A poet with a Polaroid camera.

A few days ago I told someone I was the least spiritual person in the world. I just remembered that’s not entirely true. All it takes is the mere sight of this word to make me believe in humanity, in nature, sometimes even in myself:


Tarkovsky

I wrote that essay as part of my application to the Telluride Film Festival Student Symposium.* The question was: If you could only take one film with you to the future, which one would you choose and why? (I got in and, so far, my participation in the Symposium has been the highlight of my film career. If you have been to the Telluride Film Festival, you probably understand why.)

These photos, taken at home and in Italy, bear witness to the same way of seeing and visual world as the great films. A selection from these photos was first published in Italy in 2006, and recently a Russian photo blog digitized all the pictures. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

“An artist never works under ideal conditions. If they existed, his work wouldn’t exist, for the artist doesn’t live in a vacuum. Some sort of pressure must exist. The artist exists because the world is not perfect.”

“My purpose is to make films that will help people to live, even if they sometimes cause unhappiness.”

“So much, after all, remains in our thoughts and hearts as unrealized suggestion.”

“I think in fact that unless there is an organic link between the subjective impressions of the author and his objective representation of reality, he will not achieve even superficial credibility, let alone authenticity and inner truth.”

"We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyze the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it's a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it. "

“My encounter with another world and another culture and the beginnings of an attachment to them had set up an irritation, barely perceptible but incurable-rather like unrequited love, like a symptom of the hopelessness of trying to grasp what is boundless, or unite what cannot be joined; a reminder of how finite, how curtailed, our experience on earth must be.”

* Interesting side note: Joe Swanberg of Mumblecore fame, was one of my condo roommates. He showed us a video he did of his brother and his friends skateboarding.