All the decisive blows are struck left-handed (2017)
“Silences and repetitions are rejected as a failure of language when they are experienced as oblivious holes or as the utterance of the same thing twice or more. WE SHOULD NOT STAMMER, so goes the reasoning, for we only make our way successfully in life when we speak in a continuous articulate flow. True. After many years of confusions, of suppressed voice and INARTICULATE SOUNDS, holes, blanks, black-outs, jump-cuts, out-of-focus visions, I FINALLY SAY NO: yes, sounds are sounds and should above all be released as sounds. Everything is in the releasing. There is no score to follow, no hidden dimension from the visuals to disclose, and endless thread to weave anew.”
–Trinh T. Minh-Ha
“Holes in the Sound Wall”
from When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics
Routledge, New York, 1991
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“We must acknowledge that we began [in cinema] like literary people, that we’re not sufficiently literate in existing sounds and don’t distinguish among them. If […] you go to the Donbass, then all you’ll hear [at first] is one uninterrupted roar and noise—that’s the first impression. But this wasn’t my first time in the Donbass; I studied these sounds and saw that, yes, we really are domestic, and for us these sounds are “noise”—but for the worker in the Donbass every sound has a specific meaning; for him there are no “noises.” And if it seems to you, comrades, who know all the scales perfectly, that I am at this moment emitting pure noise, then I can assure you that I am [producing] no noise whatsoever.”
Dziga Vertov, spoken at the Kiev preview of “Enthusiasm”
RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d 417, 1. 59
In John MacKay, “Disorganized Noise: Enthusiasmand the Ear of the Collective,”
Kinokultura # 7, January 2005
Accessed December 4, 2016 at
https://www.kinokultura.com/articles/jan05-mackay.html
—
“The optical thought the optical dance to the sound of the river of your soul The flowers of a mind The dance of handwriting and the song of flowers and the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky–Sometimes it is dark and you see in the darkness nothing but your own feeling your own movements your own pulse and the rapture of your heart your blood this is what you see–what goes with the music–The Stars the Heaven the Darkness and the Light of your own love your own heart The Light of your mind, The Dancing Light of your blood–and your feeling”
Oscar Fischinger
on Motion Painting No. 1
from Center for Visual Music’s Fischinger Texts: Film Notes
https://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/Fischinger/OFFilmnotes.htm
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“CHINESE CURIOS
‘These are days when no one should rely unduly on his “competence.” Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.’”
–Walter Benjamin
from One-Way Street and other Writings
NLB, London, 1979