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I will usually attend at least one screening in the beginning, for various reasons. Then I will never watch my movie again.

… The film becomes an annoying child that I wished my wife would have aborted, but it’s too late – it already breathes and it has a name and it will survive past my own physical death and I will be judged on the merits of its afterlife. So my only option is to continue to plant my seed again and again, continuing to procreate, all the while never being the parent a proper director is supposed to be, neglecting all post-birth glory, hating those who languish in pride at how well their child has held up, how sturdy, how smart, and how cute it looks. While in all actuality the child for the most part has become just another piece of shit, a whore whose patrons are those bored suckers who select your box at the video store brothel, stagger home with your child under their arm, then return her. Maybe a late fee is in order. I am an abusive father who has no need for his children once the umbilical cord is severed. It’s just the fuck I’m concerned with. Copping the nut. I don’t even know why I bother in this age when one can just adopt and then return it if you don’t like it.

—Harmony Korine, interviewed by Tod Lippy.

[Promotional still for Korine's Trash Humpers (2009).]

Are we idiots, perhaps? Maybe so, but it is not up to us to say it, still less to believe it. However, we should have finished with our migraines and our failures of nerve. One thing is our ruin, one stupid thing shackles us: “taste” — good taste. We have too much of it — or rather, we worry about it more than we should. Fear of bad taste engulfs us like a fog (a dirty December fog that suddenly appears, freezes your guts, stinks, and stings your eyes), to such a point that we stand still, not daring to advance. Don’t you realise how captious we are becoming, that we have our own poetics, our own ready-made ideas, our own rules? …

What we lack is daring. … With our scruples we resemble those poor believers who daren’t live for fear of hell and who wake their confessor early in the morning to unburden their consciences of having had a miscarriage in a dream. Let’s worry less about results. The thing is to keep fucking, keep fucking: who cares what child the muse will give birth to? Isn’t the purest pleasure in her embraces?

—Gustave Flaubert, letter to Louis Bouilhet, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830-1855, p125.

[Still from Vincente Minnelli's Madame Bovary (1949).]

You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you – no one.

There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. Don’t write love poems; avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary: they are the hardest to work with, and it takes great, fully ripened power to create something individual where good, even glorious, traditions exist in abundance. So rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty – describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. …

And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it. So, dear Sir, I can’t give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you, without trying to interpret it. Perhaps you will discover that you are called to be an artist. Then take the destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.

But after this descent into yourself and into your solitude, perhaps you will have to renounce becoming a poet (if, as I have said, one feels one could live without writing, then one shouldn’t write at all). Nevertheless, even then, this self-searching that I ask of you will not have been for nothing. Your life will still find its own paths from there, and that they may be good, rich, and wide is what I wish for you, more than I can say.

What else can I tell you? It seems to me that everything has its proper emphasis; and finally I want to add just one more bit of advice: to keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your whole development; you couldn’t disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to question that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer.

—Rainer Maria Rilke in a Letter to a Young Poet.

… Does it make sense to say of an object that it is surrounded by a space of its own? The early theologians of Islam conceived of an atomic system in which each atom was surrounded by a kind of atmosphere, a soul, a spiritual envelope. An ensemble of atoms composing a complex body required anmother type of atmosphere, and each time ensembles of these bodies composed a larger body they surrounded themselves with a different type of space. This depended not only on the size of the ensembles but on the particular conditions governing the appearance and disappearance of bodies. We humans are nothing other than an artificial system of concentric material envelopes (guilaf) without any other unifying factory than God, who inserts each one into the next….

If you are interested in any specific one of these ensembles, you must conceive or invent a way to show the type of space that surrounds it. It remains then to establish the rules for transitions from one space to the next. The same holds for time; each particular only lasts for an instant specific to itself — no single, unified time exists. Therefore each object and each ensemble possess a specific space and time.

Now let’s make the effort of imagining a cinema which can reflect such a world. We can conceive a certain type of filming capable of treating each segment of the world and the objects it contains “case by case.” Capable as well of letting us travel to the confines of cfreation through the simple juxtaposition of a small number of trembling images. In this radical impressionism, the never-seen would be within our grasp. The cinema would become the perfect instrument for the revelation of the possible worlds which coexist right alongside our own.

…At bottom I am speaking of nothing other than a cinema capable of inventing a new grammar each time it goes from one world to the next, capable of producing a unique emotion before every thing, every animal, every plant, simply by modifying the parameters of space and time. But this implies a constant practicer of both attention and detachment, an ability to enter into the act of filming and return an instant afterward to passive contemplation. In short, a cinema capable of accounting, above all, for the varieties of experience in the sensible world. Easily said….

—Raul Ruiz in Poetics of Cinema (Éditions Dis Voir , 2005, p89-90)

[Image: final shot of Terence Malick's The Thin Red Line (1997).]

The whole of cinema can be assessed in terms of the cerebral circuits it establishes, simply because it’s a moving image. Cerebral doesn’t mean intellectual: the brain’s emotive, impassioned too… You have to look at the richness, complexity, the significance of these arrangements, these connections, disjunctions, circuits and short-circuits. Because most cinematic production, with its arbitrary violence and feeble eroticism, reflects mental deficiency rather than any invention of new cerebral circuits. … Aesthetics can’t be divorced from these complementary questions of cretinisation and cerebralisation. Creating new circuits in art means creating them in the brain too.

—Gilles Deleuze in “On The Time Image“, Negotiations, 1972-1990, p60.

[Still from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969).]

Filmmaking is an incredible feeling; it’s like you decide to create a country to live in for a while [and] you decide on the population and invent the rules for that country.

—Leos Carax, from an interview with Geoff Andrew for Time Out.

[Image: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood and Stanley Kubrick on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).]

[Still from Hal Hartley's Surviving Desire (1991).]