Author of the Accident

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Pedro Costa - Casa de Lava

Pierre von Kleist Editions

In 1992, Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa travelled to Cape Verde to research his forthcoming movie, Casa de Lava. He returned with a scrapbook filled with island ephemera: postcards and photographs; newspaper clippings and poems; a visual script collected – pictured here framed by the delicate lines of his dog-eared, grass-green notebook.

Following his disappointment with the final film, Costa returned to this material he amassed. It would become everything that the movie could not. Free from the constraints of film, from the supposed need for resolution – the obligatory beginning and end – the notebook became a cathartic object; a tattered rethinking of a troubled endeavour.

The result is a not always coherent glimpse into the making of a film. After all, Costa has described the book as a warning sign. For him it predicts the erratic behaviour behind the scenes; his sabotage of the script, the actors, the producer and himself. The book is the critical conscience of the film then. Every image glued in then torn out is a burden; every scratch, every scribble a crisis.

—Sean Stoker

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Taste of Cherry (1997) dir. Abbas Kiarostami

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Il Pianeta Azzuro (The Blue Planet) - Franco Piavoli, 1982

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"It's what I should always have done—I shouldn't have become involved in cinema, that's for fools. Gardening is central because in gardening one is entering into another time into eternals and returns and cycles. Those are the ressurection cycles in my life."

—Derek Jarman, 1991

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Céline (Jean-Claude Brisseau, 1992)

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“I was putting my dreams ahead of my health. And I was putting my dreams ahead of Amelia. I was putting Fazerdaze ahead of Amelia... It actually has to be the other way round. And so I just had to grow up a bit adult, and just let go of my dreams. And just be like, “bye, I’m looking after me.” And when I started looking after me, that’s when everything came back.”

- Amelia Murray (Fazerdaze) [x]

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“I haven’t counted them, maybe [have] like a hundred ghost photos. It’s because I had this old camera, it’s still the camera I use for film photography, where I had this setting where the shutter just opens and then you have to press the shutter again to get it to close. So very long exposures for low light or a night sky. And I was usually travelling by myself and living by myself so the only way I could take my own picture was to set the camera on something, open the shutter, run out and stand there for a minute, and then run back to close the shutter. So it was like a picture of a place with me superimposed translucently.”

- Phil Elverum [x]

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“Actual activity takes up only a few moments compared to those many that are wasted.”

- Eva Hesse, Diaries (1955-1970)

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“It’s centrally important to me that I find a way to draw people’s whole beings inside the sounds that I’m giving them... To draw people right inside the river, not only because the body is nourished—I think our bodies and minds are nourished by water sound—but I began to feel that you’re able to move your whole body inside a sound, you’re making a very direct connection to the phenomena which is creating that sound. And that the depth of our sense of connection to the environmental world is crucial. I’ve been thinking, more and more, that sound is a wonderful medium to which to come to a sense of that connectivity between us and the rest of the world.”

- Annea Lockwood in Annea Lockwood: A Film About Listening (Sam Green, 2021)

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“Petrol” (Alena Lodkina, 2022) 

An idealistic film student is drawn into a shadowy and intoxicating world when she befriends an enigmatic performance artist. [x]

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"For my writing, it's not just books I collect, it's pieces my friends will say—I'll write it down or movies or whatever. But the way I like to write a lot of the times and, I don't know if I've ever gotten writer's block for this reason, is I'll take a piece, even a phrase, two words like our song 'Toothache'— 'toothache sky is bout to rain' is a Richard Brautigan line and then I go the rest of the song from there just trying to live up to that one line. It challenges me to write well and it also pays respect to the people that I have learned from reading."

— Karly Hartzman on songwriting, Wednesday, KEXP

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"Having fun is so important [and] being playful. I've had to reteach myself how to play. Because even in music school, at 19 years old, when I went to music school is—this is all about being the best, shredding the hardest and knowing the most. Then I saw all these kids leave totally discouraged, either quit music or get through it but all of the life sucked out of it. There were times where I felt music was supposed to be very serious. I think I'm just restoring this part of play and what it brings about when you're really enjoying what you're doing."

— Adrianne Lenker (Big Theif)

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“The idea of tracking a sound to a source was an interesting line of inquiry for me. That there are these sounds we experience ambiently, that I experience ambiently, like the sounds of insects or the sounds of bells. And this film emphasizes the bodies or the forms that create those sounds. So there’s something forensic in the way of listening to tether a visual source to sounds.”

- Mary Helena Clark on Figure Minus Fact (2020) 

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Gardening with Colin S02E02

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Vija Celmins

untitled (tree) (1986) / night sky (1998)

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GEORGE INNESS