We encountered this mother cow while driving along an isolated country road. She appeared out of nowhere and refused to let us pass. We spent minutes staring at each other in silence, waiting, trying to understand each other's motives. It created this eerie atmosphere of longing, sadness, questioning. 

Excerpts from Robert Bresson's Notes on the Cinematograph. 

'Prefer what intuition whispers in your ear to what you have done and redone 10 times in your head.'

'Build your film on white, on silence and on stillness.' 

'The things one can express with the hand, with the head, with the shoulders!...How many useless and encumbering words then disappear...'

The influence of Bresson's notes has seeped beyond how I think about film and now into how I think about living a life. 

Dreaming about a shared experience, about travel, and my trip to London coming up. About Scotland and Venice. Dreaming about Dungeness and Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage on the shingle. Dreaming about Bach and the piano. Dreaming about my grandparents.

Dreaming about the car driving through the dusty landscape in Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry, and about the cows mulling around in the opening shot of Béla Tarr's Sátántangó. 

About dust petering away, about cows being as they are in front of a camera, about time passing.

These are some pictures of the home grown lemons that I've picked and put on my windowsill at home. I like their varying shapes and ways that the light, both natural and artificial, hits them. It reminded me of a Hollis Frampton film where a lemon is treated to a gradual eclipse of light- from an outline of the lemon, to full exposure and to a silhouette. For now the lemons have become a part of the decor and are subjected to changes in day light and my own routine (turning the light on when it gets dark, etc). Maybe I've subconsciously had lemons on my mind since watching the film on Youtube last week or maybe its because we've been inundated by a good crop of lemons this winter(?).

Screenshot from Lemon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gnz1pIy6l4

Screenshot from Lemon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gnz1pIy6l4

Time, technology, past generations 

The spire of St Peter's Eastern Hill church in East Melbourne with city towers behind.  This (right) is an image taken on my iPhone in June 2019.  My Pa, an architect, represented the same church spire in a watercolour drawing for his 'free drawing' class as a student at the University of Melbourne in 1949.  I thought it could be interesting to show the two images side by side on this blog format. 

Clarity

These blinds provide the right amount of privacy without blocking out views of the world outside the house. The oak tree that I'm looking out to here has lost all its leaves now, allowing us to see through the branches and allowing new views to be seen from the house.

'No divorce between the artist and the intellectual. No separation between art & life. No conflict between the sacred and the profane'.  Jean-Marie STRAUB on J.S Bach 

My Aunt said something along the same lines to me over Easter after we'd both just been to a concert of J.S Bach's B Minor Mass in a Presbyterian church, neither of us being particularly religious. She said that it can't be known for sure that Bach truly was as religious as people speculate today. 

I'm interested in harmoniously being two things at once that supposedly or traditionally exist in conflict.  But Bach's compositions for just about every instrument clicks with me- my senses and my young, inexperienced mind. 

🎵

The need for silence 

For my first post on this new blog I'm going to add an image of Tilda Swinton from Béla Tarr's 2007 film, The Man from London, which I watched yesterday.  Most of the people in the film struggled to articulate their thoughts and concerns with their counterparts and were often filmed in close-up alone and in moments of intense introspection (as you can see in this image here).  I'm going to use this blog as an attempt to articulate some of my thoughts and experiences, and try my hardest to share them in a straightforward but sophisticated fashion. 

In my break (gap year) this year after finishing high school last year, and before beginning university next year, I've been doing a great deal of thinking and not having to come up with answers to things... ruminating or incubating I guess you could call it.  I have the privilege of being alone in my inarticulacy, encountering it and accepting it, which I think is something that Swinton continues to embody in her various roles in film.  

An image from The Man from London, Béla Tarr- a brilliant film.