PH Survey 2014






'…the face must be destroyed.'

 | Survey |

  BY Devdutt Trivedi

Rivette's 'Out 1: Noli Me Tangere'

a) Url/title of blog/magazine where your writing is published.
Usually on Projectorhead.


b) Best films (maximum 15) that you watched in 2014, but were released pre-1964.
Interesting question but no answer.


c) Best films (maximum of 15) that you watched in 2014, but may have released elsewhere in the last three years.
No answer.


d) Does the fact of their belonging to the past three years reveal anything in specific about contemporary cinema? Is it true that a majority of the titles on the list could only have been made in these years, and not at any other time during history?
Yes that cinema has lost its original objective of practising thought and that representation has overtaken the aesthetic regime, which exists beyond signs into the space of the non-denotational. The time-image coming outside the sensory-motor functions of the brain is dead and has no place in late capitalism. There has to be a discourse on jobs, capital, exchange, deterritorialization. Presently the Art House is already playing for an audience and not cultivating an audience.
 

e) What is it that you regret about movies or cinephilia these days? What excites you about it the most?
Photography and cinema come from an interest in phenomenology which is currently out of fashion. Nothing in cinema excites me anymore except if Ranciere or Badiou write a book on it, but then these books are also very bad. Godard's new book titled A True History of Cinema should be flushed down the toilet.


f) As you grow older, how has your relationship with cinema transformed?
Yes I find cinema to be very static and boring, the face is too important, the face needs to be destroyed.


g) What is your hope for your national cinema in the coming years?
Cinema is not about nationality
 

h) What is your greatest discovery or recollection as a cinephile this year - a director, a film, an image, a passage?
The work of Jacques Rivette especially Out 1:Noli Me Tangere. Also, L'Amour Fou, Secret Defence and Noirot.