προγραφές

'Crossroads. Badly marked from here on. Naked woodland swatches with blue smoke all about from the woodcutters’ campfires. As fresh as before and, like this morning, dew on the grass. Practically no cars up to now, and just half of the houses are inhabited. A jetblack wolfhound glared after me with his yellow eyes unflinchingly. When a rustling came from some flying leaves behind me I knew it was the dog, even though it was chained. All day long the most perfect solitude. A clear wind makes the trees up there rustle, the gaze travels very far. This is a season which has nothing to do with this world any more. Big flying reptiles soundlessly leave their vapour trails behind above me, heading directly west, flying via Paris as my thoughts fly with them. So many dogs. from the car one doesn’t notice them that much, the smell of the fires, too, the Sighing Trees. A shaved tree trunk is sweating water, again my shadow cowers far in front of me. Bruno flees, at night he breaks into an abandoned ski-lift station, it must be in November. He pulls the main lever for the cable car.'

Werner Herzog, Of Walking in Ice: Munich - Paris: 23 November - 14 December, 1974, translators: Marje Herzog and Alan Greenberg, publisher: Jonathan Cape

'[...] Herzog and his films have in fact contributed to the ongoing process of reimagining documentary after cinema verité. A performance lens captures this dynamic, which has been effaced by the discourse on Herzog, with encouragement from the director himself, so that the received idea about his body of work has been one of singularity and isolation, not unlike some of the figures in his movies. Clearly there is some truth to that idea, as far as it goes, which is one reason why Herzog’s films are usually discussed in terms of auterism. But a wholly appropriate emphasis on auterism cannot account for the tenacity of his engagement with documentary. His intervention is strategic in the sense that it puts documentary in the service of enacting the director’s personal style, as a way of emphasizing the alterity of his work, its difference from that of other filmmakers, its resistance to deliberately upsets documentary dogma. Herzog will never be a “good object” of documentary studies, at least not for scholars who are primarily concerned with politics, taxonomy, or purism. His work cannot be disciplined in this sense, and what would be the point of doing so? And yet, to borrow Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous phrase concerning Australian totems, Herzog’s documentaries are “good to think with”.'

Eric Ames, Ferocious Reality: Documentary According to Werner Herzog, publisher: University of Minnesota Press

'In his autobiography, Kinski Uncut, he describes his feelings towards you.

It is a highly fictitious book, not only when he describes me and our relationship. Page after page he keeps on coming back to me, almost like an obsessive compulsion. In some passages of this book I kind of had a hand in helping him to invent particularly vile expletives. Sometimes was sat on a wooden bench, looking over the landscape, and he said, ‘Werner, nobody will read this book if i do not write bad stuff about you. If I wrote that we get along well together, nobody would buy it. the scum only want to hear about the dirt.’ I came with a dictionary and we tried to find even fouler expressions. He needed money at the time and knew - quite rightly - that by writing a semi-pornographic rant against everyone and everything it would get some attention. He describes his childhood as one of such a poverty that he had to fight with the rats over the last piece of bread. In reality he grew up in a relatively well-to-do middle-class pharmacist’s household.'

Werner Herzog, from Herzog on Herzog, edited by Paul Cronin, publisher: Faber and Faber

'Whatever its merits and defects may be, the model of an artistically intended and aesthetically experienced film as a specially constructed and experienced world is not a reductive one. It does not, in other words, whittle down narrative cinematic art to one or another partial aspect, magnified out of proportion, in the attempted application of a single, all-embracing, one-size-fits-all theoretical system or doctrine nor to an excessively narrow empirical research program. Of course theory is not the same as history or descriptions, but it must do justice, if it is to be pursued at all, to the multiplicity and complexity of the phenomena it attempts to organize and understand, which, in this case, is also naturally, historically, and culturally shaped and mediated to a profound degree. Above all, film theory (as also intersecting with the philosophy of film) must (still) seek to capture, however necessarily in a series of relatively pale abstractions, something of the full and actual sources and effects of narrative cinema’s artistic spell.'

Daniel Yacavone, Film Worlds: A Philosophical Asthetics of Cinema, publisher: Columbia University Press

'The blood relation long remained an important element in the mechanisms of power, its manifestations, and its rituals. For a society in which the systems of alliance, the political form of the sovereign, the differentiation into orders and castes, and the value of descent lines were predominant; for a society in which famine, epidemics, and violence made death imminent, blood constituted one of the fundamental values. It owed its high value at the same time to its instrumental role (the ability to shed blood), to the way it functioned in the order of signs (to have a certain blood, to be of the same blood, to be prepared to risk one’s blood), and also to its precariousness (easily spilled, subject to drying up, too readily mixed, capable of being quickly corrupted). A society of blood-I was tempted to say, of “sanguinity” -where power spoke through blood: the honor of war, the fear of famine, the triumph of death, the sovereign with his sword, executioners, and tortures; blood was a reality with a symbolic function. We, on the other hand, are in a society of “sex,” or rather a society “with a sexuality”: the mechanisms of power are addressed to the body, to life, to what causes it to proliferate, to what reinforces the species, its stamina, its ability to dominate, or its capacity for being used. Through the themes of health, progeny, race, the future of the species, the vitality of the social body, power spoke ofsexuality and to sexuality; the latter was not a mark or a symbol, it was an object and a target. Moreover, its importance was due less to its rarity or its precariousness than to its insistence, its insidious presence, the fact that it was everywhere an object of excitement and fear at the same time. Power delineated it, aroused it, and employed it as the proliferating meaning that had always to be taken control of again lest it escape; it was an effect with a meaning-value. I do not mean to say that a substitution of sex for blood was by itself responsible for all the transformations that marked the threshold of our modernity. It is not the soul of two civilizations or the organizing principle of two cultural forms that I am attempting to express; I am looking for the reasons for which sexuality, far from being repressed in the society of that period, on the contrary was constantly aroused. The new procedures of power that were devised during the classical age and employed in the nineteenth century were what caused our societies to go from a symbolics of blood to an analytics of sexuality. Clearly, nothing was more on the side of the law, death, transgression, the symbolic, and sovereignty than blood; just as sexuality was on the side of the norm, knowledge, life, meaning, the disciplines, and regulations.'

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Intrioduction, translator: Robert Hurley, publisher: Pantheon Books

'Situational homosexuality is socially constructed sexuality. All sexual performance is fundamentally situational and does not always result in long-lasting social psychological commitment to any one form of sexual activity. It is a process that draws on both intra-psychic scripts and cultural scenarios and integrates them into the interpersonal scripts of everyday social life. The theory of sexual scripts presumes that sexual performance is not about discovering and pursing one’s intrapsychic desires (the presumptive core sexual self), but about defining and constructing scenarios of desire using cultural scenarios and negotiating interpersonal situations [...]. The men who work in the gay porn industry—whether gay, straight or “sexual”— must all construct scripts in order to perform. In this way they are no different from any person engaging in sexual activity—since all sexual performance is situational.'

Jeffrey Escoffier, 'Gay-for-Pay: Straight Men and the Making of Gay Pornography', Qualitative Sociology, 26(4)

'Eminence Front' [album: Scoop 3 (1994)] - Pete Townshend