michael

“Despair is perhaps today our most dangerous enemy, and the most difficult to combat. Money is power, and it is overwhelmingly in the hands of our potential destroyers, who are supported by the governments so many of us have helped to elect. I have a voice somewhere inside me that says, all too frequently, "Give up, shut up; really retire; do all the things you want to do, read your books, listen to your music, watch your movies, it's already a lost war, leave it all alone." But then those books, that music, those films, tell me the exact opposite: "You must fight, you must speak. If you stop, what happens to your self-respect?”
― Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan

“The film is the thing. You work so hard after the ideas come to get this thing built, all the elements to feel correct, the whole to feel correct in this beautiful language called 'cinema'. And the second it's finished people want you to change it back into words. And it's very, very saddening. It's a torture. It's the film, the language of cinema. When things are concrete [there's] very few variations in interpretation. But the more abstract a thing gets, the more varied the interpretations. But people still know inside what it is for them. And even if they don't trust their intuition, I always say that if some girl named Sally... she comes out of the theatre 'I don't have a clue what that means!' She goes over with Bob and Jim to get a cup of coffee. Bob starts talking about what he thinks it is, because he knows exactly what it is, he starts talking. Five seconds later Sally 'No, no, no, no, it's not that!' And all these things come out of Sally. So, Sally really did know. For herself. That's the beauty of it. It’s just like life. You see sort of the same things, but you come up with many many different things as you go along as a detective. [...] You have everything in the film, that’s the thing. It doesn’t matter what I say. Zip! It can only be a negative. The thing is built so you don't wanna take anything away, and you don't wanna add anything to it. It's complete. That's it.”
― David Lynch

“History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis...”
― Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious

“What is repressed is never, of course, annihilated: it will always strive to return, in disguised forms, in dreams, or as neurotic symptoms. If Freud was correct—and I see no reason to suppose otherwise—we should expect to find the traces of repressed homosexuality in every film, just as we should expect to find them in every person, usually lurking beneath the surface, occasionally rupturing it, informing in various ways the human relationships depicted.”
― Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan