"Knowledge of the possibility of representation consoles us for being enslaved to life; knowledge of life consoles us for the fact that representation is but shadow."
-- JLG, For Ever Mozart (1996)
Saturday, November 24, 2007
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2 comments:
Enslaved to life; yep, that's just about it. I'm gonna have to work on the being consoled part.
I’m playing with the grammar: ‘a slave to representation/ cinema/ art/ poetry, life is but a shadow’ sounds like Cioran. Tarkovsky said that a filmmaker should serve the cinema, in the subtitles, of course; the Russian word may for all I know be ‘a slave to.’ In hermetic poet types like Pessoa and Stevens there’s the belief of ‘serving poetry’ or the language in a manner indifferent to life, a monastic disposition in contrast to Godard’s arguably humanist one. Life is always something that can be related to, more than representation and form, like trying to get people to watch For Ever Mozart: representation cues itself to everyday life with certain recognized conventions.
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