retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time # 939
"If the element of garbage cannot be separated into the parts which make it up, neither can cinema be divided into its composing elements. Marcelo Masagão’s Act and Wind a collage film composed of cinematic citations, is a personal homage to the cinema impressed upon the director’s retina,. We have all the elements of cinema, but Act and Wind’s arbitrary editing drains the cinematic image of its elementarity. The cinematic gestures are categorized, rationalized, organized by similitude: the female gaze, the rolling object, the round object, mirrors, ringing door bells, opening doors, turning keys, running, desire, old age, youth, shadows, clocks, darkness.
"If the element of garbage cannot be separated into the parts which make it up, neither can cinema be divided into its composing elements. Marcelo Masagão’s Act and Wind a collage film composed of cinematic citations, is a personal homage to the cinema impressed upon the director’s retina,. We have all the elements of cinema, but Act and Wind’s arbitrary editing drains the cinematic image of its elementarity. The cinematic gestures are categorized, rationalized, organized by similitude: the female gaze, the rolling object, the round object, mirrors, ringing door bells, opening doors, turning keys, running, desire, old age, youth, shadows, clocks, darkness.
"There is, to be a sure, a certain pleasure that every film-goer will have in playing the game of identification in a film composed of films. Along with the pleasure of recognition, comes the sweet frustration for the films you recognize but can’t identify, a yearning for the films you can neither identify nor recognize, and a strange sort of prophetic foresight for those films you identify but don’t recognize. These intertextual gratifications aside, Act and Wind never elevates itself beyond being an arbitrary concatenation of images whose only decisive link is that created through taste. It is a film full of cuts but devoid of montage. Here, the cut is used never to compare, to clash, to generate; only to assimilate or smooth over (there are thematic cuts, formal cuts, rhythmic cuts, musical cuts, but no intellectual, political, ideological cuts). In montage theory 1+1=3, but here 1+1 is always equal to 0. And without thought, without idea, this collection of cinematic images becomes derivative, like a book of quotations, a gust of wind without the force of act.
"Depleted of any motivation other than that of taste Act and Wind presents a assembly of cinematic citations, an illusion of choice which emphasizes only individual taste as its holy grail, while concealing the social, communal and class structures that create this taste. Cinema becomes an object purified of sense as well as significance, and all that remains are shrink-wrapped, hydroponic images, radiating from an automatic screen, whose only essence is the faint reverberation of ‘I like…’
"Depleted of any motivation other than that of taste Act and Wind presents a assembly of cinematic citations, an illusion of choice which emphasizes only individual taste as its holy grail, while concealing the social, communal and class structures that create this taste. Cinema becomes an object purified of sense as well as significance, and all that remains are shrink-wrapped, hydroponic images, radiating from an automatic screen, whose only essence is the faint reverberation of ‘I like…’
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