ouá ouõouou

4. Always start from the middle. The beginning is like the scorched edge of a cake that’s touched the cake pan. You may need it just to get going, but it isn’t really edible.

6. Don’t use anything just because “that’s how it always is.” Paragraphing, quotation marks, characters that still go by the same name even though you’ve turned the page: all those are just conventions that exist to serve you. If they don’t work, forget about them. The fact that a particular rule applies in every book you’ve ever read doesn’t mean it has to apply in your book too.

7. Write like yourself. If you try to write like Nabokov, there will always be at least one person (whose name is Nabokov) who’ll do it better than you. But when it comes to writing the way you do, you’ll always be the world champion at being yourself.

[..]

Our films will be:

Cinematic analogies that use reality directly as one of the two elements of the analogy. Example: If we should want to express the anguished state of one of our protagonists, instead of describing it in its various phases of suffering, we would give an equivalent impression with the sight of a jagged and cavernous mountain. The mountains, seas, woods, cities, crowds, armies, squadrons, aeroplanes will often be our formidable expressive words: the universe will be our vocabulary. Example: We want to give a sensation of strange cheerfulness: we show a chair cover flying comically around an enormous coat stand until they decide to join. We want to give the sensation of anger: we fracture the angry man into a whirlwind of little yellow balls. We want to give the anguish of a hero who has lost his faith and lapsed into a dead neutral skepticism: we show the hero in the act of making an inspired speech to a great crowd; suddenly we bring on Giovanni Giolitti who treasonably stuffs a thick forkful of macaroni into the hero’s mouth, drowning his winged words in tomato sauce.

We shall add color to the dialogue by swiftly, simultaneously showing every image that passes through the actors’ brains. Example: representing a man who will say to his woman: “You’re as lovely as a gazelle,” we shall show the gazelle. Example: if a character says, “I contemplate your fresh and luminous smile as a traveler after a long rough trip contemplates the sea from high on a mountain,” we shall show traveler, sea, mountain.

This is how we shall make our characters as understandable as if they talked.

Cinematic poems, speeches, and poetry. We shall make all of their component images pass across the screen. Example: “Canto dell’amore” [Song of Love] by Giosuè Carducci:

In their German strongholds perched Like falcons meditating the hunt We shall show the strongholds, the falcons in ambush.

From the churches that raise long marble arms to heaven, in prayer to God Prom the convents between villages and towns crouching darkly to the sound of bells like cuckoos among far-spaced trees singing boredoms and unexpected joys... We shall show churches that little by little are changed into imploring women, God beaming down from on high, the convents, the cuckoos, and so on.

Example: “Sogno d’Estate” [Summer’s Dream] by Giosuè Carducci:

Among your ever-sounding strains of battle, Homer, I am conquered by the warm hour: I bow my head in sleep on Scamander’s bank, but my heart flees to the Tyrrhenian Sea. We shall show Carducci wandering amid the tumult of the Achaians, deftly avoiding the galloping horses, paying his respects to Homer, going for a drink with Ajax to the inn, The Red Scamander, and at the third glass of wine his heart, whose palpitations we ought to see, Pops out of his jacket like a huge red balloon and flies over the Gulf Of Rapallo. This is how we make films out of the most secret movements of genius.

Thus we shall ridicule the works of the passéist poets, transforming to the great benefit of the public the most nostalgically monotonous weepy poetry into violent, exciting, and highly exhilarating spectacles.

[Photo from the Futurist movie Thais] Cinematic simultaneity and interpenetration of different times and places. We shall project two or three different visual episodes at the same time, one next to the other. Cinematic musical researches (dissonances, harmonies, symphonies of gestures, events, colors, lines, etc.). Dramatized states of mind on film. Daily exercises in freeing ourselves from mere photographed logic. Filmed dramas of objects. (Objects animated, humanized, baffled, dressed up, impassioned, civilized, dancing—objects removed from their normal surroundings and put into an abnormal state that, by contrast, throws into relief their amazing construction and nonhuman life.) Show windows of filmed ideas, events, types, objects, etc. Congresses, flirts, fights and marriages of funny faces, mimicry, etc. Example: a big nose that silences a thousand congressional fingers by ringing an ear, while two policemen’s moustaches arrest a tooth. Filmed unreal reconstructions of the human body. Filmed dramas of disproportion (a thirsty man who pulls out a tiny drinking straw that lengthens umbilically as far as a lake and dries it up instantly.) Potential dramas and strategic plans of filmed feelings. Linear, plastic, chromatic equivalences, etc., of men, women, events, thoughts, music, feelings, weights, smells, noises (with white lines on black we shall show the inner, physical rhythm of a husband who discovers his wife in adultery and chases the lover - rhythm of soul and rhythm of legs). Filmed words-in-freedom in movement (synoptic tables of Iyric values—dramas of humanized or animated letters—orthographic dramas—typographical dramas—geometric dramas—numeric sensibility, etc.). Painting + sculpture + plastic dynamism + words-in-freedom + composed noises [intonarumori] + architecture + synthetic theatre = Futurist cinema.

Steina Vasulka, Geomania, 1987

Please, keep on lying to me, don’t make the room too bright too fast. We are obliged by an unwritten contract, to create myths and images wrapped into a sequences for you to glance at in the dark. Don’t close your eyes, avoid deliberate blindness — see between the lines. The brain interpolates the blind spot based on information from the other eye, so, the blind spot is not normally perceived. We had the opportunity to stare at that the blind spot of history, we met the sighted people who create it, the archivists, the curators, the film preservationists who decide what our collective blind spot will be. A barrier that by choice we will interrupt, is it removable or is it permanent? We almost reached the limit, we sought the forbidden and when we asked for it we were told to look elsewhere. What makes us curious, what are we afraid of? Why do we close our eyes? Why do we keep staring when we no longer can? Whether in the depiction of the world around us, in social or political roles, or the medium itself, film is full of blind spots. And if we are allowed to say so, we collected them for you to see..

~

Over the fall of 2014 a group of students from different departments of the Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague had the opportunity to work with the film collection of the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam and explore it under the of theme ‘forbidden look’, the students glanced at found footage and used it as the basis to create new work.

Spanning from performances to installations and films the students created a programme combining their own work with found footage to best reflect their explorations of taboos in the cinematic field of the avant-garde.

Work by: Sarah Abelnica,Lydia Buijs,Victoria Douka-Doukopoulou,Tanya Eftal,Sanne Glasbergen, Hans Poel,Flor Rezink and Zindzi Zweitering Under the guidance of Anna Abrahams and Jan Frederik Groot

the stills above :

Why men don’t leave – Sarah Abelnica

The Bait – Flor Renzik