"There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious."

"Every breaking away from the conventional, dead, official cinema is a healthy sign. We need less perfect but more free films. If only our younger film makers – I have no hopes for the old generation – would really break loose, completely loose, out of themselves, wildly, anarchically! There is no other way to break the frozen cinematic conventions than through a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses."

"Cada plano isolado vale por um filme, é um filme. Foi assim que a história do cinema começou. Lumière: O almoço do bebê é uma cena simples, a mulher e a criança; por trás, as folhas das árvores se movem. Existe um equilíbrio entre os galhos que se movem e a historinha em primeiro plano. Este equilíbrio é o melhor de tudo. Cada parte da imagem vive, independentemente, e isto é bom de ver. A indústria do cinema procura exatamente eliminar este equilíbrio. Se você elimina a historinha contada num filme convencional, as imagens se tornam absurdas, sem vida. Se você elimina a historinha de qualquer de meus filmes, ou a historinha contada num filme de Dovjenko, ou nos filmes de vários outros como nós, restará sempre um jardim de imagens. E, tal como num jardim as imagens não precisam formar um conceito claro. Você nem precisa entendê-las, basta fazer o que se faz num jardim: caminhar, caminhar entre elas"

"But here’s the thing
 I am not there
I have fallen to misty pieces
yet you attempt to name and embed me."

"I suppose I give as much as I want to give. I decide immediately if I like a person and if I do, then I'm myself, and if I don't, then I give nothing. (...) But people do have completely the wrong idea about me, almost the opposite, in fact. And I'm quite happy for it to be like that. Do I want loads of people to know who I am? I'd much rather they didn't have a clue."

"Talkies substituted passive participation instead of the deeper state of active communion that silence encouraged."

"(...) I simply looked at the world, not really prepared for anything.”

"Many is the mirage I chased. Always I was overreaching myself. The oftener I touched reality, the harder I bounced back to the world of illusion, which is the name for everyday life. 'Experience! More experience!' I clamored. In a frantic effort to arrive at some kind of order, some tentative working program, I would sit down quietly now and then and spend long, long hours mapping out a plan of procedure. Plans, such as architects and engineers sweat over, were never my forte. But I could always visualize my dreams in a cosmogonic pattern. Though I could never formulate a plot I could balance and weigh opposing forces, characters, situations, events, distribute them in a sort of heavenly lay-out, always with plenty of space between, always with the certitude that there is no end, only worlds within worlds ad infinitum, and that wherever one left off one had created a world, a world finite, total, complete."

"The confusion is not my invention. We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of."

"I see only one common point shared by young directors: we all play pinball while older directors drink scotch and play cards."

"It’s good to be free; for then you can sleep and let desire and malaise follow each other without caring what happens. I’m going to become completely rusty."

"Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them."

"But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths." 

"'Como todo mundo, sinto necessidade da família e dos amigos, de afeto e contatos amigáveis. Não sou feito de pedra ou de ferro, como um hidrante ou um poste.'
Talvez seja isto o que realmente conta: chegar ao cerne do sentimento humano, apesar das evidências."

"And what next? (...) Little by little everything will return to normal. I'll find new interests, new acquaintances, but I won't be able to devote all of myself to them. (...) The only thing left to for me is to wait."

"We question life to seek out some meaning. Yet to preserve all the simple human truths we need mysteries. The mystery of happiness, death, love. (...)"

"Yes, what I need now is a touch of the unimaginable, coloured for preference, that would do me good."

"Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody — not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms — had the smallest idea of what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (...)"

"Normally I didn’t see a great deal. I didn’t hear a great deal either. I didn’t pay attention. Strictly speaking I wasn’t there. Strictly speaking I believe I’ve never been anywhere."

"Won't let the creeping ivy
Won't let the nervous bury me
Our veins are thin
Our rivers poisoned"

"When you're in the muck, you can only see muck. If you somehow manage to float above it, you still see the muck, but you see it from a different perspective. And you see other things, too. That's the consolation of philosophy"

sobre tudo aquilo que não se pode controlar.

"(...) The intervention of the camera necessarily distorts and alters human behaviour, ergo the resulting piece of film cannot be objective or truthful so that film is deemed to have failed. Why failure? It is perhaps more generous and worth while to simply accept that a documentary can never be the real world, that the camera can never capture life as it would have unravelled had it not interfered, and the results of this collision between apparatus and subject are what constitutes a documentary – not the utopian vision of what might have transpired if only the camera had not been there."

"There are too many ideas and things and people. Too many directions to go. I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something, is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size."

"I am free and that is why I am lost."

da aniquilação pela vida prática: dois meses já planejados pra domínio do photoshop.

(e a consequente constante criação surgida disto)

sobre este ano: percepção de isolamento é apenas real na sua forma mais crua.

após a percepção, a busca por sua aniquilação.

negação do terceiro sujeito, e retorno ao primeiro.

"Quando a tecnologia e o dinheiro tiverem conquistado o mundo; quando qualquer acontecimento em qualquer lugar e a qualquer tempo se tiver tornado acessível com rapidez; quando se puder assistir em tempo real a um atentado no ocidente e a um concerto sinfônico no oriente; quando tempo significar apenas rapidez online; quando o tempo, como história, houver desaparecido da existência de todos os povos, quando um esportista ou artista de mercado valer como grande homem de um povo; quando as cifras em milhões significarem triunfo, - então, justamente então – reviverão como fantasma as perguntas: para quê? Para onde? E agora? A decadência dos povos já terá ido tão longe, que quase não terão mais força de espírito para ver e avaliar a decadência simplesmente como... Decadência. Essa constatação nada tem a ver com pessimismo cultural, nem tampouco, com otimismo... O obscurecimento do mundo, a destruição da terra, a massificação do homem, a suspeita odiosa contra tudo que é criador e livre, já atingiu tais dimensões, que categorias tão pueris, como pessimismo e otimismo, já haverão de ter se tornado ridículas."

"It tastes like ashes."

"[the existence of God, life after death, the meaning of life] were always obsessions of mine, even as a very young child. These were things that interested me as the years went on. My friends were more preoccupied with social issues-issues such as abortion, racial discrimination, and Communism-and those issues just never caught my interest. Of course they mattered to me as a citizen to some degree...but they never really caught my attention artistically. I always felt that the problems of the world would never ever be solved until people came to terms with the deeper issues-that there would be an aimless reshuffling of world leaders and governments and programs. There was a difference, of course, but it was a minor difference as to who the president was and what the issues were. They seemed major, but as you step back with perspective they were more alike than they were different. The deeper issues always interested me."

"In the times of bigness, spectaculars, one hundred million dollar movie productions, I want to speak for the small, invisible acts of human spirit: so subtle, so small, that they die when brought out under the Klieg lights. I want to celebrate the small forms of cinema: the lyrical form, the poem, the watercolor, etude, sketch, portrait, arabesque, and bagatelle, and little 8mm songs. In the times when everybody wants to succeed and sell, I want to celebrate those who embrace social and daily failure to pursue the invisible, the personal things that bring no money and no bread and make no contemporary history, art history or any other history."

"It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable, and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp."

"And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but it doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved. And the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I feel so fucking sad, and the truth is I've felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long I've been pretending I'm OK, just to get along, just for, I don't know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own. Well, fuck everybody."

"Interior liberty is universal."

"(...) But you must have imperfect hours to get perfect hours. You must kill ten hours to make two hours live. What you must be careful of is not to kill all the hours, all the years."

note to self: creation can come from routine.

"For Peixoto, the experience offered by Limite cannot be adequately captured by language, but was made to be felt. Therefore, the spectator should subjugate himself to the images as to “anguished cords of a synthetic and pure language of cinema”. According to the director, his film is “meticulously precise as invisible wheels of a clock”, where long shots are surrounded and linked by shorter ones as in a “planetary system”. Peixoto characterizes Limite as a “desperate scream” aiming for resonance instead of comprehension. “The movie does not want to analyze. It shows. It projects itself as a tuning fork, a pitch, a resonance of time itself”, capturing the flow between past and present, object details and contingence as if it had always “existed in the living and in the inanimate”, or detaching itself tacitly from them."

"There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall."

"Our heads are round so thought can change direction."

sobre a época da ignorância (imposta pelo cinema):

quentin tarantino e robert rodriguez deveriam ser proibidos de fazer filmes.

em oposição, david lynch em 1080p é alucinante.

"To understand is to perceive patterns."

interações humanas são puramente feita de padrões.

a negação disto é apenas em si mesmo.

"For me, distance montage opens up the mysteries of the movement of the universe. I can feel how everything is made and put together; I can sense its rhythmic movement."

"Why did I get involved? Is it because Jean-Luc has been my friend for 20 years? Or is it because Jean-Luc is the world’s greatest filmmaker? Jean-Luc Godard is not the only director for whom filming is like breathing, but he’s the one who breathes best. He is rapid like Rossellini, sly like Sacha Guitry, musical like Orson Wells, simple like Pagnol, wounded like Nicholas Ray, effective like Hitchcock, profound like Bergman, and insolent like nobody else. Professor Chiarini, Director of the Venice Film Festival, says: 'There’s cinema before Godard; and cinema after Godard.' It’s true, and as the years pass it’s increasingly clear that Breathless has marked the cinema, that it’s a decisive turning point, like Citizen Kane in 1940. Godard blew the system up, he messed it up, just like Picasso did with painting; and like Picasso, Godard has made everything possible. More prosaically, I can say that I have become a producer of the thirteenth film of Jean-Luc Godard because I noticed that the people who invested money in the preceding twelve masterpieces got rich."

"I spent a great deal of my life being ignored. I was always very happy that way. Being ignored is a great privilege. That is how I think I learnt to see what others do not see and to react to situations differently. I simply looked at the world, not really prepared for anything."

“The square root of I is I.”

(mais e mais seletivo de quais egos alheios suportar)

"Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten."

You're only buried with your ideologies.

"There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face."

"Your mind is restless
They say you're getting better
But you don't feel any better"

"Dying should come easy:
like a freight train you
don't hear when
your back is
turned."

“

There is much to be said for contentment and painlessness, for these bearable and submissive days, on which neither pain nor pleasure is audible, but pass by whispering and on tip-toe. But the worst of it is that it is just this contentment that I cannot endure. After a short time it fills me with irrepressible hatred and nausea. In desperation I have to escape and throw myself on the road to pleasure, or, if that cannot be, on the road to pain.

For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocracy.

”

"I can't explain why it's a sin the state I'm living in
i just feel so tired
I go outside"

"I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction."

"(...) para que serve a vida? não sei. talvez não sirva pra nada. talvez se resuma a um ininterrupto exercício de minimizar perdas. trabalha-se para não morrer de fome. quando já se tem o suficiente, acumulamos para não morrer de fome no futuro. ou para exibir cultura e dinheiro. bebemos sucos naturais e corremos na esteira para retardar nosso apodrecimento físico, ainda que inevitável. entorpecemo-nos de álcool, sexo e congêneres imaginando driblar assim o tédio. amamo-nos na ilusão de eliminar a solidão como condição primária. minimizar perdas. de qualquer modo, é tudo que temos (...)"

"Oh see, first off you gotta realize - everything for me is a reconstruction or deconstruction. I would actually say deconstruction (...)"

de constante desconstrução e reconstrução, resta a imobilidade.

(cotidiano de retorno ao ponto zero)

"Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked."

“Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing.”

"I conceive of the film as a modern art form particularly interesting to the sense of sight. Painting has its own peculiar problems and specific sensations, and so has the film. But there are also problems in which the dividing line is obliterated, or where the two infringe upon each other. More especially, the cinema can fulfill certain promises made by the ancient arts, in the realization of which painting and film become close neighbors and work together."

“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing."

“Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.”

"Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit."

"You take every fucking feeling you have, put it in a box and bury it."

"The frame pauses briefly before the projector’s lamp, and then moves on. Our lives are accumulations of ephemeral images and moments that our consciousness constructs into a reality. No sooner have we grasped the present, it is relegated to the past, where it only exists in the subjective history of each individual. The images can be thought of as desires or memories: actions that take place in the mind. The film stock can be thought of as the body, that which enables these events to be seen. Like our own bodies, this celluloid is a fragile and ephemeral medium that can deteriorate in countless ways."

“Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing their whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.”

"Not that human life was so highly valued. Keeping order appears to be the business of the authorities, but in fact it's the business of all. Order. Freedom, however, has nothing human. It's something divine, something... our lives are too short for us to know properly. If you're looking for a link, think of Pericles, order and freedom are linked by passion. We have to believe in both, we suffer from both. Both from order and freedom. But human life is meaningful, rich, beautiful and filthy. It links everything. It mistreats freedom only... wasting it, as if it was junk. People don't like freedom, they are afraid of it. The strange thing is there is nothing to fear about freedom... order, on the other hand, can often be frightening."

"Photography is dead! It's all about death... memory, and desire, aging, and death."

"I still believe in humanity. I know it’s an illusion, but I want to believe.”

("Quero acreditar que todos nós temos a humanidade no sangue. É uma ilusão, eu sei.")

"The process of making films in communion with oneself, the way a painter works or a writer, need not now be solely experimental. Contrary to what people say, using the first-person in films tends to be a sign of humility: 'All I have to offer is myself'."

"And I don't want, and I don't want
To keep myself from moving on anyways
And I know how too many tough times
Can ruin the day from good ways

(If I wanna, when I need to
You know I could just
Come back to it anyhow)"

"- You're gonna land somewhere. You'll be fine. You're talented, you're smart. You're ready.

- What if I'm not?

- You want to know a secret? I spent my whole life being scared. Scared of not being ready, of not being right of not being who I should be. And where did it get me?

(...)

- You can't stay here!"

"Excuse me
But I just have to
Explode
Explode this body
Off me

I'll be brand new
Brand new tomorrow
A little bit tired
But brand new"

"The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque"

"Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms"

"
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. And intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way."

"(...) You'll have to learn to live in a very strange new world."

"The years shall run like rabbits,For in my arms I holdThe Flower of the Ages,And the first love of the world.'But all the clocks in the cityBegan to whirr and chime:You cannot conquer Time.
'In the burrows of the NightmareWhere Justice naked is,Time watches from the shadowAnd coughs when you would kiss.
'In headaches and in worryVaguely life leaks away,And Time will have his fancyTo-morrow or to-day."

‎"For me, the cinema is primarily a form. A film must have a form, otherwise it doesn't say anything. 'Form' is something visual, not intellectual. When I'm making a film I look a lot, and think very little. You think later, during the editing, not while you're shooting"

"I'm the hero of the story

Don't need to be saved

It's all right, it's all right, it's all right, it's all right

No one's got it all"

"não conseguiu firmar o nobre pacto

entre o cosmo sangrento e a alma pura

(...)

gladiador defunto, mas intacto

(tanta violência, mas tanta ternura)"

"But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously..."

"Nada de valor absoluto de uma imagem.

Imagens e sons só terão valor e força na utilização à qual você os destina."

se na literatura há "livro do desassossego", em cinema um paralelo equivalente com "notas sobre o cinematógrafo".

"Stop the mindless wishing that things would be different. Rather than wasting time and emotional and spiritual energy in explaining why we don't have what we want, we can start to pursue other ways to get it."

"(...) Tied to a night they never met

You know it's time
That we grow old and do some shit"

"(...) who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping (...)"

"You are no longer inaccessible, the limpid, the transparent one (...) You are waiting."

"Because now I am grown so old and neutral...."

"By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired."

"(...) Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that."

"Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity."

‘The man’s the work. Something doesn’t come out of nothing"

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life."

"I, I thought of that old joke, y'know, the, this... this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, 'Doc, uh, my brother's crazy; he thinks he's a chicken.' And, uh, the doctor says, 'Well, why don't you turn him in?' The guy says, 'I would, but I need the eggs.' Well, I guess that's pretty much now how I feel about relationships; y'know, they're totally irrational, and crazy, and absurd, and... but, uh, I guess we keep goin' through it because, uh, most of us... need the eggs."

"I learned that just beneath the surface, there's another world, and still different worlds as one digs deeper. Nothing is as it seems -- I knew it as a kid, but couldn't find proof. It was just a feeling. There is goodness like those blue skies and flowers, but another force -- a wild pain and decay also accompanies everything."

5. i don't express a lot of things that i should express.

7. i try to avoid disagreements all the time.

9. i am too sensitive, for a lot of things.

10. i don't like, at all, how people try to find sense in everything and how they hate the lack of sense that exists in life.

11. if i don't make a carrer in cinema, i'll be really miserable.

13. i do believe in astrology, more than i should.

14. my biggest fear is to suffer some bad psychical violence.

15. i hate the ideas of nations, and patriotism.

16. i dispise any justifications to war and use of weapons, of any kind.

18. i prefer to be disliked by my ideas and beliefs than be liked by agreeing to bullshits.

19. i was sure about having a carrer in photography, not too sure these days.

23. i have a few close friends, not able to have a lot.

24. kindness is not a virtue to me, it's a necessity.

25. i feel deslocated and misundesrtood, most of the times.

(07/02/2009)

"These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom."

"Ser é perceber ou ser percebido."

"The endless cycle of idea and action,

Endless invention, endless experiment,

Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;

Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;

Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. "

"In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement."

"Nothing so ridiculously teenage and desperate, nothing so childish
At a better pace, slower and more calculated, no chance of escape

(...)

Still kisses with saliva, no longer empty and frantic like a cat tied to a stick

That's driven into frozen winter shit, the ability to laugh at weakness
Calm fitter, healthier and more productive, a pig in a cage on antibiotics"