The collection / 10 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01Undated

...that out of the quarrel with others we produce rhetoric, matter for the editorial page, while out of the quarrel with ourselves we create art.

Frank Lentricchia / quote

02Undated

Our personal past is only available to us now through black-and-white film, it's a medium for communication with the dead, including our dead selves, the way we used to be, which is why we're drawn to it.

Frank Lentricchia / quote

03Undated

Only the past is real.

Frank Lentricchia / quote

04Undated

People are mysterious, even to themselves.

Frank Lentricchia / quote

05Undated

No one can be the total cure for another person.

Frank Lentricchia / quote

06Undated

The camera has a mind of its own--its own point of view. Then the human bearer of time stumbles into the camera's gaze--the camera's domain of pristine space hitherto untraversed is now contaminated by human temporality. Intrusion occurs, but the camera remains transfixed by its object. It doesn't care. The camera has no human fears.

Frank Lentricchia / quote

07Undated

Cinema is a mixed form. L'Avventura has characters, it has social context, and these things are not trivial. Its plot is the disappearance of a disappearance. Possibly the most frightening plot imaginable. Forgetting the dead, whom all of history tells us we must remember. But what makes movies themselves, rather than novels or plays, is something else. What is it if not the film medium itself? The purity of the visual, which lies in the silence of the stilled image. The freeze frame. The deeply, deeply silent image. Like death. The image in itself in its silent purity reaches--it reaches!--for the purity of death.

Frank Lentricchia / quote

08Undated

In the end, everything is found to be wanting.

Frank Lentricchia / quote

09Undated

I want to die, stripped, by myself, of all fantasies. That's the goal. I want to feel what is real, at the end, and only what is real. Grip fiercely with my eyes all that is around me--the people of my intimate life, the objects in the room, without the evasions of fantasies.

Frank Lentricchia / quote

10Undated

Here's the most startling irony I know in film history: Antonioni, who is often denigrated by left-wing critics as a formalist and aesthete gives us radical realism through the long take, and what he gives us--this is his metaphysical wager--is real outside the film, off the set, beyond the camera and underneath the surface of everyday life.

Frank Lentricchia / quote