Notes - Jorge Luis Borges

reading notes from Biblioteca personal - prólogos by Jorge Luis Borges

these notes, and everything that Borges wrote, recall what he declared at the beginning of Siete noches: «De mí sé decir que soy lector hedónico»

«las divinidades eran las mismas pero los nombres cambiaban en cada lengua»

 «Oriente, palabra espléndida que abarca la aurora y tantas y famosas naciones»

«atribuyó a los egipcios la división del año en doce meses gobernados por doce dioses»

«Cicerón, que no ignoraba que en griego la palabra historia quiere decir investigación y verificación»

«Emily Dickinson creía que publicar no es parte esencial del destino de un escritor. Juan Rulfo parece compartir ese parecer»

«un texto fantástico, cuyas indefinidas ramificaciones no le es dado prever, pero cuya gravitación ya lo atrapa»

«fue el menos contemporáneo de los hombres»

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Notes - Apichatpong Weerasethakul

reading notes from an interview with Apichatpong Weerasethakul

«For me, listening to heartbeats through a stethoscope or using a magnifying glass with a light was already magic. On rare occasions I was treated with a view through a microscope. Another exciting memory was to watch 16mm films at the American institution in Khon Kaen. They had bases in the northeast during that time to counter communism. I remember very well the black and white King Kong, among other films. The movies and medical tools were the best of inventions for my childhood.»

«At one point I was reading articles about brain science. There was an MIT professor who manipulated brain cells into re-enacting certain memories, via lights. He said that the findings sort of disproved Descartes’ belief that the mind and the body are separate entities. This hypothesis aligned with my thinking that meditation is nothing more than a biological process. Sleep and memory can always be hacked into. If I were a doctor I would try to cure sleeping sickness by light interference at a cellular level. The lights in this film vaguely reflect this idea. They are not only for the soldiers but also for the audience as well.»

«When we were young we were told about this most amazing place where the water is full of fish and the land covered in rice fields. The signs of wealth were always idyllic, omitting the brutalities. We have this burden of fabricated history. It effects generations: how do we view ourselves? With the information that is surfacing and recent studies, our sense of identity is shifting. I think the film plays with this shaky sense of belonging.»

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Notes - Bela Tarr

reading notes from an interview with Bela Tarr

«I learned a very simple yet fundamental thing: respecting people, their life and their dignity.»

 «In my view, there is no difference between an amateur and a professional. In order to direct a film you don’t need any film school diploma or professional certificate of sorts: that’s for sure.»

«You know, for me it is ridiculous when a director says “it is my film.” It is everybody’s film, because filmmaking is a collective work that requires the talent of all the members of the crew. And not only the talent, but also the physical presence and the spirit, the brain, the sensibility, the empathy of every person on the set. I have always worked with, more or less, the same people, because I feel safe with them, and I know I can fully trust them.»

«What is essential cannot be learned, it has to be experienced.»

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Notes - László Krasznahorkai

reading notes from an interview with László Krasznahorkai

«Let me reply to that by telling you a story. Mihály Vig and I were walking along a street in Pécs together, and I was complaining to him that young people today are so terribly far removed from anything spiritual and intellectual. I said that when I was young, there was at least a handful of us who used to read, compose music, or paint pictures. In other words, we were thinking beings and were possessed by a search for something, which connected us. I was saying that this seems to have died out. To this, Mihály said to me that he thought I was wrong – the people I am thinking of still exist in the same numbers today, but they are not visible. And, pointing up at the windows there, that evening at Pécs, he asked me, “How do you know there is not one sitting up there right now? It is just that they don’t want to meet you as an ‘author’. They are busy. They cannot bear this world and are in some way testing a different one. Perhaps by creating something. Perhaps they are just sad and that’s why they can’t come. And that sadness will lead to something. To another gap for seeing out of the intolerable through to the tolerable. Or,” said Mihály, “he or she is sitting up there alone, reading your book, of all people’s.»

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Notes - Joshua Oppenheimer

reading notes from miscellaneous interviews with Joshua Oppenheimer

«this should be not a film simply about impunity and coexistence, this should fundamentally be a film about memory and oblivion, because that’s the real casualty of living for decades in fear.»

«if you overcome the fear of looking, you come out less afraid.»

«the capacity for human evil depends on our ability to lie to ourselves.»

«it was painful to deny myself the escapism of saying 'These men are monsters and they just should be judged', it was painful to not give my self the comfort of saying 'My role is to judge them or build a case and condemn them', because after all the role of artists aught not to be that of a court. We aught to be trying to understand, not trying to condemn. We aught to be trying to empathize - not sympathize. And we should take it for granted that our audiences are smart enough to understand that mass murder is wrong. If we don't understand that, we should get out of this business.»

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