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[Hal Hartley Retrospective]
THE GIRL FROM MONDAY
Hal Hartley
USA, 2005
Bonus Shorts:
EMIL CIORAN
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS
"Happy"
She knew if she loved him she could make him
happy, but she didn’t. Or she did, but it sank
into itself like a hole and curled up content.
Surrounded by the blur of her own movements, the
thought of making him happy was very dear to her.
She moved it from place to place, a surprise she
never opened. She slept alone at night, soul of
a naked priest in her sweet body. Small soft hands,
a bread of desire rising in her stomach. When she
lay down with the man she loved and didn’t, the
man opened and opened. Inside him an acrobat
tumbled over death. And walked thin wires with
nothing above or below. She cried, he was so
beautiful in his scarlet tights and white face
the size of a dime.
GEORGE ORWELL
Nineteen Eighty-Four
"If you mean confessing,' she said, 'we shall do that, right enough. Everybody always confesses. You can't help it. They torture you."
"I don't mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter: only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you — that would be the real betrayal."
She thought it over. "They can't do that," she said finally. "It's the one thing they can't do. They can make you say anything, but they can't make you believe it. They can't get inside you."
"No," he said a little more hopefully, "No; that's quite true. They can't get inside you. If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.”
HANNAH WEINER
"It Walks"
It walks.
That is,
it puts one foot in front of another
and moves in the direction of its face,
which is in the front of it,
and in the direction its eyes are looking,
if its eyes are in its face.
While it walks
it can look at scenery,
or think, if it thinks,
or just move closer to an ant
or a new job
or a piece of log to sit on
in between the walking.
Then it sits:
it lowers its ass, which is the hind part,
onto the log,
if it has an ass.
Because if it doesn’t
it lies.
That is,
its entire body rests upon the log
and all its legs fold under
or spread out
or go in the air
depending on how its legs are attached,
and where.
And arms,
if it has arms,
which are legs
that are not needed to walk on.
If it has arms
and legs
and an ass
it can ride a bicycle!
Then the scenery goes by much faster
if it is looking at scenery,
and it gets where it is going faster
if it is going somewhere.
Faster:
it can do it more often
between sunrise and sunset
or between sunset and sunrise
if it does it at night.
That is,
if it can do what it is doing
on a bicycle.
ITALO CALVINO
Cosmicomics
And, thinking of this judgment I would no longer be able to change, I suddenly felt a kind of relief, as if peace could come to me only after the moment when there would be nothing to add and nothing to remove in that arbitrary ledger of misunderstandings, and the galaxies which were gradually reduced to the last tail of the last luminous ray, winding from the sphere of darkness, seemed to bring with them the only possible truth about myself, and I couldn’t wait until all of them, one after the other, had followed this path.
ITALO CALVINO
Cosmicomics
When a body succeeds in emitting or in reflecting luminous vibrations in a distinct and recognizable order--I thought--what does it do with these vibrations? Put them in its pocket? No, it releases them on the first passer-by. And how will the latter behave in the face of vibrations he can't utilize and which, taken in this way, might even be annoying? Hide his head in a hole? No, he'll thrust it out in that direction until the point most exposed to the optic vibrations becomes sensitized and develops the mechanism for exploiting them in the form of images. In short, I conceived of the eye-encephalon link as a kind of tunnel dug from the outside by the force of what was ready to become image, rather than from within by the intention of picking up any old image.
ITALO CALVINO
Cosmicomics
So our efforts led us to become those perfect objects of a sense whose nature nobody quite knew yet, and which later became perfect precisely through the perfection of its object, which was, in fact, us. I'm talking about sight, the eyes; only I had failed to foresee one thing: the eyes that finally opened to see us didn't belong to us but to others.
ITALO CALVINO
Cosmicomics
I could distinguish the shape of her bosom, her arms, her thighs, just as I remember them now, just as now, when the Moon has become that flat, remote circle, I still look for her as soon as the first sliver appears in the sky, and the more it waxes, the more clearly I imagine I can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the Moon the Moon and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them.