an analogy is a signpost

Exceedingly popular, Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up was adored by the public for perhaps all the wrong reasons. It's still upheld as a controversial film and the most memorable scenes involve David Hemmings straddling supermodel Veruschka for a shoot and a menage-a-tois between Hemmings, Jane Birkin, and Gillian Hills. Watching it in hindsight can provide quite a few kicks, considering there is a very young Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck in the Yardbirds' line-up and one can spot a poster stating the death of Bob Dylan, at a time when he switched from acoustic to electric.

It's easy to be swayed by the extravagant coating of Blow-Up. It's reminiscent of Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? in that often, the visual images are remembered more than the underlying themes of the film. But it's very easy to be distracted by the painted face of Peggy Moffitt, dressed in full peacock attire. At some point, one has to realize that these depictions of life, these glamorized depictions, are false images. They are an imitation of life.

( I am in Paris. )

"Yet I am aware how susceptible to illusion we all are. How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs." - Hanif Kureishi

Andrei Tarkovsky's film Solaris is a three hour meditation on the nature of our perceptions and how they keep us from communicating with foreign entities. It is a highly emotional piece, about an Orpheus who can't keep from looking back at his grief until he is trapped in it entirely. Visually mesmerizing, Tarkovsky references Rembrandt and other painters to imply that cinema is worthy of brilliance as those artists were.

It's a film about our plight as human beings, condemned to freedom and our perceptions, condemned to reflection and trapping ourselves in a moment we thought we had passed. Solaris left a mark on me, that image of seaweed undulating in the river. And when I sleep at night, at times my dreams bring that image back to me. It's a brilliant film, worthy of analysis.

( We don't need other worlds. We need mirrors. )

"A revolt against nature: a woman genius." - Octave Mirbeau

( Nothing that's monstrous is foreign to me. )

As a student who majored in English, it's a good idea to make best friends with any number of online etymology sites (my favorite's here). In one class, I was required to find a word I liked in Paradise Lost, research the history of the word, and then write an essay on why Milton would have used that word, considering the context as well. This breeds great habits in readers (and possibly writers, I hope). When I was reading The Brothers Karamazov, I noticed that Dostoevsky used the word "despair" constantly. After 700 pages, I realized that there were many words Dostoevsky focused on. Susan Howe gave me "categories," considering that she is a collector of words. And while reading The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, I noticed a particular emphasis on the word "definition." This makes things especially eerie when the word the writer has chosen to focus on is pertinent to their history.

Virginia Woolf was a writer I had every intention to dislike. There was something about her prose that rubbed me in the wrong way when I first read Mrs. Dalloway at the tender age of twenty. I picked it up again at twenty-five, hoping to have my mind blown by all the content I had missed. My mind was not blown, but I was writing furiously, jotting down notes in the margins, looking up the etymological history of words; this is a sign of adoration on my part. I was surprised to find that I loved this book and that it spoke to me in perhaps one of the worst parts of the year. The word that Virginia Woolf focuses on is "plunge."

(  . . . passing invisibly, inaudibly, like a cloud, swift, veil-like upon hills, falling indeed with something of a cloud's sudden sobriety and stillness upon faces which a second before had been utterly disorderly. )

I am an eye
I am a mechanical eye
I, a machine, am showing you a world
The likes of which, only I can see
-Dziga Vertov

( Androgynous little red riding hoods )