(Source: retrogasm)
To the question “Is cinema an art?” my answer is, “What does it matter?” You can make films or you can cultivate a garden. Both have as much claim to be called art as a poem by Verlaine or a painting by Delacroix.
If your film or your garden is a good one it means that as a practitioner of cinema or gardening you are entitled to consider yourself an artist. The pastry-cook who makes a good cake is an artist. The ploughman with an old-fashioned plough creates a work of art when he ploughs a furrow. Art is not a calling in itself but the way in which one exercises a calling, and also the way in which one performs any human activity. I will give you my definition of art: art is “making.” The art of poetry is the art of making poetry. The art of love is the art of making love.”
- Jean Renoir
(Source: oldfilmsflicker)
(Source: vespering, via miss-givings)
Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
Couple Quai du Louvre Paris, 1955 by Frank Horvat
That is why the better part of our memory exists outside ourselves, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source can make us weep again. Outside ourselves, did I say; rather within ourselves, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged.
—Marcel Proust, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin (via proustitute)
Lemony Snicket - Horseradish: Bitter truths you can’t avoid
(Source: theredhairing, via the-black-mamba)
Santas at Santa Claus School, Diane Arbus, 1964
