Sweet potatoes and puff pastry are tests of patience.
Flashbacks in
Shunji Iwai’s Last Letter (2020) = too many, a stringy mess of conversations. Iwai’s camera movements have become more sophisticated over time. But when the film’s stiff screenplay holds the audience’s hand through decades of surreptitious, sheepish exchanges, these sweeps and circles become unwelcome insinuations of depth. Not every letter changes a life.
Lim Dae-hyung’s Moonlit Winter (2019) = none at all, an exceptional execution of restraint for a focused and mature film. Some love letters take a lifetime to read, others to write. The pleasure of this promise leaves little time to settle on what’s past. Excluding flashbacks allows Lim’s screenplay to skip nostalgic fantasy in favor of a clean, snowy slate.
In Arthur C. Clarke’s 1975 novel Imperial Earth, a character en route to Earth in the year 2276 boards a spaceship and watches classic films from the twentieth century to study human life. This selection includes Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, and Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon Bonaparte, a mention that briefly imagines what the project—by then, already abandoned by MGM after two years of preproduction—might’ve been for mankind.
from Olaf Stapledon’s Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord, about an intelligent dog punished for his great knowledge of and love for the world:
“‘We are bound to hurt one another so much, again and again. we are so terribly different.' 'Yes,' he said, 'But the more different, the more lovely the loving.’”
Two good dogs:
Flike in Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D. (1952)
Mary in Hong Sang-soo’s Woman is the Future of Man (2004)
from Samuel Delany’s About Writing:
“Learn the names of different kinds of words and groups of words: noun (ordinary noun [chair, woman, pencil … ], proper noun [William, Audrey, Rover … ]); article (definite [the], indefinite [a, an]); verb (simple [fell], compound [would have tried to stop falling]); adjective (simple [modifying], demonstrative, substantive, possessive); adverb (of time, of place, instrumental; remember, adverbs modify not only verbs; they modify adjectives and other adverbs too); pronoun (subjective, objective, demonstrative, relative, possessive); preposition; conjunction (coordinating [and, or, but], subordinating [than, as, while, because … ]); participle (present, past); gerund; as well, learn what a clause is, a noun absolute, a periphrastic (“She is more dear to me than life itself” is the periphrastic version of “She is dearer to me than life itself.”)
from the original edition of William Strunk Jr.’s Element of Style, which Delany calls “one of the best quick courses in grammar”:
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
Concise =
Marcello Mastroianni placing his fingertips on a typewriter, then withdrawing, in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960)
Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina’s recipe for spaghetti all’ Amatriciana
from David Klion’s essay “Unlearning Woody Allen”
“It’s a cop-out to say that the heart wants what it wants. We have to ask ourselves who taught the heart what it wants, and whether it’s capable of wanting something more.”
Ken Loach, Kes, 1969.