Transit Film Quotes

There are...emotions, traumas, and transitions in every family that faces don't reflect and film doesn't capture. (255)

[...] because there comes a point where greed and madness can no longer be told apart. This dividing line is very thin, just like a belt of film surrounding the earth's sphere. It's a delicate blue, and this transition from the blue to the black is very gradual and lovely.

Look," Steven said, pointing at the sky. The stars were out in droves. One, far in the distance, was particularly bright. It flickered, then seemed to go out altogether before returning even brighter than before. "That's them, isn't it?" she said. "The Fall?" "Yes," Francesca said. "That's it. It looks just like the old texts say it would." "It was just"-Luce furrowed her brow, squinting-"I can only see it when I-" "Concentrate," Cam ordered. "What's happening to it?" Luce asked. "It is coming into being in this world," Daniel said. "It wasn't the physical transit from Heaven to Earth that took nine days. It was the shift from a Heavenly realm to an Earthly one. When we landed here, our bodies were...different. We became different. That took time." "Now time is taking us," Roland said, looking at the golden pocket watch that Dee must have given him before she died. "Then it is time for us to go," Daniel said to Luce. "Up there?" "Yes, we must soar up to meet them. We will fly right up to the limits of the Fall, and then you-" "I have to stop him?" "Yes." She closed her eyes thought back to the way Lucifer had looked at her in the Meadow. He looked like he wanted to crush every speck of tenderness there was. "I think I know how." "I told you she would say that!" Arriane whooped. Daniel pulled her close. "Are you sure?" She kissed him, never surer. "I just got my wings back, Daniel. I'm not going to let Lucifer take them away." So Luce and Daniel said goodbye to their friends, reached for each other's hands, and took off into the night. They flew upward forever, through the thinnest outer skin of the atmosphere, through a film of light at the edge of space.

Perhaps the deepest indication of our slavery is the monetization of time. It is a phenomenon with roots deeper than our money system, for it depends on the prior quantification of time. An animal or a child has “all the time in the world.” The same was apparently true for Stone Age peoples, who usually had very loose concepts of time and rarely were in a hurry. Primitive languages often lacked tenses, and sometimes lacked even words for “yesterday” or “tomorrow.” The comparative nonchalance primitive people had toward time is still apparent today in rural, more traditional parts of the world. Life moves faster in the big city, where we are always in a hurry because time is scarce. But in the past, we experienced time as abundant. The more monetized society is, the more anxious and hurried its citizens. In parts of the world that are still somewhat outside the money economy, where subsistence farming still exists and where neighbors help each other, the pace of life is slower, less hurried. In rural Mexico, everything is done mañana. A Ladakhi peasant woman interviewed in Helena Norberg-Hodge’s film Ancient Futures sums it all up in describing her city-dwelling sister: “She has a rice cooker, a car, a telephone—all kinds of time-saving devices. Yet when I visit her, she is always so busy we barely have time to talk.” For the animal, child, or hunter-gatherer, time is essentially infinite. Today its monetization has subjected it, like the rest, to scarcity. Time is life. When we experience time as scarce, we experience life as short and poor. If you were born before adult schedules invaded childhood and children were rushed around from activity to activity, then perhaps you still remember the subjective eternity of childhood, the afternoons that stretched on forever, the timeless freedom of life before the tyranny of calendar and clocks. “Clocks,” writes John Zerzan, “make time scarce and life short.” Once quantified, time too could be bought and sold, and the scarcity of all money-linked commodities afflicted time as well. “Time is money,” the saying goes, an identity confirmed by the metaphor “I can’t afford the time.” If the material world

When The Matrix debuted in 1999, it was a huge box-office success. It was also well received by critics, most of whom focused on one of two qualities—the technological (it mainstreamed the digital technique of three-dimensional “bullet time,” where the on-screen action would freeze while the camera continued to revolve around the participants) or the philosophical (it served as a trippy entry point for the notion that we already live in a simulated world, directly quoting philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 reality-rejecting book Simulacra and Simulation). If you talk about The Matrix right now, these are still the two things you likely discuss. But what will still be interesting about this film once the technology becomes ancient and the philosophy becomes standard? I suspect it might be this: The Matrix was written and directed by “the Wachowski siblings.” In 1999, this designation meant two brothers; as I write today, it means two sisters. In the years following the release of The Matrix, the older Wachowski (Larry, now Lana) completed her transition from male to female. The younger Wachowski (Andy, now Lilly) publicly announced her transition in the spring of 2016. These events occurred during a period when the social view of transgender issues radically evolved, more rapidly than any other component of modern society. In 1999, it was almost impossible to find any example of a trans person within any realm of popular culture; by 2014, a TV series devoted exclusively to the notion won the Golden Globe for Best Television Series. In the fifteen-year window from 1999 to 2014, no aspect of interpersonal civilization changed more, to the point where Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner attracted more Twitter followers than the president (and the importance of this shift will amplify as the decades pass—soon, the notion of a transgender US president will not seem remotely implausible). So think how this might alter the memory of The Matrix: In some protracted reality, film historians will reinvestigate an extremely commercial action movie made by people who (unbeknownst to the audience) would eventually transition from male to female. Suddenly, the symbolic meaning of a universe with two worlds—one false and constructed, the other genuine and hidden—takes on an entirely new meaning. The idea of a character choosing between swallowing a blue pill that allows him to remain a false placeholder and a red pill that forces him to confront who he truly is becomes a much different metaphor. Considered from this speculative vantage point, The Matrix may seem like a breakthrough of a far different kind. It would feel more reflective than entertaining, which is precisely why certain things get remembered while certain others get lost.

So think how this might alter the memory of The Matrix: In some protracted reality, film historians will reinvestigate an extremely commercial action movie made by people who (unbeknownst to the audience) would eventually transition from male to female. Suddenly, the symbolic meaning of a universe with two worlds—one false and constructed, the other genuine and hidden—takes on an entirely new meaning.

The more monetized society is, the more anxious and hurried its citizens. In parts of the world that are still somewhat outside the money economy, where subsistence farming still exists and where neighbors help each other, the pace of life is slower, less hurried. In rural Mexico, everything is done mañana. A Ladakhi peasant woman interviewed in Helena Norberg-Hodge's film Ancient Futures sums it all up in describing her city-dwelling sister: "She has a rice cooker, a car, a telephone — all kinds of time-saving devices. Yet when I visit her, she is always so busy we rarely have time to talk." For the animal, child, or hunter-gatherer, time is essentially infinite. Today its monetization has subjected it, like the rest, to scarcity. Time is life. When we experience time as scarce, we experience life as short and poor. If you were born before adult schedules invaded childhood and children were rushed around from activity to activity, then perhaps you still remember the subjective eternity of childhood, the afternoons that stretched on forever, the timeless freedom of life before the tyranny of calendar and clocks. "Clocks," writes John Zerzan, "make time scarce and life short." Once quantified, time too could be bought and sold, and the scarcity of all money-linked commodities afflicted time as well. "Time is money," the saying goes, an identity confirmed by the metaphor "I can't afford the time.

Hoping to settle the wheelchair matter once and for all, Graham dragged his chief of construction, his chief of architecture, and a film crew out to Dulles Airport, whose escalators were approximately the same width as those planned for Metro. There he produced a variety of braces and crutches. As the cameras rolled, Graham rode up and down the escalators using one aid after another, climaxing by riding both directions in a wheelchair, facing up each time. Graham clearly believed he had proved beyond doubt that 'it is entirely possible, easily and safely, for wheelchair travelers to use escalators.' His aides watched in disbelief; a fit and fearless major general in his fifties hardly represented the disabled population, whatever braces he strapped to his legs. All he had proved, concluded the WMATA architect Sprague Thresher, was that 'if everybody who had to use a wheelchair was Jack Graham, we wouldn't need elevators.

In under two weeks, and with no budget, thousands of college students protested the movie on their campuses nationwide, angry citizens vandalized our billboards in multiple neighborhoods, FoxNews.com ran a front-page story about the backlash, Page Six of the New York Post made their first of many mentions of Tucker, and the Chicago Transit Authority banned and stripped the movie’s advertisements from their buses. To cap it all off, two different editorials railing against the film ran in the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune the week it was released. The outrage about Tucker was great enough that a few years later, it was written into the popular television show Portlandia on IFC. I guess it is safe to admit now that the entire firestorm was, essentially, fake. I designed the advertisements, which I bought and placed around the country, and then promptly called and left anonymous complaints about them (and leaked copies of my complaints to blogs for support). I alerted college LGBT and women’s rights groups to screenings in their area and baited them to protest our offensive movie at the theater, knowing that the nightly news would cover it. I started a boycott group on Facebook. I orchestrated fake tweets and posted fake comments to articles online. I even won a contest for being the first one to send in a picture of a defaced ad in Chicago (thanks for the free T-shirt, Chicago RedEye. Oh, also, that photo was from New York). I manufactured preposterous stories about Tucker’s behavior on and off the movie set and reported them to gossip websites, which gleefully repeated them. I paid for anti-woman ads on feminist websites and anti-religion ads on Christian websites, knowing each would write about it. Sometimes I just Photoshopped ads onto screenshots of websites and got coverage for controversial ads that never actually ran. The loop became final when, for the first time in history, I put out a press release to answer my own manufactured criticism: TUCKER MAX RESPONDS TO CTA DECISION: “BLOW ME,” the headline read.

Early in a career that began in 1912 when he was 19 years old, Romain de Tirtoff, the Russian-born artists who called himself Erté after the french pronunciation of his initials, was regarded as a 'miraculous magician,' whose spectacular fashions transformed the ordinary into the outstanding, whose period costumes made the present vanish mystically into the past, and whose décors converted bare stages into sparkling wonderlands of fun and fancy. When his career ended with his death in 1990, Erté was considered as 'one of the twentieth-century's single most important influences on fashion,' 'a mirror of fashion for 75 years,' and the unchallenged 'prince of the music hall,' who had been accorded the most significant international honors in the field of design and whose work was represented in major museums and private collections throughout the world. It is not surprising that Erté's imaginative designs for fashion, theater, opera, ballet, music hall, film and commerce achieved such renown, for they are as crisp and innovative in their color and design as they are elegant and extravagant in character, and redolent of the romance of the pre- and post-Great War era, the period when Erté's hand became mature, fully developed and representative of its time. Art historians and scholars define Ertés unique style as transitional Art Deco, because it bridges the visual gab between fin-de-siècle schools of Symbolism, with its ethereal quality, Art Nouveau, with its high ornament, and the mid-1920s movement of Art Deco, with its inspirational sources and concise execution.

Often interfaces are assumed to be synonymous with media itself. But what would it mean to say that “interface” and “media” are two names for the same thing? The answer is found in the remediation or layer model of media, broached already in the introduction, wherein media are essentially nothing but formal containers housing other pieces of media. This is a claim most clearly elaborated on the opening pages of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. McLuhan liked to articulate this claim in terms of media history: a new medium is invented, and as such its role is as a container for a previous media format. So, film is invented at the tail end of the nineteenth century as a container for photography, music, and various theatrical formats like vaudeville. What is video but a container for film. What is the Web but a container for text, image, video clips, and so on. Like the layers of an onion, one format encircles another, and it is media all the way down. This definition is well-established today, and it is a very short leap from there to the idea of interface, for the interface becomes the point of transition between different mediatic layers within any nested system. The interface is an “agitation” or generative friction between different formats. In computer science, this happens very literally; an “interface” is the name given to the way in which one glob of code can interact with another. Since any given format finds its identity merely in the fact that it is a container for another format, the concept of interface and medium quickly collapse into one and the same thing.

Chapter 17   I was on my way from Rambam Hospital to Tiberias, when the news first came across the radio about a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. Maggie was still at the Hematology  Ward. I tried to imagine how she felt listening to the news. Surely she was as shocked as everyone else. There in the ward, patients were fighting for their lives, and now in another place in the country, people had perished in seconds. The entire country was horrified by the horrible scenes that aired on all the media. Gradually, the magnitude of the disaster started to be known. A suicide bomber detonated a charge inside a bus, while travelers were going up and down the bus at the heart of the city. It was a few minutes before nine in the morning. There were over twenty dead and dozens wounded. At home, sitting in front of the TV, I watched the extensive coverage. This transition from the sick atmosphere of the hospital in the morning, to the atmosphere of the evening suicide bombing, was depressing. The TV coverage was painful and brought an atmosphere of sadness. I had a feeling that the broadcast intended to clarify to all the people who were still healthy  that their health would not help them. That their end could come just as it did to those victims of the terrorism act on the bus. People did not stop thinking about the event, and the harsh images which were shown repeatedly on the television. Reporters broadcasted from the scene in heightened excitement and everything was filmed live. It seemed that someone was afraid, lest, God forbid, there would be a single person in the country who did not watch this horror. It was appalling. It was one of the first suicide bombings in Israel, and perhaps one of the largest ones.

Quand elle était petite, elle voulait m’épouser. J’étais son prince charmant. Année après année, j’avais bien vu dans son regard que le mythe s’était éparpillé dans les affres de la réalité. J’étais tombé de mon piédestal et, si je ne cherchais pas à mentir sur qui j’étais, j’avais toujours eu envie qu’elle me voie au meilleur de ma forme. Au fond, je pouvais dire que nous n’avions jamais réellement eu une relation saine. La preuve : cette incapacité physique d’aller voir son appartement, ce lieu où elle vivait en femme. Il faudrait des siècles pour admettre que nos enfants sont devenus adultes. On dit souvent qu’il est difficile de vieillir ; moi, je pourrais vieillir indéfiniment du moment que mes enfants, eux, ne grandiraient pas. Je ne sais pas pourquoi j’éprouvais tant de difficultés à vivre cette transition que tout parent connaît. Je n’avais pas l’impression qu’autour de moi les gens avaient les mêmes. Pire, j’entendais des parents soulagés du départ de leurs enfants. Enfin, ils allaient retrouver la liberté, disaient-ils. Il y avait ce film où le garçon, Tanguy, s’éternisait chez ses parents, prolongeant sans cesse ses études. Le mien était parti à l’autre bout du monde dès ses dix-huit ans. C’est toujours comme ça : ceux qui veulent se débarrasser de leurs enfants héritent de boulets, tandis que ceux qui veulent couver à loisir leur progéniture se retrouvent avec des précoces de l’autonomie. Mon fils me manquait atrocement. Et je ne supportais plus d’échanger avec lui des messages par Skype, ou par e-mails. D’ailleurs, ces messages et ces moments virtuels étaient de plus en plus courts. Nous n’avions rien à nous dire. L’amour entre un parent et un enfant n’est pas dans les mots, pas dans la discussion. Ce que j’aimais, c’était simplement que mon fils soit là, à la maison. On pouvait ne pas se parler de la journée, ce n’était pas grave, je sentais sa présence, ça me suffisait. Étais-je si tordu ? Je ne sais pas. Je ne peux qu’essayer de mettre des mots sur mes sentiments. Et je peux affirmer maintenant ce que je sais depuis le début : je vis mal la séparation avec mes enfants. Elle me paraît normale, justifiée, humaine, biologique, tout ce que vous voulez, pourtant elle me fait mal.

For example, people ask me about Eastman Kodak’s slow disintegration and financial struggle. Let me tell you that people at Kodak knew where the wind was blowing. The decline in sales of photographic film and its slowness in transitioning to digital photography was no surprise to anybody who studied it intensively or was directly involved. Listen to your intuition and sell, or even better, don't invest in it at all.   Selling

But I rather like it. This swift change of scene, this blending of motion and experience-it is much better than heavy, long-drawn-out kind of writing to which we are accustomed. It is closer to life. In life, too, changes and transitions flash by before our eyes, and emotions of the soul are like a hurricane. The cinema has divined the mystery of motion. And that is greatness. "When I was writing 'The Living Corpse,' I tore my hair and chewed my fingers because I could not give enough scenes, enough pictures, because I could not pass rapidly enough from one event to another. The accursed stage was like a halter choking the throat of the dramatist; and I had to cut the life and swing of the work according to the dimensions and requirements of the stage. I remember when I was told that some clever person had devised a scheme for a revolving stage, on which a number of scenes could be prepared in advance. I rejoiced like a child, and allowed myself to write ten scenes into my play. Even then I was afraid the play would be killed. "But the films! They are wonderful! Drr! and a scene is ready! Drr! and we have another! We have the sea, the coast, the city, the palace-and in the palace there is tragedy (there Is always tragedy in palaces, as we see in Shakespeare). "I am seriously thinking of writing a play for the screen. I have a subject for it. It is a terrible and bloody theme. I am not afraid of bloody themes. Take Homer or the Bible, for instance. How many bloodthirsty passages there are in them- murders, wars. And yet these are the sacred books, and they ennoble and uplift the people. It is not the subject itself that is so terrible. It is the propagation of bloodshed, and the justification for it, that is really terrible! Some friends of mine returned from Kursk recently and told me a shocking incident. It is a story for the films. You couldn't write it in fiction or for the stage. But on the screen it would be good. Listen-it may turn out to be a powerful thing!

Lucas began filming THX 1138 on Monday, September 22, 1969, shooting from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the still unfinished Bay Area Rapid Transit system.

I was born during the reign of now forgotten technical appliances, those transitional forms that didn't survive although it seemed that their epoch would last forever. Who'd have thought something as modern and contemporary as a cassette player would so quickly and definitively end up in a museum? a video-recorder, a Walkman, a floppy disk, telephone boxes, telephone answer-machines... who still uses any of those things? In fact it's easier to find someone who plays gramophone records or someone who writes letters and sends them by post, just as there are still people who go to the cinema and film libraries. But finding someone who watches videos or has a telephone answer-machine, who walks around with a Walkman or files data on floppy disks, doesn't seem possible, ever less so, even theoretically.

His album that year was Sign O’ the Times. I took the fact that the gang in the title track was named the Disciples as a personal tribute. The tour behind that record was the best Rock show I’ve ever seen. I went three times, and it blew my mind every time. The production was the highest evolution of the live, physical part of our Artform I have ever seen. It was Prince’s vision, but his production designer, LeRoy Bennett, deserves much of the credit for pulling it off. It was Rock, it was Theater, it was Soul, it was Cinema, it was Jazz, it was Broadway. The stage metamorphized into different scenes and configurations right before your eyes, transforming itself into whatever emotional setting was appropriate for each song. On top of that, the music never stopped, for three solid hours. Prince wrote various pieces, or covered Jazz, as interstitial transitions for those moments when the stage was shifting or the musicians were changing clothes. At one point, he even had a craps game break out, which made me laugh—it brought me back to Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom and our onstage Monopoly games. They captured it pretty well on film, but it can’t compare. When you’re watching a movie, your mind is used to scene changes, different sets and lighting. Live, it’s something else. That kind of legerdemain before your eyes is mind-boggling.

A vast amount of preparation, really, to arrive at the innocuously brief moment of decisive action: the cut—the moment of transition from one shot to the next—something that, appropriately enough, should look almost self-evidently simple and effortless, if it is even noticed at all.

Yayoi Kusama at the Brata Gallery, 89 East 10th Street, is a young Japanese painter currently working in New York. Her paintings are puzzling in their dry, obsessional repetitions. They are huge white canvases, lightly scored with gray dots and partly washed over again with a white film. The results are infinitely extending compositions utterly dependent on the viewer’s patient scrutiny of the subtle transitions in tone. Her exhibition is without question a striking tour de force, but disturbing none the less in its tightly held austerity.

Sensation Hunters (January 3, 1934), features Brennan as a stuttering waiter in a nightclub, whose scenes usually end before he can finish a sentence. Dressed in a short cutaway jacket with a lock of hair curled in the middle of his forehead, he is ridiculously slow on the uptake when he is addressed ironically by his employer—“Hey, Handsome,” “Hey, Honey”—as she brushes past him. Before he can say much, she is gone, leaving him to stare dumbly at the tray in his hands. This a typical example of the comic relief he brought to otherwise ordinary scenes, but in this case he also serves as a foil to the fast-paced world of showgirls, con artists, and pickpockets. In a way, Brennan became a specialist, employed to get scenes off to a fast start, or to make a snappy transition with just a little bit of the actor’s business—in this case straining for words that his impatient employer cannot bother to take in. His one moment of joy comes when several showgirls jostle him on their way to the stage, his one brush with stardom. And then he vanishes from the film, no longer of use to the plot.

If the material world is fundamentally an abundant world, all the more abundant is the spiritual world: the creations of the human mind — songs, stories, filmes, ideas, and everything else that goes by the name of intellectual property. Because in the digital age we can replicate and spread them at virtually no cost, artificial scarcity must be imposed upon them in order to keep them in the monetized realm. Industry and the government enforce scarcity through copyrights, patents, and encryption standards, allowing the holders of such property to profit from owning it. Scarcity, then, is mostly an illusion, a cultural creation. But because we live, almost wholly, in a culturally constructed world, our experience of this scarcity is quite real — real enough that nearly a billion people today are malnourished, and some 5,000 children die each day from hunger-related causes. So our responses to this scarcity — anxiety and greed — are perfectly understandable. When something is abundant, no one hesitates to share it. We live in an abundant world, made otherwise through our perceptions, our culture, and our deep invisible stories. Our perception of scarcity is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Money is central to the construction of the self-reifying illusion of scarcity.

This attitude finds a late but still abundantly clear expression in the conventions of the classical court theatre, in which the actor, quite regardless of the demands of stage deception, addresses the audience directly, apostrophizes it, as it were, with every word and gesture, and not only avoids ‘turning his back’ on the audience but emphasizes by every possible means that the whole proceeding is a pure fiction, an entertainment conducted in accordance with previously agreed rules. The naturalistic theatre forms the transition to the absolute opposite of this ‘frontal’ art, namely the film, which, with its mobilization of the audience, leading them to the events instead of leading and presenting the events to them, and attempting to represent the action in such a way as to suggest that the actors have been caught red-handed, by chance and by surprise, reduces the fictions and conventions of the theatre to a minimum. With its robust illusionism, its forthright and indiscreet directness, its violent attack on the audience, it expresses a democratic conception of art, held by liberal, anti-authoritarian societies, just as clearly as the whole of the courtly and aristocratic art—by its mere emphasis of the stage, the footlights, the frame and the socle—is the unmistakable expression of a highly artificial, specially commissioned occasion, from which it is obvious that the patron is an initiated connoisseur who does not need to be deceived.

vast amount of preparation, really, to arrive at the innocuously brief moment of decisive action: the cut—the moment of transition from one shot to the next—something that, appropriately enough, should look almost self-evidently simple and effortless, if it is even noticed at all.

Through the thirties and forties there was a transition whereby you had a film with sound, dialogue, special effects, and everything else, but the filmmakers weren’t quite sure about the role of music.