A Commonplace Book, February 24, 2023

Jeff Vandermeer, Abbas Kiarostami, Claire Denis, Apichatpong Weerasethakul

"I am not at all interested in theories about cinema. I am only interested in images and people and sound. I am really a very simple person." ~ Claire Denis

“I try to mimic the pattern of memory and of thinking and the randomness of life. It's like a journey. That is the main thing about the beauty of life; that you don't cram. And not only beauty, but also the fact that there is never a concrete thing in life. I want the movie to be a tool of liberation…Liberation from expectation, liberation from the known pattern of time presented in film. It is playful. It’s what keeps me making the films, because I enjoy this play. If I say play, it’s really not intellectual. But play. A game.” ~ Apichatpong Weerasethakul

“I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning and keep on thinking about them for weeks.” ~ Abbas Kiarostami

Hard to describe what those next years felt like to live through. Except as a hollowing out, a loss beyond repair… even as it kept begging to be repaired. While the promise of what had been so very close haunted me. In so many ways.

So much in motion, such energy, it disguised the decay of things, the incremental rot. How much was hollowed out.

Impossible to tell how fast society was collapsing because history had been riddled through with disinformation, and reality was composed of half-fictions and full-on paranoid conspiracy theories. You couldn’t figure out if collapse was a cliff or a gentle slope because all the mental constructs obscured it. Multinationals kept their monopolies, shed jobs or even their identities, but most did not go under. Governments became more autocratic, on average.

Here was fine, there was a disaster. But here was just a different kind of disaster. A thick mist drenched in the smoke of flares that “kept curling back on us. Why fight a mist if all that lay ahead was more of the same?

Those of us who survived the pandemic, and all the rest, passed through so many different worlds. Like time travelers. Some of us lived in the past. Some in the present, some in an unknowable future. If you lived in the past, you disbelieved the conflagration reflected in the eyes of those already looking back at you. You mistook the pity and anger, how they despised you. How, rightly, they despised you.

So we stitched our way through what remained of life. The wounds deeper. The disconnect higher.The shock that shattered our bones yet left us standing.

- “Hummingbird Salamander,” Jeff Vandermeer