misc.

1. If you watch the English version of Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1983) several times, you will begin to believe that if thought itself had a voice it would be Alexandra Stewart's.

2. The ending of Claire Denis's Beau Travail (1999) makes a fairly convincing case that the cinema was invented for the redemption of horrible music.

3. Title for an academic study of Hong Sang-soo: "Towards a Metaphysics of Soju."

4. The problem with Christopher Nolan is he makes movies as if he has never farted.

5. Bresson in black & white is sublime. Bresson in color is really scary.

6. One might be tempted to call the second half of Birth of a Nation (1915) cinema's Original Sin, but I think it came twelve years earlier, with Edison's on-camera electrocution of Topsy the elephant. All we should require of a movie is that it not make us ask "Topsy died for THIS?"

7. Chaplin's "Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot" is a lovely formulation, though I guess he never saw a Mizoguchi movie, where life just gets more tragic in long-shot.

8. Funny how the death of cinema happened just as those who announced it reached an age where one's own death begins to feel like less of an abstraction.

9. The next New Wave is going to be a series of neo-realist superhero movies shot by teenagers with stolen Handycams on the streets of Ciudad Juarez.

10. After we take care of world hunger and economic inequality, our next priority as a species should be to project Hideko Takamine's face onto the moon.