91 quotes found
"If I had not grown up in Stockerau, in the boonies of Lower Austria, than I would not be what I am now. The germ cell of burgeoning nerdism is difference. The yearning to be understood, to find opportunities to share experiences, to not be left alone with one's bizarre interest. At the same time one derives an almost perverse pleasure from wallowing in this deficit. Nerds love deficiency: that of the other, but also their own. Nerds are eager explorers, who enjoy measuring themselves against one another and also compete aggressively. And yet the nerd's existence also comprises an element of the occult, of mystery. The way in which this power is expressed or focused is very important."
"Historically speaking, the first wave of the punk/new wave (approximately 1976-1983) was primarily a movement of creative abuse of hardly-ever-used consumer media technology. Parents (usually technophile Baby boomer dads) bought expensive equipment like 8-track recorders, Super-8 and Polaroid cameras and later VHS camcorders and only used it to "document" birthday parties and other eminently boring ceremonies. But the rebellious teens found interesting new things to do with the dust-collecting media tech, and it started one of the biggest DIY revolutions of the 20th century. So punk (years before cyperpunk) was a movement of youngsters goofing around with (aka appropriating) consumer tech."
"I think that the figure of the nerd provides a beautiful template for analyzing the transformation of the disciplinary society into the control society. The nerd, in his cliche form, first stepped out upon the world stage in the mid-1970s, when we were beginning to hear the first rumblings of what would become the Cambrian explosion of the information society. The nerd must serve as comic relief for the future-anxieties of Western society. And the transformation I'm talking about is already in full swing: the police gaze of 19th- and 20th-century disciplinary society made visible the individual, which is illuminated by power. In our burgeoning technological control society, the individual is x-rayed and algorithmized. Even worse: the individuals x-ray themselves, willingly putting themselves on display."
"Jesus died for our SIMMs."
"Privacy is a bourgeois fantasy."
"The widespread inability to understand technological artifacts as fabricated entities, as social and cultural phenomena, derives from the fact that in retrospect only those technologies that prove functional for a culture and can be integrated into everyday life are 'left over.' However, the perception of what is functional, successful and useful is itself the product of social and cultural--and last but not least--political and economic processes. Selection processes and abandoned products and product forms are usually not discussed."
"In a media-based society (and of course there is no such thing as a non-media-based society consisting of more than one person) it is the signs and significants, the meanings and habits and conventions of speaking and thinking, the images and stereotypes which control everything. It is important to analyze how it is represented and of course what is not represented or how it lacks representation. It's not so much Rupert Murdoch – whose assholeness I will not dispute – that we should attack, but rather something I would call the cultural grammar of the public space. Power is formed within such a grammar. Access and non-access to each and every thing is regulated in its realm. Meanings are negotiated there."
"The human is a narrative being. We construct emotional machines, so-called “stories”, to communicate, to share the world in which we live and make it collectively experienceable. And we are pretty good at doing that. Since the primordial soup at some point mendelized into primate brains, we have either been fleeing from big cats or telling others about our escapes from the clutches of big cats. Sitting around the campfire, interpreting and breaking down the world, charging it with aura. Initially this was all very mythopoeic, and slowly it became more differentiated. But even in the post-Enlightenment age, world interpretations are not necessarily particularly rational. Good stories sell well, and the best stories are the ones that hit you in the gut, regardless of whether they would hold up to a Wikipedia check or not."
"Oh, Tolkien, that miserable Catholic. He even hated refrigerators. A technophobic academic who probable would have fucked Ireland, if Ireland were fuckable."
"Companies like Nike already use Graffiti as a standard variety in their marketing campaigns and the first people who read Naomi Klein's 'No Logo' were marketing gurus who wanted to know what they shouldn't do."
"Since the advent of modernism, artists have been seeking to loosen the entanglement of work and subject, because they saw themselves pushed into a role that they did not necessarily want to occupy: one which offered freedom and independence on the upside, but in combination with isolation and powerlessness on the downside. While the workers of the Fordist factory developed collectivist strategies to pursue their goals, the particularities of the artist's existence – cast as productive eccentricity and manic-depressive individualism – made it more difficult for artists to organize to achieve their demands and improve their precarious living and working conditions. It was only with great difficulty that this group, condemned to autonomy, could free itself from the prison of its freedom."
"The information age is an age of permanently getting stuck. Greater and greater speed is demanded. New software, new hardware, new structures, new cultural techniques. Life-long learning? Yes. But the company can't fire the secretary every six months, just because she can't cope with the new version of Excel. They can count their keystrokes, measure their productivity … but! They will never be able to sanction their inability! Because that is immanent."
"I think that Man in creating God somewhat overestimated his abilities."
"Imagination is an abuse of power."
"The great gender unifier is your asshole."
"Computer games are embedded in the cultural framework of technological developments. In the study of technological development and creativity, focusing attention on the failure, the error, the breakdown, the malfunction means opening the black box of technology. Studies have convincingly demonstrated that the widespread inability to understand technological artifacts as fabricated entities, as social and cultural phenomena, derives from the fact that in retrospect only those technologies that prove functional for a culture and can be integrated into everyday life are "left over." However, the perception of what is functional, successful and useful is itself the product of social and cultural--and last but not least--political and economic processes. Selection processes and abandoned products and product forms are usually not discussed. According to Langdon Winner, there is a sense in which all technical activity contains an inherent tendency toward forgetfulness."
"Contemporary art -- the field we are usually working in because there's money -- is mostly concerned with systems or systematic concepts. In the context of their work, artists adapt models of individual art-specific or economic or political systems like in a laboratory, to reveal the true nature of these systems by deconstructing them. So would it be fair to say that by their chameleon-like adaptation they are attempting to generate a similar system? Well... the corporate change in the art market has aged somewhat in the meantime and looks almost as old as the 'New Economy'. Now even the last snotty brat has realized that all the hogwash about the creative industries, sponsoring, fund-raising, the whole load of bullshit about the beautiful new art enterprises, was not much more than the awful veneer on the stupid, crass fanfare of neo-liberal liberation teleology. What is the truth behind the shifting spheres of activity between computer graphics, web design and the rest of all those frequency-orientated nerd pursuits? A lonely business with other lonely people at their terminals. And in the meantime the other part of the corporate identity has incidentally wasted whole countries like Argentina or Iceland. That's the real truth of the matter."
"I always wonder what the official web site of the GDR would look like if they were still around. Would they use Flash? Or HTML5?"
"The future is like the Jetsons, plus rape."
"Long time ago I called the greasy stuff on touch displays "hackerfat"... but it's better to change that to "socialsmear"."
"I blame society for Zack Snyder's career."
"The Capitalist system is a highly adaptable entity. And so it isn't surprising that alternative spaces and forms of living provided interesting ideas that could be milked and marketed. So certain structural features of these "indie" movement outputs were suddenly highly acclaimed, applied and copy-pasted into capitalist developing laboratories. These qualities fit best into the tendency in which -- by the end of the seventies -- bourgeois society started to update and re-launch using the experiences gained through countercultural projects. Mainstream harvested the knowledge that was won in these projects and used it. Normalizing dissent."
"The emergence of new media (and therefore artistic) formats is certainly interesting. But etching information into copper plates is just as exciting. We think that the perpetual return of 'the new', to cite Walter Benjamin, is nothing to write home about - except perhaps for the slave-drivers in the fashion industry. We've never been interested in the new just in itself, but in the accidental occurrence. In the moment where things don't tally, where productive confusion arises. That's why in the final analysis, although we've laughed a lot with Stewart Home, we even reject the meta-criticism of innovation-fixation articulated in 'neoism'. The new sorts itself out when it lands in the museum. Finito."
"I always loved the grand dichotomies of life. Dogs and cats. Cats and mice. Like Tom and Jerry. But as someone who grew up in Central Europe I never understood how a mouse can live inside a wall. Walls are made of bricks! They are not hollow. Way later I came to understand, when I learned that US-American houses are just made of wood, and their walls are really hollow."
"Christianity is a death cult gone horribly wrong."
"Everything in German sounds like a war crime. And everything in Austrian German sounds like a war crime served with whipped cream."
"Hasta la victoria siempre! Never forget! And let anthropomorphized kiwis puke evil provitamins on Jean-Luc Picard!"
"Did you know that if you removed all nerve cells from your brain and laid them out end-to-end in a straight line, you would die?"
"Whenever I go to a botanical garden, I think of killing people with a spade."
"Monotheism is a dictatorship. The number of the beast is 1."
"Vegas is gorgeous hyperreality, but most of the stuff people like here is not my cup of tea. I don't gamble, and I don't like Penn & Teller. I'd rather be locked into a basement full of Philip Glass recordings."
"Liberals believe being friendly and fair will make the world better. But our world runs by horrific rules. Fair-play doesn't change the rules. You just accept them."
"A guy once screamed "Rammstein is fascist" in my face. I screamed "Laibach have seen better days!" back."
"Watching a Norwegian film: character screams "Satan" and the English subtitle reads "Christ". That's was I call subliminal messaging."
"Strange to see radical anti-Semites using Facebook. I'd like to call that Zuckerberg's Paradox."
"Mankind is a sexual and tool-using species. So it's never old news to deal with the intersection of human desire and ingenuity. As biohacking, sexually enhanced bodies, genetic utopias and the plethora of gender have long been the focus of literature, science fiction and, increasingly, pornography, we explore the possibilities that fictional and authentic bodies have to offer."
"Rammstein is an award-winning music-based German-teaching system for American goths."
"Dreamt I had a meeting with the Austrian Film Institute about a grant. They told me I would never get one, but I should try insurance fraud."
"I remember when I got a new device for my computer. I connected it to the landline phone plug(!), and the device called another device and sang a robot love song to it. That made the devices connect, and I could go online and exchange messages. That was one of the most important things that ever happened to me, breaking my isolation. It helped me to reach out to other folks all around the globe. Communication is key in nerd culture. But beware if that communication fails. You can create toxic troll wastelands! Not even robot love songs can help you with that!"
"There are still films about bank robberies, but let's be honest, the biggest financial crimes today aren't happening in banks, they're happening on Wall Street. This is happening in the completely abstract datasphere. Capitalism is dependent upon this commodity of speed. Making a film about a bank robbery is maybe funny, but it's completely anachronistic. We have to tell the stories of the 21st century, specifically in a way that people can relate to it."
"Leftist memes are 25 pages long and have footnotes. (Original German: Linke Memes sind 25 Seiten lang und haben Fußnoten.)"
"[Glossary of Broken Dreams] was born out of the frustration that debate culture (not only) on digital platforms has become radically fragmented and fractalized, making it hard to call it discourse. It's a Tower of Babel-like context confusion that pleases me as a nerd, but as a political being who wants society to progress, it doesn't please me at all. [...] I just thought it was time for something like a political spring cleaning of concepts. Because picking up the broom and taking a chance to get rid of stuff is the only way to prevent us all from becoming social liberal hoarders. One of my examples is the concept of privacy that, at the moment, everyone coddles like a puppy. Let me say this, as a good old Neo-leftist, I'm having problems with the conservative and deeply bourgeois can of worms that the privacy debate entails. I think it's time to change our thought patterns here. Instead of trying to find ways to defend our privacy come hell or high water, we should ask ourselves why privacy is such a major concern for us? Is what we're trying to achieve here just reformist symptom-control rather than a solution to the underlying problems?"
"It's not working from home, it's living at work."
"Conspiracy theories (actually: hypotheses) are comforting, anthropocentric, affirming constructs. They assume that someone runs the world, that someone is in control. The sad truth is that nobody is in control. That's way more terrifying."
"My nerdy teenage rebellion was to confront my parents with the scientific method, challenging their weird beliefs, asking for peer-reviewed data and scientific context. I remember that one day when I was 15, I asked my mother to use her divining rod and a piece of paper to determine the first 30 decimal values of pi. It took her three hours and not a single one was right. That felt like a huge success, but she just told me she had a bad day because of the full moon. Tomorrow she would try again and would succeed. And if not, who says that the 30 digits of pi in the math books are actually right? Maybe her version was correct in the first place and she had access to a higher knowledge? It simply wasn't possible to challenge her."
"Sometimes I surprise myself with my own face."
"Don't cry for me, cry for Argentina!"
"After the Soviet Union turned into many, many little non-Soviet countries... it was crazy. It was like a lot of pop-ups on Firefox, and you try to click them away, but it doesn't work!"
"Is Corona laboratory-made? Nah. I think it's way more reasonable to assume that a bat fucked a pangolin. And some guy then fucked that pangolin. Mystery solved. Occam's razor."
"It′s always seemed odd to me that people don′t paint with both hands. I mean, if I′m technically so shackled that I can′t paint with my hair, stomach or bottom, what about my other hand? You′ve got to live in painting. All-round painting... Indefinable space-at least indefinable in traditional terms-that′s what I require of my paintings. There must be absolutely no central focus... There can be no progress until that damned centre has been eliminated... My paintings are sublimated stamping,screaming and hissing-I try to translate a process experienced physically into a physically visible one."
"I covered the walls of both basement rooms with Milino,a cheap substitute for canvas,stretched string backwards and forwards across the rooms and attached widths of packing-paper to them,so that they reached down to the floor and as far as the walls that I wanted to paint. I wanted to create a labyrinth which would somehow help to prevent a compositional idea from establishing itself all too quickly. I had the idea of working on all the walls pretty well at the same time,as if they were one large painting completely surrounding me. By constantly wandering in the labyrinth I sought to realise a form of “de-composition”."
"Using the scanty means at my disposal I attempted to paint the room together with several objects that I had gathered together,white on white. The white room is an interior to be made devoid of any specific sensualism emanated by objects. Ultimately it is a classic white canvas expanded into three-dimensional space. It was in these surroundings that I rolled across the room,my body wrapped up in pieces of white cloth like a pile of parcels. The pieces of cloth unwound themselves from my tense body,which for a long time remained in a catatonic position,with the soles of both my feet stuck as it were to the wall.[...] I had planned to do some bodypainting for the second part of the performance.[...] At first I poured black paint over the white objects,I painted Anni with the aim of making a “living painting”. But gradually a certain uncertainty crept in. This was caused by jealous fight between two photographers,which ended by one of them leaving the room in a rage.[...] My unease increased,as I became aware of the defects in my “score”-and should this not have any,the mistakes in the way I was translating it into actions. Recognising this,I succumbed to a fit of painting which was like an instinct breaking through. I jammed myself into a step-ladder that had fallen over and on which I had previously done the most dreadful gymnastic exercises,and daubed the walls in frantic despair-until I was exhausted. The very last hour of “informel”. Mühl angrily ridiculed my relapse into a “technique” that had to be overcome."
"My body is the intention. My body is the event. My body is the result."
"“Ritual” might be an acceptable term, if shorn of its overtly religious connotations.For me,breaking taboos became nothing less than a stylistic means. I allowed my body, my self, to be pushed into such extreme situations that certain norms of social behaviour could only appear utterly absurd to me."
"Total actions are a further development of the happening and combine the elements of all art forms, painting music, literature, film, theatre, which have been so infected by the progressive process of cretinisation in our society that any examination of reality has become impossible using these means alone. Total actions are the unprejudiced examination of all the materials that make up reality. Total actions take place in a consciously delineated area of reality with deliberately selected materials. They are partial, dynamic occurrences in which the most varied materials and elements of reality are linked,swapped over,turn on their heads and destroyed. This procedure creates the occurrence. The actual nature of the occurrence depends on the composition of the material and actors′ unconscious tendencies. Anything may constitute the material: people, animals, plants, food, space, movement, noise, smells, light, fire, coldness, warmth, wind, dust, steam, gas, events, sport, all art forms and all art products. All the possibilities of the material are ruthlessly exhausted. As a result of the incalculable possibilities for choices that the material presents to the actor,he plunges into a concentrated whirl of action finds himself suddenly in a reality without barriers, performs actions resembling those of a madman,and avails himself of a fool′s privileges,which is probably not without significance for sensible people. Old art forms seek to reconstruct reality,total actions unfold within reality itself. Total actions are direct occurrences(direct art),not the repetition of an occurrence,a direct encounter between unconscious elements and reality(material). The actor performs and himself becomes material: stuttering, stammering, burbling, groaning, choking, shouting, screeching, laughing, spitting, biting, creeping, rolling about in the material."
"Oswald Wiener had just dropped by. We were watching a football world championship game. Suddenly,in the middle of a game with Germany,the reporter said,“Bertie Vogts slid in like an Irrwisch [Jack-o’-Lantern]”. Eureka! That was the title I was looking for,and Oswald wiener commented,“That fits perfectly-an irrer Wisch”"
"I think my actions,like those of my associates,were possible in this form only in vienna. Our heritage was the vienna secession and Austrian expression,and that,along with the violent disapproval of our work,explains not only its frequently overwrought and aggressive character,but also its radical psychological insights."
"Self-painting is a further development of the art of painting. The surface of an image has lost its function as the sole means of conveying expression. It was taken back to its roots,to the wall,to the object,to the living being,to the human body. By using my body as a means of conveying expression,the result created is a happening captured by a camera as it progresses,and an experience which viewers can share."
"The white room is an interior to be made devoid of any specific sensualism emanated by objects. Ultimately it is classic white canvas expanded into three-dimensional space."
"Pure painting or the art of drawing whose point of departure is based on purely formal criteria is,in my opinion, passé. I do not reject it if other artists make attempts,but as far as I am concerned,this is what I believe. if I do not place a text next to my drawings,I consider the work on such programmes to be futile."
"In simple terms: art has not been a public nuisance for quite a while now. either the people have become well-behaved or the perpetrators of nuisances have become tired."
"Art is gushing hot bile on the fields and harvesting the looks of nasty dwarfs."
"The seven dwarfs were devastated when an eighth joined them one morning before they went to work. He went straight into their house,took little plates and cutlery out of his waistcoat,grabbed the mining tools and was the first dwarf to set off for work. Caught off-guard by his cheeky but honest manner,the others followed,angry because he was showing them the way along the path they took every day and surprised when they found he had turned into dark grotto into a glass palace with Snow White hewn in gold. For these established prospectors it was terrible to behold the intruder appropriating for himself the right to mine the virgin goldmine."
"I want to cover all areas that can be depicted visually. This ranges from fairytales to attempts to enter the abstract and view oneself as a social outcast or someone struggling to stay alive."
"Art is created in a state of delirium. Anyting else is the restoration of monuments. Collectors are artist that do not have a home. they have to make one for themselves."
"In fact,my art generally nauseated me. Often,when I wanted to set down a poem on an uncontaminated piece of paper,I′d start feeling sick and I did actually throw up in front of many drawings. I tremble all over in front of each picture-poem and before every action I would swallow a jar of pressed vine vermin. Time and again I strove for a kind of non-art,and time and again I failed,like a chimpanzee wanting to throw away a banana without peeling it. My disgust at producing art naturally atracted collectors,and ocassionaly photographers."
"My picture-poems are linguistic margins on visual atolls."
"For me,the Bild-Dichtung[image-poem] is the ideal form,because the drawing process is constantly being interrupted or contrasted by the writing. And since I always have something to say when I am writing,the effort has a balancing effect. Drawing and writing are wonderful complements."
"Writing without making mistakes is like vomiting hot air."
"Poetry is when words are robbed of their attributed truth."
"In a certain sense,I never left Actionism as I understood it to this very day. Today,I work in “sittings” that are very similar to the course of the actions. Only the stage has changed on which the presentation takes place."
"The pencil-stroke is like cutting into the heart."
"My thinking at that time was determined by a kind of willfully repressed pleasure[Freude] in Freud ,and I wanted to be as artistically direct as plumber illustrating the history of art with a spanner."
"Analogously to Arnulf Rainer′s ‘overpaintings’,and extending these with my own actionistic resources, the artist′s head should be in the picture ,should become one with the picture, and disappear in it."
"Being covered in white paint ,you demonstrate behaviour intended to create a public nuisance,which did in fact cause offence to members of the public ,and created a breach of the peace and public order."
"Color will play no part in the art of future."
"I hate people,who force their way through at traffic accidents to see blood. They...rape and dismember virgins,and have orgies."
"You become an artist to upset your family."
"Creative children do not paint. They mess around. If they have to draw,creative children always end up being the ridiculous kind of child,who produces childern′s drawings Creative children wipe spinach round their gobs,that′s all. Any thing more that these crappy daubnings is the result of education-and before long we′re on a level with Paul Klee."
"As a boy,I was extremely shy,certainly as a result of my upbringing. I was an expert blusher,and some of my harsh actions may echo this shyness by way of compensation."
"Majorca,Spring 1960: As chance would have it-and chance always has something up its sleeve-I bumped into another academic renegade. He was about to leave for Majorca,where,he said,two stone houses were waiting for him and for me. So off we went. On the boat from Barcelona it was bitterly cold,and I arrived in Palma like a lump of ice on two sticks. My stone house was an aesthetic delight,especially as there was no furniture at all in it. We made straight for the local fishing village,where we soon met an Englishman suffering from a skin disease who lent us two matrasses. Later,other European artistic refugees arrived at the Café Marinero, including a Pole called Foot who had fought in the French army against what he called "very romantic barbarians". he painted too, alternately in monochrome and in abstract expressionist style. Abstract Expressionism was the only style practised by Joan Merritt,a brilliant woman from the United States. She transformed an artistic nature reserve into a jungle. In Franco´s empire you had to report to the Guardia Civil once a week. It was the same ritual every time. You knocked on the door and a voice answered "Un momentino!" You waited until eventually receiving a very loud command: "Entra!" A man with a big stomach,a moustache and a cigar would be leaning backwards in his chair at a desk with an oversize telephone. You stood in silence. The official would pick up the receiver and make an official call. A pin-up calendar hung on the wall,displaying a senorita in a skin-coloured bathing costume. Then the official leafed through your passport and bashed a stamp into it. A second ritual was Sunday mass, the Catholic way. It was conveyed by loudspeakers to the outside world, so it could be heard miles away. A third ritual was collecting your post.For obvious reasons,the Generalísimo would not allow post offices all over the place. In our village he left things to an itinerant clerk-cum-supervisor. she set up her office in one "cervecería"or another, as fancy took her. You entered the room and nodded silently to the other foreigners,all of us always somehow suspicious. A mother´s-milk monster with strictly arranged hair, a Generalísima, would be sitting behind a table on which she´d piled letters that had arrived. When she wasn´t disappearing into a backroom she´d occasionally call out a name. The whole business often lasted as long as the deep sleep of a dreaming donkey. Once you´d been given your post you had to go to the man with the moustache and cigar. The first ritual was then repeated, before the stamped postage stamp was stamped out of existence. Despite this, life in the fishing village was genuinely worth living. The sun shone every day,the fish were cheap,the wine even cheaper and mineral water free. The café proprietor reaked of tobacco and his customers smelled a fish. One fisherman had lost three fingers,and the lavatory´s aroma lay over the whole room. Once,when I was drunk,I called the Englishman with skin disease a "fucking bastard" and he scratched away at his scabs in fury. Red wine flowed from the barrels and murky blood trickled out of eyes. Smoke rushed through the room,the landlord fell over a barrel and,unbelievably,got up straightaway and refilled his own and customers´ glasses with what he had. this time,it was a bitter-tasting liqueur,spiced with filterless Peninsulares cigarettes. everyone smelled of ham and sweaty feet,and you´d sometimes tread on a rotten olive. One day a blonde Danish woman came to the Café Marinero,got to know me and invited me to her house,where she showed me her housekeeper,a local,who was pining for her unfaithful boyfriend. And there was an American woman who introduced me to My Fair Lady. Finally,I met an émigré Mongolian fisherman who couldn´t swim and drowned without a hope in the world. The fishing village had a soporiphic effect. Even when you were sitting at the bar and had to look for the owner to order another glass of red wine,it felt as though you were in a dream. And you were still dreaming when you crept along the dusty alleys with their weathered walls to visit the village barber. That man cropped my hair once. He sat down in a chair he´d probably got from a doctor. He begun practising his craft behind my right ear,worked his way up to the parting-and then vanished. I looked through some magazines he´d probably got from a dentist. Eventually,I decided to get down from the chair,which he´d wound up high,and went through several alleys looking for him. And Io and behold- there he was,waving down at me from a roof he was helping to tile. There I stood, like a half-finished Mohican, and carried on dreaming. Having grasped the way, fatalistic system worked, I returned to the barber´s shop,where you could also buy sweets,soap,toothpaste"
"I know very well the sorts of pressures you're under in television. I don't work in television anymore myself, but I'm constantly hearing from colleagues who present scripts to networks and are told, "The script is too complex. You have to keep it simple because the audience is dumb. You can make more money for the advertisers that way.""
"Film is an artificial construct. It pretends to reconstruct reality. But it doesn't do that—it's a manipulative form. It's a lie that can reveal the truth. But if a film isn't a work of art, it's just complicit with the process of manipulation."
"All of my films constitute a reaction against mainstream cinema. Every serious form of art sees the receiver as a partner in the undertaking. In fact, that's one of the preconditions of humanistic thought. In cinema, this fact, which should be self-evident, has been overlooked and replaced by an emphasis on the commercial aspects of the medium."
"Today's conventional cinema, or mass cinema, doesn't take the receiver seriously as a partner. It sees the audience member as a bank machine, whose only function is to spit out money."
"My films are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus."
"Pornography, it seems to me, is no different from war films or propaganda films in that it tries to make the visceral, horrific, or transgressive elements of life consumable. Propaganda is far more pornographic than a home video of two people fucking."
"Film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth."
"My favourite film-maker of the decade is Abbas Kiarostami. He achieves a simplicity that's so difficult to attain."
"I do think that our perception of reality is fragmentary, and in 20th-century literature, it's totally normal to not describe reality as something whole and completely transportable and explicable. That's been accepted in novels. But genre films always pretend that reality is transportable, which means that it is explicable."
"Consider the pigeon just a pigeon...There are lots of pigeons in Paris."