Filmstudie

The function of cinema is to fill the eye.

Vormittagsspuk

Bosquet: Can the mystical reside in a hat?

Dali: It always resides in hats.

Entartete Kunst, said the Nazis, and so Hindemith’s score was lost.

Dreams That Money Can Buy

The habiliments of desire (Ernst), “The Girl with the Pre-Fabricated Heart” (Léger), the hidden mystery of art (Ray), the gangster’s mystique (Duchamp), Calder’s “Ballet” and “Circus”, Richter’s “Narcissus”.

Dadascope

“The ear is the sure clue to him: only a musician can understand the play of feeling which is the real rarity in his early plays. In a deaf nation these plays would have died long ago. The moral attitude in them is conventional and secondhand: the borrowed ideas, however finely expressed, have not the overpowering human interest of those original criticisms of life which supply the rhetorical elment in his later works. Even the individualization which produces the old-established British speciality, the Shakespearean ‘delineation of character,’ owes all its magic to the turn of the line, which lets you into the secret of its utterer’s mood and temperament, not by its commonplace meaning, but by some subtle exaltation, or stultification, or slyness, or delicacy, or hesitancy, or what not in the sound of it. In short, it is the score and not the libretto that keeps the work alive and fresh; and this is why only musical critics should be allowed to meddle with Shakespear—especially early Shakespear.” (G.B.S.)

“One of the most purely lyrical of French poets, Verlaine was an initiator of modern word-music and marks a transition between the Romantic poets and the Symbolists. His best poetry broke with the sonorous rhetoric of most of his predecessors and showed that the French language, everyday clichés included, could communicate new shades of human feeling by suggestion and tremulous vagueness that capture the reader by disarming his intellect; words could be used merely for their sound to make a subtler music, an incantatory spell more potent than their everyday meaning. Explicit intellectual or philosophical content is absent from his best work. His discovery of the intimate musicality of the French language was doubtless instinctive, but, during his most creative years, he was a conscious artist constantly seeking to develop his unique gift and ‘reform’ his nation’s poetic expression.” (Encyclopædia Britannica)