A Personal Ten Best List I Composed For KG

Peter Kubelka -- Adebar (1957)

Raoul Walsh -- The Bowery (1933)

Charles Chaplin -- City Lights (1933)

Eric Rohmer -- Die Marquise von O... (1976)

Ousmane Sembene -- Emitaï (1971)

Jean-Luc Godard -- Film Socialisme (2010)

John Cassavetes -- Love Streams (1984)

Margarida Cordeiro -- Trás-os-Montes (1976)

James Gray -- Two Lovers (2008)

Danièle Huillet -- Von heute auf morgen (1997)


(Though these titles are indeed ten of my all-time favourite movies, their selection reflects only my superficial satisfaction with their look and their variety as a list.)

"Today all economists—even those who are very hostile to Hayek's other arguments (that government regulation of the money supply lies at the root of the business cycle, that political attempts to reduce inequalities in the distribution of income lead to totalitarianism, that the competitive market is the "natural spontaneous order" of human society)—agree that Hayek and company hit this particular nail squarely on the head.

Looking back at the seventy-year trajectory of Communism, it seems very clear that Hayek (and Scott) are right: that its principal flaw is its attempt to concentrate knowledge, authority, and decision-making power at the center rather than pushing the power to act, the freedom to do so, and the incentive to act productively out to the periphery where the people-on-the-spot have the local knowledge to act effectively.

In short, by the end of his book James Scott has argued himself into the intellectual positions adopted by Friedrich Hayek back before World War II. Yet throughout the book Scott appears to be ignorant that the intellectual terrain which he has reached has already been well-explored."

— This anonymous Amazon review of James C. Scott's "Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed" (1999)



"Primitive societies are societies without a State. This factual judgment, accurate in itself, actually hides an opinion, a value judgment that immediately throws doubt on the possibility of constituting political anthropology as a strict science. What the statement says, in fact, is that primitive societies are missing something - the State - that is essential to them, as it is to any other society: our own, for instance. Consequently, those societies are incomplete; they are not quite true societies--they are not civilized--their existence continues to suffer the painful experience of a lack--the lack of a State--which, try as they may, they will never make up. Whether clearly stated or not, that is what comes through in the explorers' chronicles and the work of researchers alike: society is inconceivable without the State; the State is the destiny of every society. One detects an ethnocentric bias in this approach; more often than not it is unconscious, and so the more firmly anchored. Its immediate, spontaneous reference, while perhaps not the best known, is in any case the most familiar. In effect, each one of us carries within himself, internalized like the believer's faith, the certitude that society exists for the State. How, then, can one conceive of the very existence of primitive societies if not as the rejects of universal history, anachronistic relics of a remote stage that everywhere else has been transcended? Here one recognizes ethnocentrism's other face, the complementary conviction that history is a one-way progression, that every society is condemned to enter into that history and pass through the stages which lead from savagery to civilization. "All civilized peoples were once savages," wrote Ravnal. But the assertion of an obvious evolution cannot justify a doctrine which, arbitrarily tying the state of civilization to the civilization of the State, designates the latter as the necessary end result assigned to all societies. One may ask what has kept the last of the primitive peoples as they are."

— Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State (1974)

It's really very simple. I have a meeting with the camera man, the production designer, the costumer, and the sound man and I tell them, "This is the look I want." We do lots of tests (on film) and run them and I'll say, "That's the one I want." We talked about the textures. I told them, "I want lots of pools of light and relative darkness." Because that's what it was like. If you were lucky, you had electricity downstairs. Upstairs there was no electricity at all. You took up candles or just moved in the dark; but, there were pools of light. Sometimes just light from a fire, which I've always loved. Once you've discussed it with those four people and you see it on the tests, you say, "That's what we got to do." Then you let them get on with it. They're artists in their own right.

What was thrilling about working with my production designer James Merifield was getting authentic wallpaper from the period. Christopher Hobbs used to be my production designer (The Long Day Closes, The Neon Bible), but he's moved to France. In our front room there used to be this pink paper with little flowers. Merifield found this paper again. I said, "God, I can't believe that you found it" and he said, "But what would really make it stand out is if I put a pale yellow wash over it." It looks fabulous. It's like going back to my parlor when I was a child.

My costumer Ruth Myers found wonderful clothes. I told her the clothes had to look as if they'd been lived in but she said she wanted the character of Hester to have one good coat to take with her when she leaves her husband, and that was the wonderful claret-colored coat. It was sumptuous. You rarely saw primary color in England then. It was very drab and so it looks sensual as well as making her look gorgeous. It's all those things that theybring to it, you know? Ruth said, "I'll put her in this" and I say, "I'm not so sure about green; it's a color I'm not keen on" and then Ruth put her in this green duster coat and you think, "Why did I ever doubt?"

From a recent interview between Terrence Davies and Michael Guillén. 

Olaf Möller's Sight and Sound Ballot 2012

Afrique 50 (René Vautier, 1950) 

Dialogue With a Woman Departed (Leo T. Hurwitz, 1980)

The Ditch (Wang Bing, 2010)

Einleitung zu Arnold Schönbergs “Begleitmusik zu einer Lichtspielscene/Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg's Accompaniment to a Cinematic Scene (Jean-Marie Straub/Danièle Huillet, 1973)

Gebet für die Linke (Reni Mertens & Walter Marti, 1974)

Jom (Ababacar Samb-Makharam, 1981)

Níhóngdēng xià de shàobīng (Wáng Píng, 1964)

Outrage (Ida Lupino, 1950)

Rabočij poselok (Vladimir Vengerov, 1965)

The Year Long Road (Giuseppe De Santis, 1958)

NYPD officers shot and killed knife-wielding man near 37th and 7th in front of a large crowd of shocked bystanders. The victim was taken to Bellevue Hospital around 3pm where he later died.

“The movie business has always been a business like any other, and even more so than most. Every dollar counted and every penny had to show up on the screen. To put it another, blunter way – it was very likely, as a cost-saving device, an economic imperative to utilise to the fullest every board, plank and canvas flat on the studio stages. Sets and parts of sets would get recycled, with lower-budgeted films probably benefiting the most from the cast-offs of the major productions, although even major productions cannibalised sets and parts of sets, architectural trim, chandeliers, wall sconces, sections of staircases, doorways, etc. from other films. Consider this example: George Sidney’s Scaramouche was released in the US in May 1952. Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful, which was shot between April and June 1952, was released in December 1952. A left-over section of one of Scaramouche’s most elaborate set pieces, the duel in the theatre, is used as a throwaway in Minnelli’s film. The partial set is not necessary for the short twenty-second, single-shot scene in The Bad and the Beautiful, in which Kirk Douglas rehearses with Lana Turner – but it certainly enhances it. 

The set, clearly kept in mothballs for future use, resurfaces for a cameo appearance in Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another Town, ten years later in 1962, with added-on opera box modules. This time, Kirk Douglas is rehearsing Rosanna Schiaffino. Is it the same ladder?”

- The Secret Life of Objects, Mark Rappaport in Rouge.