(Visual) Quotes…, 5/21

From Tsai Ming-liang’s “Vive l’amour” (1996).

Favorites from the decade that was

Fifty fillets of film, alphabetically ordered. Now I can finally get on with my life.

(Visual) Quotes of quotes of quotes of quotes + Quotes of quotes of quotes of quotes, 12/17

The mirror phase occurs at a time when the child’s physical ambitions outstrip his motor capacity, with the result that his recognition of himself is joyous in that he imagines his mirror image to be more complete, more perfect than he experiences his own body. Recognition is thus overlaid with misrecognition: the image recognised is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its misrecognition as superior projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego, the alienated subject, which, re-introjected as an ego ideal, gives rise to the future generation of identification with others. This mirror-moment predates language for the child. […] Quite apart from the extraneous similarities between screen and mirror (the framing of the human form in its surroundings, for instance), the cinema has structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego. The sense of forgetting the world as the ego has subsequently come to perceive it (I forgot who I am and where I was) is nostalgically reminiscent of that pre-subjective moment of image recognition.

Images from “What Time Is It There?” (2001).

Text from Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”.

(Visual) Quotes of quotes of quotes of quotes, 12/8

A batch of images from one of the decade’s best (as anyone who has read my not-yet-revealed “Best of the 00s” list could tell you), the endlessly entrancing Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003). To paraphrase Paul Valéry, films are aesthetic objects designed to induce cinematic modes of consciousness; is there a film from the last ten years that achieves this function more successfully than does Tsai Ming-liang’s apparatus-baring half-history lesson/half-ghost story?