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i'm sloane & i like to look at things and read things and go places that may or may not exist.
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2:52 pm 21 notes
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives/ Dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
— Raul Ruiz, The Face of the Sea (In Place of an Epilogue)
2:27 pm 5 notes
This idea of decontextualized images as organic, autonomous entities resurfaces in the chapter Fascination and Detachment in which Ruiz argues that the art of cinema lies both in its ability to engage the spectator during the course of the film, as well as its ability to form isolated connections and residual imprint - the iconostasis of the image that continues to exist outside of the film - that has been enabled by the ritualization of the transformative encounter:
We mustn’t forget that to experience a work of art is not simply letting oneself be fascinated by it, a mere falling in love with it, but rather, it’s understanding the process of falling in love. For this, one needs the freedom to move away from the loved object in order to return to it freely. The amorous encounter with the work of art is a practice that can be summarized in the following formula: ‘To love renders one intelligent’.
Ruiz describes this existence of an external collective consciousness - a figurative external brain - as being akin to an electromagnetic field or emanated aura that creates a continuity of memory in its fragmentation and reconstitution even in the absence of immediate experience. Conceptually, Ruiz illustrates this sense of a karmic fatedness in a ghostly encounter between the hero and an enigmatic woman named Ivonne in The Lost Domain:
-I know that tonight we’ll make love and that soon afterwards I will die, but I know we’ll see each other again. Amazed, the young man asks her: -“We’ll meet after our deaths?” -“Of course not,” she replies. “I don’t believe in such things. We’ll meet in a different way: you, or another man, will come across another woman, not me, like we have tonight, and they will live the same story, and, in this manner, we, like them, will have met.
(Source: filmref.com)
2:25 pm 5 notes
2:11 pm 4 notes
An uncharted memory flees stubbornly towards an increasingly distant era.
The sensation of antiquity increases.
A multitude of countries, wrongfully sent to sleep.
And everything looks in order from the outside, unfailingly.
And always is there this rise of vastness on the inside…this rise of memory, drifting.
Like rediscovering flying in the dark across the place of another era.
We’re there now, we’re walking through.
One night, a growing blindness.
Is that where we must go in?
Is that where we were, without knowing?-
Méditerranée
5:07 pm 175 notes
— Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (via blua)
(via doublejawed)
9:48 am 3,288 notes
— Nagisa Oshima - The man who left his will on film, 1970. (via darkmylight)
(via unpopularculture)
6:13 pm 10 notes
9:01 pm 773 notes
As girls grow into womanhood, the body becomes the central medium through which these unwritten codes of behavior are transmitted and memorized. The demure lowered gaze fixed at some point on the floor, the acquiescent nod of the head, the feminine swing of the hips, the closely held thighs and the modestly drawn-in shoulders are all written into our bodies by invisible hands and inaudible words so that we start believing that this is the way we are supposed to be.
The containment of a woman’s body is demonstrated by the very tightness with which she holds herself and moves The notion that such gendered body language is ‘natural’ is reinforced by observing other women we encounter. For example, observing men and women in public transportation and on the streets of Mumbai, one notices the tentative and watchful manner in which women occupy public space. In BEST buses, the average women will occupy the least possible space, rendering herself as inconspicuous as she can…on the other hand, the average man will spread his legs out, occupy more than half of a two-seater in a bus and appear to disregard the people around him.
—Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan, Shilpa Ranade,Why Loiter?: Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets
Observing the occupation of space(s) by women is critical praxis for me when I watch films, particularly because there’s always some surprise (and satisfaction) in catching glimpses of scenes where filmmakers break away from the traditionally gendered frame. The screencaps above illustrate that sentiment best. While Indian women at leisure in public spaces has never been a plausible reality for the filmmaker to pursue, this uninhibited, un-sexualized, un-victimized image of women in private, domestic spaces has usually been shied away from as well, because film has been expected to make its female protagonists hyper-aware of their bodies in the form of traditional gender roles for the benefit of a cis, heteronormative, North Indian Hindu male audience. Obviously the harrowing majority of filmmakers from parallel cinema to the so-called mainstream are male and their own sexist expectations of women have been translated into the narratives of their films along with the way they frame their female protagonists, never affording viewers with the realities (or criticisms) of women and their occupancy of private/domestic space.
The women in these films however, are able to lie faceless and thoughtless in crumpled sarees and nightgowns, no male gaze to bind their bodies to a decreed acceptable amount of space. They spill out from the frame, with hidden limbs, faces, thoughts—a luxury the traditionally gendered frame would not dream of providing.
11:45 am 366 notes
Maurice Sand , Werewolves , (c.1852)
Illustration for “Légendes Rustiques” by George Sand.
(Source: kirgiakos, via mercurialblonde)
