life...

“I do not know what kind of art it is that the people have to seem older ... Art means happy and beautiful things that touch you. Art is to rejuvenate the people, not to make them decrepit. Well, to continue being alive is also an art. I suppose it's the most sublime art of all, don't you think so?"

quando leio sobre 'novelistas' a usar os ebooks para uma maior interactividade, mudar o meio, etc, etc., um pouco como o 3d - é um pouco cómico, tragicómico. bom era que soubessem usar o meio que têm.

aqui revejo o jogo de espelhos, caleidoscópio de realidades que associo a Pamuk e suspeito uma ligação à cultura persa que não descortino por desconhecimento.

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It’s fascinating to consider the ideological factors that influence how film canons are formed, especially when it comes to films that depict unfamiliar cultures. Without thinking much about it, we tend to prefer American movies that suggest either that foreigners are just like us (the liberal approach, as in Samuel Fuller’s China Gate, in which Angie Dickinson is cast as a Eurasian) or that they’re devils from another planet (consider the xenophobic and racist depiction of Vietcong soldiers in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter). The possibility that they might be neither is often more than the media can handle, with the unfortunate consequence that movies are less likely to make it big when they depict foreigners as complex beings who are not carbon copies of ourselves — movies, in short, that are human in their approach but not necessarily idealistic or sentimental or bourgeois humanist. When it comes to foreign movies that depict their own cultures, the same rules apply but with even greater force.
(daqui, um artigo sério mas cheio de ravinas)

difícil é sair dos mesmos pensamentos sobre os mesmos pensamentos, com piada (outra vez) a frase make it big. (ou seja, qual é o objectivo do filme-cineasta-cinema?)

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"While reading 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler' after a long time I wondered if there exists an equivalent in the cinema: a cinema about the director-viewer relationship. Godard, especially Prenom:Carmen, comes to mind. But a relatively closer equivalent in cinema to Calvino's masterpiece can be found in Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami's 'Close-Up'. It does not have the searing poeticism and mystical anguish of 'Taste of Cherry' or the complex social commentary of 'Ten', but is as rewarding a cinema as any of his other movies. It is self-reflective the way 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler' is. The movie is about the making of a documentary of the trial of a cinema lover who poses as the Iranian film director (and Kiarostami's close friend) Mohsen Makhmalbaf (The Cyclist, Gabbeh) to another cinema loving family and promises to cast the family in his next movie. The poseur himself, like the family, is a great fan of Makhmalbaf and has taught himself about the art of movie making by reading though he never had any practical experience of directing. He stages detailed rehearsals in the family house and enjoys their hospitality. The impostor is caught and brought into trial and the trial is shot in a documentary style for the movie is ostensibly about the making of the documentary. The trial reveals the inherent ambiguity of the impostor’s motives: money or fame or a symbolic gesture regarding the fundamental irreconcilability between art and life or maybe a pure love of cinema as the impersonator claims originally. The movie ends happily, the impersonator meets the real Makhmalbaf, played of course by Makhmalbaf himself, and he is forgiven by all. But the uneasiness of the treacherous questions regarding the imprecise, shifting relationship between the director, the medium and its audience remains embedded as an open, almost pre-articulate question in the movie-goer’s psyche much after he has finished watching Kiarostami’s little gem."

(daqui)

(há que tempos que não leio Calvino). I wonder if this intertwining of fiction and life, author and character and reader are something recurrent in Persian poetic tradition.

por exemplo, as 1001 noites são contos que parece terem origem no século 8, compilados no séc. 9  e só no séc. 14 lhes foi colocada a moldura, a história de Sherezade.