final provocations

 

ON PHILOSOPHY
(Aristotle, Ancient Greek Philosopher, Metaphysics)

"A sense of wonder started [hu]man[s] philosophizing, in ancient times as well as today. Their wondering is aroused, first, by trivial matters; but they continue on from there to wonder about less mundane matters such as the changes of the moon, sun, and starts, and the beginning of the universe. What is the result of this puzzlement? An awesome feeling of ignorance. [Humans]....begin to philosophize, therefore, to escape ignorance..."

ON FILM & HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
(Krzysztof Kieslowski, Film Director, 1941-1996)

"Real artists find answers. The knowledge of the artisan is within the confines of his skills. For example, I know a lot about lenses, about the editing room. I know what the different buttons on the camera are for. I know more or less how to use a microphone. I know all that, but that's not real knowledge. Real knowledge is knowing how to live, why we live, things like that."

ON EDUCATION AND CRITICAL INQUIRY
(Paulo Friere, Brazilian Activist and Philosopher of Education, 1922-1997, Pedagogy of the Oppressed)

"Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."

ON THE CRITICAL POWER OF FILM
(Mark Crispin Miller, Journalist and Media Critic, from "Hollywood the Ad")

"The movies at their best have reminded us, forcefully, that things should be otherwise--which is why advertising urges us to laugh them off, to 'see right through them.' Those movies have to be suppressed, revised, their power forgotten, because they don't just bedazzle us with a blurred, promissory vision of utopia but actually enable us to see, through them, the real workings of the very system that produced them, and that is now degrading them and us."

ON THE "NEW HAPPY ENDING" IN POPULAR FILM (Miller)
"Whereas the movies once could dramatize a painful choice, the new fear of loss prohibits such a story; and whereas prior movies could at times reflect, albeit obliquely, on dark forces outside (and inside) the theater, the new taste refuses any such bad news. Indeed, the fear of loss seems so intense that it now rejects not just a downbeat story but any story whatsoever, as if the crucial difference between fiction and reality were just too much to bear. Whereas narrative requires that you maintain some sense of distance from it, what the movies offer, and what their viewers seem to crave, is the infantilizing promise of no distance, no separation, never any feeling of exclusion--not even from the spectacle itself…Hollywood now offers to fulfill that longing by ending movie after movie with the same upbeat moment…an image of euphoric melding, as the audience within the frame looks on and cheers."

SCORSESE ON THE ART OF FILMMAKING
(Martin Scorsese, Film Director)

"I made it [The Last Temptation] as a prayer, an act of worship. I wanted to be a priest. My whole life has been movies and religion. That's it. Nothing else." "I guess the passion I had for religion wound up mixed with film, and now, as an artist, in a way, I'm both gangster and priest."