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Quote by Steven Magee

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Steven Magee

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“Not that I had any intention of accosting him to propose any practical agreement. That would have demanded on Laura's part a degree of devotion, of understanding, a detached view of the purely animal act of love, such as could not be expected of so young a woman who was so subject conventions of comportment in a society that had always shown itself incapable of differentiating between love and sexuality.”

LoveSexualityOppressionDeclineImpotenceWomen And MenOlder Man Younger Girl
Book:Au-delà de cette limite votre ticket n'est plus valable
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“There is something worse than being unmasked: not being unmasked. Thus the crime will have kept on leaving clues, and illusion itself cannot bear to remain illusion. It is constantly prostituting itself to the world and actualizing itself in full view. Thinking is as difficult as walking in the snow without leaving tracks. Or else you have to go back over your tracks step by step, like the child in The Shining, pursued by his father in the labyrinth of ice. Political power exists only because we want absolutely none of it. And the political sphere is there only to mask this defection on our part by a trompe-l'oeil system of representation. But life, such as it is, we want too. And force, potency. That too we want, irresistibly. But perhaps less deeply than we want its opposite.”

PowerImpotenceKubrick
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“The champions of the digital adopt an absurd line of argument (absurd in the sense of Freud's story of the kettle): 1. It is a revolution, an absolute advance. 2. At any rate, we have no choice, the process is irreversible. But it must be one or the other: if it is inevitable, there's no point representing it as an ideal dimension. And if it's destined to win out, there's no point claiming it is best. Any form of irony or offhandedness about one's own ideas is wounding to one's interlocutor.”

ImpotenceDigital Technology
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“The most beautiful of all photographs are those taken of savages in their natural surroundings. The savage is always confronting death, and he confronts the lens in exactly the same manner. He does not ham it up, nor is he indifferent. He always poses; he faces up to the camera. His achievement is to transform this technical operation into a face-to-face confrontation with death. This is what makes these pictures such powerful and intense photographic objects. As soon as the lens fails to capture this pose, this provocative obscenity of the object facing death, as soon as the subject begins to collude with the lens, and the photographer too becomes subjective, the 'great game' of photography is over. Exoticism is dead. Today it is very hard indeed to find a subject - or even an object - that does not collude with the camera lens. The only trick here, generally speaking, is to be ignorant of how one's subjects live. This gives them a certain aura of mystery, a savagery, which the successful picture captures. It also captures a gleam of ingenuity, of fatality, in their faces, betraying the fact that they do not know who they are or how they live. A glow of impotence and awe that is completely lacking in our tribes of worldly, devious, fashion-conscious and self-regarding people, always well-versed in the subject of themselves - and hence devoid of all mystery. For such people the camera is merciless.”

PhotographySavagesImpotence
Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“He was so staggered that he started to laugh, but his laughter subsided almost at once, and in its place he felt a wave of fury and despair roll over him at the sheer inexorability of late-capitalist degradation not just of the environment, not just of civic institutions, not just of intellectual and political ideals, but worse, of his own expectations, of what he even felt was possible any more—a familiar surge of grief and helpless rage at the reckless, wasteful, soulless, narcissistic, barren selfishness of the present day, and at his own political irrelevance and impotence, and at the utter shamelessness with which his natural inheritance, his future, had been either sold or laid to waste by his parents’ generation, trapping him in a perpetual adolescence that was further heightened by the infantilising unreality of the Internet as it encroached upon, and colonised, real life—‘real life,’ Tony thought, with bitter air quotes, for late capitalism would admit nothing ‘real’ beyond the logic of late capitalism itself, having declared self-interest the only universal, and profit motive the only absolute, and deriding everything that did not serve its ends as either a contemptible weakness or a fantasy.”

ExpectationsCapitalismAngerPossibilitiesFuryDegradationImpotenceIrrelevanceLate Capitalism
Book:Birnam Wood
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“Regardless of the subject of my films … I am looking for a way of evoking in audiences feelings similar to my own: the physically painful impotence and sorrow that assail me when I see a man weeping at the bus stop, when I observe people struggling vainly to get close to others, when I see someone eating up the left-overs in a cheap restaurant, when I see the first blotches on a woman's hand and know that she too is bitterly aware of them, when I see the kind of appalling and irreparable injustice that so visibly scars the human face. I want this pain to come across to my audience, to see this physical agony, which I think I am beginning to fathom, to seep into my work.”

TruthSufferingAudienceAwarenessFilmmakingAgonyImpotenceDirecting
Author:Krzysztof Kieślowski
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