““We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.”
– Mark Rothko, with Adolph Gottlieb
I’m not on Instagram any more, but I revisit via web or RSS the pages I remember well, like @dailyrothko. Funny thing – the older I get, the more fascinated I am by Rothko’s work.
On revealing truth: TNW reporter discovers they can game the Google News algo.
Mike Dempsey introduces me to a book designer I didn’t know, Kelly Blair:
“Today, in the digital age, we’re more connected than ever. We’re not better connected, tho. We have become lonely figures in a sea of people. It is extremely difficult to find a slow film that does not portrait a lonely character, removed from his or her environment.”
Text of a talk on Slow Cinema by Nadin Mai. Also from this talk:
“None of these films would be possible by looking at events. The directors who make films today don’t look at what happens to us. They look at the condition that is ours today. …Slow Cinema isn’t surface cinema. It doesn’t look at the outside. Slow Cinema is human cinema. It doesn’t judge. It observes. It observes what this Human Condition does to us, what it does to our hopes and to our prospects for the future.”
Slow Cinema has fascinated me since a film professor in Dundee introduced me to the work of Bela Tarr, many years ago. Slow Cinema is still cinema, and therefore a manipulation of image, sound and viewer — but there is truth in it.
I was thinking about Meret Oppenheim’s work over the weekend, and suddenly here’s a strong piece about her by Emily Watlington. She may have had a “concern with the limits of reason, her sense of the senselessness of the world,” but you can’t say there’s no truth in this: