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Dogma95 Manifesto

 Orts  Tagged with:
Nov 192010
 

Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg co-wrote this as a response to the technological innovations that were democraticizing the production of film. It was also a statement to protect the avante-garde and affirm its importance at a time when anyone could make film. The principle tenets imposed a kind of chastity on the film-maker and was contra-Hollywood normative sensibilities: shooting was to be done on location, the sound must be recorded with the images, the camera must be hand-held, the film must be in colour, there must be no murders or weapons, temporal and geographical alienation must be avoided, genre movies are not acceptable, and the director must not be credited.

Vinterberg did “Festen” (1998) in this style and von Trier contributed, among others, his “Goldheart” trilogy: “Breaking the Waves” (1996), “The Idiots” (1998), and “Dancer in the Dark” (2000).

Edward Tufte – Design is choice.

 Book Notes
Nov 192010
 

Design is choice. The theory of the visual display of quantative information consists of principles that generate design options and that guide choices among options. The principles should not be applied rigidly or in a peevish spirit; they are not logically or mathematically certain; and it is better to violate any principle than to place graceless or inelegant marks on paper. Most principles of design should be greeted with some skepticism, for word authority can dominate our vision, and we may come to see only with our own eyes.

What is to be sought in designs for the visual display of information is the clear portrayal of complexity. Not the complication of the simple; rather the task of the designer is to give visual access to the subtle and the difficult – that is, the revelation of the complex.

Notes on Catharism

 Book Notes
Nov 192010
 

12th century dualist heresy where it is believed that Good and Evil are two gods and that the material world is Evil. But the twist is that to become a Cathar priest you had to become a perfect through a rite called the consolamentum (consolation). But since most Cathars were not perfect but only credentes (believers) they decided to postpone the consolamentum until they were dying. And before this, they lived rather liberal lives for the times. They ate lots of meat and had lots of sex among other things. A laudable approach to dealing with the duality of attending to the spirit while living in the evil world.

Books to note:

Stephen O’Shea. The Perfect Heresy: The Revolutionary Life and Death of the Medieval Cathars.

Jonathan Sumption. The Albigensian Crusade.

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Montaillou. Translation by Barbara Bray.

Witold Gombrowicz – from Cosmos (1965)

 Orts
Nov 192010
 

The most important, most extreme, and most incurable dispute is that waged in us by two of our most basic strivings: the one that desires form, shape, definition and the other, which protests against shape, and does not want form. Humanity is constructed in such a way that it must define itself and then escape its own definitions. Reality is not something that allows itself to be completely contained in any form. Form is not in harmony with the essence of life, but all thought which tries to describe this imperfection also becomes form and thereby confirms only our striving for it.

That entire philosophical and ethical dialectic of ours takes place against the background of an immensity, which is called shapelessness, which is neither darkness nor light, but exactly a mixture of everything: ferment, disorder, impurity, and accident.

William Butler Yeats – A Last Confession

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

What lively lad most pleasured me
Of all that with me lay?
I answer that I gave my soul
And loved in misery,
But had great pleasure with a lad
That I loved bodily.

Flinging from his arms I laughed
To think his passion such
He fancied that I gave a soul
Did but our bodies touch,
And laughed upon his breast to think
Beast gave beast as much.

I gave what other women gave
That stepped out of their clothes.
But when this soul, its body off,
Naked to naked goes,
He it has found shall find therein
What none other knows,

And give his own and take his own
And rule in his own right;
And though it loved in misery
Close and cling so tight,
There’s not a bird of day that dare
Extinguish that delight.