Note made in the dark
1. One of my greatest abilities is that I can write in the dark. Somehow I believe I am a genius.
2. I must admit, I always try too hard to appear more intelligent than I really am.
3. One of the first things I did during my residency: bought Robert Bresson’s Notes Sur Le Cinematographe, the French version. And I started to read it from cover to cover, without knowing much French. I had the strange belief that I would be able to understand it. Or at least I would be able to learn some French after reading it. But it didn’t work that way. Maybe I should have started with Le Petit Prince.
4. I learned most of my French in the cinema. French films are shown without subtitles, and foreign films are shown with French subtitles. I spend most of my time in Cinémathèque Française. I don’t even check what film is showing. I just go there at night, buy a ticket and sit in the front row.
5. Why do we love cinema? Because in the safe world of cinema, facing these fictional characters, we become more human than we really are. We become kinder and more sympathetic; we simply become better people.
6. Because in the safe world of cinema, we are merely observers. We stay safe from the danger and the emotional threat of life itself, safe from growing indifferent.
7. Because in the safe world of cinema, we experience many lives.
8. Why make films? Because film is the greatest art form of this century, and I want to be on the side of the greatest.
9. Because in real life, we can hardly understand each other.
10. Because that is the only way I can hang out with friends.
11. Because I don’t know any better way to live.
12. Because there is a part of me, sad and fragile, that can only be shown to you in the dark.
Notes by Tan Chui Mui, taken from an article on Criticine
2 comments:
chey..i was wondering since when you "learnt" french...
She writes honestly, but also writes dangerously. There is an integral intersubjective passivity that she presupposes in the element of watching (i.e. Gazing) that magnifies distances and reifies them. "Because in the safe world of cinema, we experience many lives"; but her cinema redoubles itself like a maternal envelope, the "many lives" a given anasthesia as much as it is amniotic. "Because in real life, we can hardly understand each other" - therefore is it cinema's job to manufacture an hermeneutic interface based on the rigorous exchange of images? I like to think in a cinema, not think like a cinema.
OK, rant over. Keep working.
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