Is the form imposed by… itself?

I asked a writer about the interesting “forms” of his books. One looks like two different territories separated by an event. The other is weaved with “devices” which acts like small intermissions or surprising dreams reports.

I’m interested by forms in literature, from style to tricks with narration or punctuation (who said Faulkner?), and I stay amazed by the american ways of using storytelling (like in Siri Hustvedt’s essays, which mix her personal life with ideas and concepts).

The writer told me that he doesn’t “think” about the form : it comes in the moment, it imposes itself.

That made me think about this photographer, who said :

“A photographer solves a picture, more than composes one.”

Stephen Shore

As if there was just ONE way to take the picture, in a given place.

That’s my tool today : is the form of a piece of work imposed by itself? As the artist, here, of course, only decides : what does that mean? Where do you know this? In other arts? How does this work?

Thanks for reading!

Photo : Stephen Shore

Call me by your name quote : “The meaning of the river flowing is not…

“The meaning of the river flowing is not that all things are changing, so that we cannot encounter them twice, but that some things stay the same only by changing.”

…heard in Call me by your Name

Photography : Heat Wave Turtles

Astronomers, astronauts, Hopper’s letter and the banality of life

In an old French movie we hear :

• “Deux intellectuels assis vont moins loin qu’une brute qui marche”.
• (“two sitting intellectuals don’t get as far as a walking brute”)

I read this and I smiled, because, darn it, I’m one of the two sitting guys!

So, well, listen : I went to my mother’s house this week-end and I helped her in her gardening activities : I weed-eatered a big part of the garden to prepare it for tillage.

Happily, her string-trimmer was on batteries, and lasted like 15 minutes before I had to stop. Phewww.

I hate to “do” these things. I hate DIY and odd jobs. It’s awful! I feel sad, and dirty, I’m bored. I am terribly bored. I want to be after. I want to go home.

In a garden, I want to read a book, to have a conversation, to take photos, or watch the buzzing world & butterflies.

I’m a cat person – in MBTI I’m INTFJ and my enneagram is 5 : The Observer – I’m perceptive, I watch and think, instead of… doing things.

Reading, writing (in the morning), eating, sex (evenings), taking photos – my entertainment thing is NOT linked to displacement – which, for me, is a dumb way to kill the banality of life.

And but yeah, Hopper’s letter :

…how life works. It’s moving. Always moving, whether you like it or not. And, yeah, sometimes it’s painful. Sometimes it’s sad. And sometimes… it’s surprising.

Maybe I fear surprises? Why is that? Always moving? Nope.

Make mistakes, learn from ’em, and when life hurts you, because it will, remember the hurt. The hurt is good. It means you’re out of that cave.

Mmmmh I think I prefer the cave, now. Hurt not good. I’m OK!

Have a nice day!

Movies : an in between modernity mess

There’s a funny dissonance I love to feel in movies : it’s when the modernity of a scenario, of dialogs, of directing is seen into what seems an “old form”.

It’s obvious – and very disturbing – when you watch Seven Samurai (1954) or Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). The sound is old, and it’s black and white vintage, but everything sweats modernity.

It’s as if it was “not OK”, not fitting, and one wonders how the audience could watch that at the time. You feel this with all Welles movies, but also Fellini’s.

But in the beginning of the sixties, you find movies which are between two worlds : Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962), Huston’s Night of the Iguana (1964), Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), but also Lilith (1964) or Breathless (1960), Suddenly Last Summer (1959), The Misfits (1961), L’Eclisse (1962)…

All of them are black and white movies, and you begin to watch them accordingly (“Oh a good vintage classic movie!”). And you are FLOORED by the complexity or modernity of these…

Well, this article is about this “in between” mess. The structure seems to be : “looks like an old form, but modernity explodes into it”.

Where do you find that? In literature? Photography? Poetry?

What if you searched, out of Netflix, “Best films of the Sixties”, and watch them all, just for the pleasure of discovering forms, authors, resonances, happiness? Out of the flow…

Have a nice day!

 

 

Chekhov quote : “Everybody has some passions…

“Everybody has some passions, nobody has the strength”.

A. Chekhov, Platonov

Photography : Other Birds

Photography : Strange Birds

Ladies, witches, ghosts…