New Meme Format

Ritual (2000, hideaki anno)

Gorchakov, dreaming of a world without borders, appears to long for Babel – the city that united humanity with a single language. He must also be aware that after divine intervention, Babel became a symbol of the impossibility of reaching the realm of the unknowable and of the consequent damnation to the sphere of translation. The fall or relegation to the state where translation is ‘possible’, indeed even essential, occurred, according to the Old Testament, as a result of the unsuccessful attempt to build a super-structure – the Tower of Babel ‘whose top may reach unto heaven’ (Genesis 11: 4). At the centre of the story is the spatial conflict provoked by linguistic unity: ‘Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do’ (Genesis 11: 6). God imposes a certain spatial limit beyond which humans cannot ascend; everything that remains further than this point in space is destined to be beyond human reason and knowledge. The damnation is achieved by means of a confusion of languages with further dissipation: ‘So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city’ (Genesis 11: 8).

Abroad is a key word which is related to the verb to scatter in the King James’s Version and means in this case a state of being ‘widely asunder’; in its modern use, however, it tends to signify ‘any region outside one’s homeland’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Abroad is the condition of Gorchakov since it describes his estrangement: the protagonist is disconnected from his current surroundings (language, people and landscape), he finds himself abroad in the two senses – ‘widely asunder’ and outside his homeland. Language and topography operate as agents of alienation and the film’s aesthetic strategy is to resolve somehow the divergence between the character’s inner aspirations and outer surroundings.

Nariman Skakov, The (im)possible translation of Nostalgia (Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema Volume 3 Number 3, publ. 2009)

Ritual (2000, hideaki anno)

Ritual (2000, hideaki anno)

Ritual (2000, hideaki anno)

Ritual (2000, hideaki anno)

Any nostalgia I feel is literary. It’s not the stillness of evenings in the country that endears me to the childhood I spent there, it’s the way the table was set for tea, it’s the way the furniture was arranged in the room, it’s the faces and physical gestures of the people. I feel nostalgia for scenes. Thus someone else’s childhood can move me as much as my own; both are purely visual phenomena from a past I’m unable to fathom, and my perception of them is literary. They move me, yes, but because I see them, not because I remember them.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

I let my love for cinema destroy my life... but I’m still always eager to see a good film.

It’s not important who made it.

Just seeing it is the important thing.

The cinema lost me my job.

It robbed me of my life... my social identity.

But even now, just one good film and I eagerly turn back to cinema.

If I had the money, I might, for example, like Peter Falk, buy kites so I wouldn’t grow up.

The cinema.

Whenever I see a film, I dissolve myself in it... to such an extent that I reach the bottom.

I fade out and perhaps... I get lost in it.

And this has played an essential role in my life.

Cinema is important to me. It’s like a prism.

A good film... is part of my life.

With every good film I see, I feel reborn.

It feels as if I made it myself, as if it were my creation.

I identify with the director.

I identify with the actors.

I feel attuned and in harmony with the atmosphere of the film.

I feel as if it’s my story.

That’s how films carry me away.

That’s why they’ve become my obsession.

If I didn’t have to live in society, I’d seek shelter in the mountains and live all by myself.

If I didn’t have to go on living, and were courageous enough, I’d have liked to be hanged from the beams of cinema.

If I had the courage to protest... I would use filmmaking as a tool to fight all injustice.

—Hossein Sabzian in Close-Up Long Shot