StandingAtTheFence @standingatthefence - Tumblr Blog

Sean Bonney, Further Notes on Militant Poetics

a lover’s discourse, roland barthes

“Akerman was younger than Orson Welles was when he made “Citizen Kane,” younger than Jean-Luc Godard was when he made “Breathless.” The three films deserve to be mentioned together. “Jeanne Dielman” is as influential and as important for generations of young filmmakers as Welles’s and Godard’s first films have been. Akerman presented monumentally composed, meticulously observed, raptly protracted images of a woman’s domestic routine—Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig) preparing cutlets in her kitchen, for instance. These images prove cinematically that the domestic lives of women are the stuff of art; that women’s private lives are as ravaged by the forces of history as are lives lived on the public stage of politics; and that the pressures of women’s unquestioned, unchallenged, and unrelieved confinement in the domestic realm and in family roles is a societal folly that leads to ruin, a form of violence that begets violence.”

— Richard Brody, “Postscript: Chantal Akerman.”

artemisiasea

“Suppression always destroys first what is gentle and benevolent; it inspires rage and reaction, encourages malevolence and magic, and so creates the very thing which, theoretically, it would destroy.”

Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti

petaltexturedskies

You wore melancholy like a perfume and tragedy was the only human situation that you really understood.

Oriana Fallaci, in a letter to Pier Paolo Pasolini, dated 16 November 1975

feral-ballad

Aria Aber, from Hard Damage; “Operation Cyclone”

photoarchive

Rodney Evans, Photography students, Texas Southern University, Houston, TX, 1961

philosophybits

“Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Temps Modernes, vol 1 (October 1945)

nokiabae

The Silences of The Palace (1994) - dir. Moufida Tlatli

philosophybits

“Decay, growth, fullness, emptiness, now murky, now bright, the sun shifting, the moon changing phase — day after day these things proceed… Life has its sproutings, death its destination, end and beginning tail one another in unbroken round, and no one has ever heard of their coming to a stop.”

— Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, Watson tr. (Ch 21)