From Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer: 

Cheppity cheppity chep chep. Chep. Silence. Cheppity chep chep. Chep.

  It starts as an evil turn of events. There is a sense of urgency. Something has to be done. Let us please do something about it. Then it is a colour, a very bad colour that needs tending to. Then a pain. But there is no use: it is a sound and it is out there in the world and nothing can be done about it. Awake.

Cheppity cheppity chep chep. Chep. Silence.

We may propose as fairly certain that, in the strongest sense, transgression only begins to exist when art itself becomes manifest, and that the birth of art fairly closely coincided, in the Reindeer Age, with the tumultuous outbreak of play and festival announced by these cave-painting figures, vying with one another in energy and exuberance that attain fullest expression in the game of birth and death played on stone. 

-Bataille, Lascaux; or the Birth of Art

some thoughts on Malick's The Tree of Life

[I wouldn’t read it if you haven’t seen it.]

Saw the new Malick flick The Tree of Life a few days ago. It managed to leave me quite moved and also quite exasperated. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that it fails as a work of art. Of all Malick’s films it must be the greatest failure and whereas before he has flirted with sentimentality, here he just wades in. He has always shown faith in the story telling aspect of film making but here he suddenly decides that pretty images are a substitute for deep truths. In fact the first half of the film is Malick’s retelling of the beautiful moment in the Book of Job where God answers all the explanations being made in His name by men, and asks, ‘Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?[…]When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?’ etc. Malick now thinks that filming a load of sublime looking things will substitute for that moment when the Lord spoke. The writer of the Book of Job knew his descriptive powers were woefully insufficient. Malick doesn’t.

 (That pretty much all of the reviews in the press have missed the Job angle entirely is further proof that our culture has cut itself off from its foundations. But it’s cool, as a simplistic realism now resonates twice before having the measure of all things.)

  Malick, after that strange beginning, starts to use the narrative element of films extremely well. There are moments of subtle beauty when the boy at the centre of the film is confronted by concrete elements of good and evil and his response is confusion. But Malick here captures that confusion in nuances particular to the ability of story-telling film. This despite his consistent montage to glory in the form of pretty light that keeps weaving its way in. Malick’s stated intent to explore the dichotomy between grace and nature is given life by these gestures and actions in the film that didn’t need his explicit hints.

  The film has other real strengths. Through this exploration of power and grace the work begins to weigh heavily with the dominance of power. Grace can hardly find breath; but it just survives. In traditional Christian language this is, obviously, the Fall. And Malick gives it a real presence in the film. The fact that grace, or love, is powerless in the face of this heavy power but persists and is always there as a choice and hope is an example of an honest portrayal of the Christian world in contrast to the average efforts in film. Jesus’ only means in the world was love. He was crushed by the mechanisms of power. As it was then, so it is now. And as Malick makes sure we get a bit too clearly, ‘The only way to happiness is to love.’

  What is strange about the experience of this film is that despite the gaudy crap you actually leave the film with a sense of falleness that is quite deep and resonant. It feels at times like two sensibilities are at work making the thing. The guy who thinks nice light on Austin lawns will fill us with awe at Glory and the guy who has a real ability to make solid film narrative speak distinctively. 

  Robert Bresson said that a film is brought to life again in the editing room, and you feel with this one it could be pretty great with a huge cull.

Fran Angelico, 1433

“Whatever you write it’s always a catastrophe. That’s the depressing thing about the fate of a writer … All you deliver is a bad, ridiculous copy of what you had imagined … It’s especially hard in the German language, because that language is wooden, clumsy, disgusting. A terrible language that kills anything light and wonderful. The only thing one can do is sublimate that language with a rhythm to give it musicality.”

Thomas Bernhard interview, quoted in a Josipovici article.

“Being speaks German.”

Heidegger

Hmm.