Frame One

Form and Cinematography. By Brent Rowland. What I'm reading and watching at Frame One Shelf.

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“We’re all on the brink of despair. All we can do is look each other in the face, keep each other company, joke a little. Don’t you agree?”

The Great Beauty

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"David had as many amazing things to say about Hoyte personally as he did about the work, and that was really important to me."

Spike Jonze called David O. Russell to discuss Hoyte van Hoytema's work on The Fighter. Great artists are interesting people first. It's just as important as craft.

(Photo by Sam Zhu)

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"He has a lot of humility and patience. He really takes time to figure out the best way to serve a story, and I love that about him. Along with all the other things I mentioned about Hoyte, he’s also fearless and trusts his intuition. He’s not precious. He’s willing to change everything on the day. He’d say, ‘Let’s just turn off all the lights and shoot with the city coming in through the window,’ and I’d go, ‘Cool, let’s do it,’ because his calmness inspires a lot of trust."

Spike Jonze on working with Hoyte van Hoytema

(Photo by Sam Zhu)

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"Europe is beginning to sense that the overblown onesidedness of its intellectual culture (most clearly expressed in scientific specialization) is in need of a correction, a revitalization coming from the opposite pole. This widespread yearning is not for a new ethics or a new way of thinking, but for a culture of the spiritual function that our intellectual approach to life has not been able to provide. This is a general yearning not so much for a Buddha or a Laotze but for a yogic capability. We have learned that humanity can cultivate its intellect to an astonishing level of accomplishment without becoming master of its soul."

Hermann Hesse wrote these words in an essay while composing the spare and beautiful declaration of belief that would become his novel Siddhartha. I'm starting 2014 by reading Siddhartha for the third time. I read it first as a teen and then again in my mid 20s. I know it will set the tone for the type of year I hope to have, one related to the above quote. Hesse was describing the "profound malaise" of Europe in 1920, but his observations clearly relate to our own time, nearly 100 years later--maybe even more urgently.

Despite the deeply resonant notes of melancholy that run through Hesse's work, he manages to always find the beauty, the redemptive tones in our struggle. This balance draws me to his writing. The same man wrote the acute observations above and the lyrical insights below. That's exactly why I'm starting my year with Hesse:

"The world was beautiful when one just looked at it without looking for anything, just simply, as a child."

"Light and shadow passed through his eyes, the stars and moon through his heart. Himself was what he now had to experience."

"When someone seeks it can happen that his eyes only see the thing he is seeking and that he is incapable of finding anything, incapable of taking anything in, because he is always only thinking about what he is seeking, because he has an object, a goal, because he is possessed by this goal. Seeking means having a goal, but finding means being free, open, having no goal. Perhaps you, venerable one, are indeed a seeker, for in striving after your goal, there is much you fail to see that is right before your eyes."

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Form <--> Content

The three quotes below have influenced my thinking about and approach to art over the past six months. My approach to a lot of things, actually. All the writing here will come back to these ideas.

My relationship to art, both its consumption and creation, has changed. I'd like to think it's matured, but who knows really. What I know is the experience of art has become much more important to me than any sort of reflective/interpretive process. Like Borges, Barthes and Sontag, this experience feels deeper, more personal, more nurturing and fulfilling.

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"Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism."

-Jorge Luis Borges | The Divine Comedy

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"The filmic is that in the film which cannot be described, the representation which cannot be represented. The filmic begins only where language and metalanguage end."

-Roland Barthes | The Third Meaning

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"What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. In place of a hermeneutics of art we need an erotics of art."

-Susan Sontag | Against Interpretation