world, a fresh new world where everything still remains to be done and discovered. Or we are dependent on that technology to actually get us off this planet Earth and out there, away, on the road again!

Surely I simplify. But a feeling in us is: there are too many of us, we have made a mess, it is doubtful that we can learn less destructive, less competitive, communal ways. And the unchanged habits of the predator, or our genes working to assure their own survival, compell us to move on, to seek out the next fertile area that we can successfully occupy and use according to our whims, and with all our fragile justifications.

The connection with film in general and documentary in particular? Cinema — not “the movies,” or “the image,” or “television,”–but cinema, this specific project, this discipline, this practise of a certain investigation, analysis and representation of ideas, cinema belongs to the material world. It is about where we are standing now. It is about the pleasures and problems of here. It is always about this world and our bodies moving through this world. Cinema, and especially the documentary, affirm not only our inseperability from each other, but also from a whole web of relationships with objects and other living things. The irony is, that even as the image increasingly stands in the way of a real contact with things as they are, as image-spectacles mirror the very world-weariness I am talking about here, the right film at the right time gives us one of the few ways we have of staying in touch with what is really around us, and to recall why it is important to remain in touch.

One result of such experiences is to help restore communicability between us and the world around us.

—Robert Kramer, Juror’s Statement for Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival.

Now that I’m alone and old, I foresee only catastrophe and chaos. I know that old people always say that the sun was warmer when they were young, and I also realise how commonplace it is to announce the end of the world at the end of each millennium. Nonetheless, I still think the entire century is moving toward some cataclysmic moment. Evil seems victorious at last; the forces of destruction have carried the day; the human mind hasn’t made any progress whatsoever towards clarity. Perhaps it’s even regressed. We live in an age of frailty, fear, and morbidity. Where will the kindness and intelligence come from that can save us?

—Luis Bunuel, My Last Breath (1983, Vintage), p252.

(Portrait of Luis Bunuel by Salvador Dali.)

There is absolutely no doubt that we are on a disaster course. We are destroying the planet and we are destroying each other. The world is mortally horrifying, especially compared to what people of my generation expected it to be at the beginning of the Seventies, after Vietnam and everything.

But while all this terrible stuff is going on, people are getting on with things. Not least people who care for and nurture the future, which is kids. Which is teachers. Which is Poppy [pictured above]. And that is something from which we should draw, not palliative comfort, but a real sense that life doesn’t stop being about life.

—Mike Leigh, interviewed by Nick Curtis.