la photographie et le cinema

I was returning from the railroad station. In my ears, there remained chugs and bursts of steam from a departing train. Somebody cries in laughter, a whistle, the station bell, the clanking locomotive…whispers, shouts, farewells. And walking away I thought I need to find a machine not only to describe but to register, to photograph these sounds. Otherwise, one cannot organize or assemble them. They fly like time. Perhaps a camera? That records the visual. But to organize the visual world and not the audible world? Is this the answer?

—Dziga Vertov (AKA David Arkadevich Kaufman), 1924

Movies in Hollywood now, for the past 20 or 30 years, are made mainly by lawyers or agents.

—Jean-Luc Godard, The Christian Science Monitor - August 3, 1994.

In achieving the aims of baroque art, photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness. Painting was forced, as it turned out, to offer us illusion and this illusion was reckoned sufficient unto art. Photography and the cinema on the other hand are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism.

—André Bazin

People don’t become inured to what they are shown - if that’s the right way to describe what happens - because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration.

—Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

If this “journal” does not mention the war, it is first of all because this is not a “journal”. It is my little secret ruse for preserving joys or my happiness, my immense happiness, all perfumed with inexplicable things. And at the same time it is protection. Protection against “too much happiness”.

—Jacques-Henri Lartigue