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A Rational Mind: The Films of Edward Yang -
Ah I wish I was in the city for this Edward Yang retrospective… I’d love to see Yi Yi on the big screen and catch A Brighter Summer Day again.
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Takashi Shimura as Watanabe, the bureaucrat doomed to die from cancer, in Ikiru (1952, dir. Akira Kurosawa)
“Occasionally I think of my death … then I think, how could I ever bear to take a final breath; while living a life like this, how could I leave it? There is, I feel, so much more for me to do — I keep feeling I have lived so little yet. Then I become thoughtful, but not sad. It was from such a feeling that Ikiru arose.”
-Kurosawa, quoted in Akira Kurosawa: Interviews
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My favourite and preferred step between imagination and image is a strip of photochemistry that can be held, twisted, folded, looked at with the naked eye, or projected on to a surface for others to see. It has a scent and it is imperfect. If you get too close to the moving image, it’s like impressionist art. And if you stand back, it can be utterly photorealistic. You can watch the grain, which I like to think of as the visible, erratic molecules of a new creative language. After all, this “stuff” of dreams is mankind’s most original medium, and dates back to 1895. Today, its years are numbered, but I will remain loyal to this analogue artform until the last lab closes.
- Steven Spielberg
Archiving digital images is a technological dilemma. The idea of that discovered shoebox of pictures, or wedding album, will not exist digitally in your camera or on your computer or in a “cloud”: you should print them. I often feel a photochemical image contains the mass of the subject and dimension; a digital image often feels as if it is mass-less. This could be nostalgia or simply how I learned to see. Others will not have this learning: they will probably never experience a photochemical image. Is this loss a tragedy, a revolution, an evolution? What have we lost, and what have we gained?
- Keanu Reeves
My greatest fear is that as a discarded medium and corporate outcast, analogue will no longer be essential to visual education. Many young people will not know the difference between hand and button, they will only know the button; and their use of technology will be constricted by their ignorance of hand work. They will not perceive the qualities of optical photography because their eyes will only know digital imagery.
-Mitch Epstein
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I love the idea of finding pictures and movies in a shoebox, some sort of physical container. I’ve seen my parents’ youth through tattered albums, and opening those pages with photos, handwritten letters, and memories falling out is really rewarding.
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