Just received a surprise visit here at the Bookery from Aaron Tieger of fishblog and CARVE and his girlfriend Wendy (whose last name I forgot—sorry, Wendy!), who is about to become a literature professor at Ithaca College. So the innovative poetry community of Ithaca will be acquiring some powerful new allies in the months ahead. Huzzah for community! Down with scenes!
Still in a quoting mood; here are some choice bits from Robert Bresson's Notes on the Cinematographer which I feel ineluctably apply to the writing of poetry. Sometimes let "images" be images; sometimes let them be words or sounds:
The faculty of using my resources well diminishes when their number grows.
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No actors.
(No directing of actors.) No parts.
(No learning of parts.) No staging.
But the use of working models, taken from life.
BEING (models) instead of SEEMING (action).
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Two types of film: those that employ the resources of the theatre (actors, direction, etc.) and use the camera in order to reproduce; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create.
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Respect man's nature without wishing it more palpable than it is.
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An image must be transformed by contact with other images as is a color by contact with other colors. A blue is not the same blue beside a green, a yellow, a red. No art without transformation.
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Flatten my images (as if ironing them), without attenuating them.
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To create is not to deform or invent persons and things. It is to tie new relationships between persons and things which are, and as they are.
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Radically suppress intentions in your models.
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Your imagination will aim less at events than at feelings, while wanting these latter to be as documentary as possible.
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One recognizes the truth by its efficacy, by its power.
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A whole made of good images can be detestable.
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Dig deep where you are. Don't slip off elsewhere. Double, triple bottom to things.
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No absolute value in an image.
Images and sounds will owe their value and their power solely to the use to which you destine them.
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Where not everything is present, but each word, each look, each movement has things underlying.
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Let it be the intimate union of the images that charges them with emotion.
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A too-expected image (cliche) will never seem right, even if it is.
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Don't run after poetry. It penetrates unaided through the joins (ellipses).
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Let it be the feelings that bring about the events. Not the other way.
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Forms that resemble ideas. Treat them as actual ideas.
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Not artful, but agile.
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Of lighting
Things made more visible not by more light, but by the fresh angle at which I regard them.
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Debussy himself used to play with the piano's lid down.
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Reorganize the unorganized noises (what you think you hear is not what you hear) of a street, a railroad station, an airport. . . Play them back one by one in silence and adjust the blend.
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Retouch some real with some real.
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To find a kinship between image, sound and silence. To give them an air of being glad to be together, of having chosen their place. Milton: Silence was pleased.
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Image and sound must not support each other, but must work each in turn through a sort of relay.
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Voice and face
They have formed together and have grown used to each other.
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THE BONDS THAT BEINGS AND THINGS ARE WAITING FOR, IN ORDER TO LIVE.
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The eye (in general) superficial, the ear profound and inventive. A locomotive's whistle imprints in us a whole railroad station.
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The true is inimitable, the false untransformable.
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Quality of a new world which none of the existing arts allowed to be imagined.
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Be as ignorant of what you are going to catch as is a fisherman of what is at the end of his fishing rod. (The fish that arises from nowhere.)
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In your passion for the true, people may see nothing but faddism.
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Laugh at a bad reputation. Fear a good one that you could not sustain.
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Is it for singing always the same song that the nightingale is so admired?
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Production of emotion determined by a resistance to emotion.
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Those horrible days—when shooting film disgusts me, when I am exhausted, powerless in the face of so many obstacles—are part of my method of work.
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