The personal blog of Robert Hardy:
Filmmaker, Musician, Writer
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
![“If I were to explain things myself and offer an interpretation [of my films] then this would automatically reduce the spectator’s ability to find their own answers. My films are offerings, I invite the audience to deal with them, think about them and reflect upon them and, ultimately, to find their own answers. I also think that an author doesn’t always necessarily know what he intends and what the meaning is behind his work. For example, I am always amazed by the many theses and books I read about myself, all of which reveal what I supposedly wanted to express in my films or was supposed to have dealt with. I strongly believe it would be very counterproductive for the audience if I were to answer the questions I am raising in my films, because then no one would have to think about them.”
Michael HanekeBorn March 23, 1942](http://25.media.tumblr.com/bdd894451a5276a61b3ad7d037005681/tumblr_mk2kcsGqBC1qf7r5lo1_r2_500.jpg)
“If I were to explain things myself and offer an interpretation [of my films] then this would automatically reduce the spectator’s ability to find their own answers. My films are offerings, I invite the audience to deal with them, think about them and reflect upon them and, ultimately, to find their own answers. I also think that an author doesn’t always necessarily know what he intends and what the meaning is behind his work. For example, I am always amazed by the many theses and books I read about myself, all of which reveal what I supposedly wanted to express in my films or was supposed to have dealt with. I strongly believe it would be very counterproductive for the audience if I were to answer the questions I am raising in my films, because then no one would have to think about them.”
Michael Haneke
Born March 23, 1942
(Source: strangewood)
“I have never taken on a project offered to me by a producer or a production company. My films emerge from my own desire to say a particular thing at a particular time. The root of any film project for me is this inner need to express something. What nurtures this root and makes it grow into a tree is the script. What makes the tree bear flowers and fruit is the directing.”
“I am often asked if there is anything special I do to make my films understood by foreigners. I reply that I am making my films as a Japanese as honestly as I can. So these films are understood by other people and sometimes are loved by them. It seems that everyone becomes closer to everyone else through cinema.” — Akira Kurosawa
The central character of my latest film, The Sacrifice, is also a weak man in the vulgar, pedestrian understanding of the word. He is no hero, but he is a thinker and an honest man, who turns out to be capable of sacrifice in the name of a higher ideal. He rises to the occasion, without attempting to shed his responsibility or trying to foist it onto anyone else. He is in danger of not being understood, for his decisive action is such that to those around him it can only appear catastrophically destructive: that is the tragic conflict of his role. He nevertheless takes the crucial step, thereby infringing the rules of ‘normal’ behaviour and laying himself open to the charge of folly, because he is conscious of his link with ultimate reality, with what could be termed world destiny. In all this he is merely obeying his vocation as he feels it in his heart - he is not master of his fate but its servant; and it may well be that through individual exertions such as his, which nobody notices or understands, world harmony is preserved.
Andrei Tarkovsky on The Sacrifice (1986); Sculpting in Time (via forgottencityiram)
What, then, is the main theme that had to sound through Stalker? In the most general terms, it is the theme of human dignity; of what that dignity is; and of how a man suffers if he has no self-respect.
Let me remind the reader that when the characters in the film set out on their journey into the Zone, their destination is a certain room in which, we are told, everybody’s most secret wish will be granted. And while the Writer and the Scientist, led by Stalker, are making their hazardous way over the strange expanse of the Zone, their guide tells them at one point either a true story, or else a legend, about another Stalker, nicknamed Diko-óbraz. He had gone to the secret place in order to ask for his brother, who had been killed through his fault, to be brought back to life. When Diko-óbraz returned home, however, he discovered that he had become fabulously wealthy. The Zone had granted what was in reality his most heartfelt desire, and not the wish that he had wanted to imagine was most precious to him. And Diko-óbraz had hanged himself.
And so the two men reach their objective. They have been through a great deal, thought about themselves, reassessed themselves; and they haven’t the courage to step across the threshold into the room which they have risked their lives to reach. They have become conscious that at the tragic, deepest level of awareness they are imperfect. They had summoned the strength to look into themselves - and had been horrified; but in the end they lack the spiritual courage to believe in themselves.
The arrival of Stalker’s wife in the café where they are resting confronts the Writer and the Scientist with a puzzling, to them incomprehensible, phenomenon. There before them is a woman who has been through untold miseries because of her husband, and has had a sick child by him; but she continues to love him with the same selfless, unthinking devotion as in her youth. Her love and her devotion are that final miracles which can be set against the unbelief cynicism, moral vacuum poisoning the modern world, of which both the Writer and the Scientist are victims.
Andrei Tarkovsky on Stalker (1979); Sculpting in Time (via forgottencityiram)
I pride myself on not blogging or re-blogging stupid shit. But, when it comes to stupid Nicholas Cage jokes (all of them), I find it difficult to restrain myself.
“It was precisely this ‘cinematic’ potential for expressing spontaneity that attracted me as a form of personal art. I saw its disruptive strength: a way of bringing about a change. This means of expression can transcend the aesthetic to become experience. My ideal was a ‘living’ cinema that explored the dynamism of the visual communication of beauty, fear and joy. I wanted my personal cinema to transmute the dance of my interior being into a poetry of moving images that would create a new climate of spiritual revelation where the spectator, forgetting that he or she was looking at a work of art, could only become one with the drama.”
Kenneth Anger
Born February 3, 1927
(Source: strangewood)
(Source: femburton)
“Artificial light is simple. It is a specific color temperature and feel. But, natural light is complex and sometimes chaotic. A bounce from the floor or a reflection from the sky can do so much.”
- Emmanuel Lubezki, cinematographer.
Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you’ll look back and realize they were big things.
Kurt Vonnegut (via launicarosa)
(Source: larmoyante)
