“Film is, for me, an art of composition.”

Criticism tries to serve as a theoretical gunsight: what to aim at. And the gun is more like a catapult. It will have to clear the trees here on earth before it leaves the atmosphere.

Eternity changes Poe’s oeuvre into itself — goes on discovering its truth content — through “a remarkable number of works that derive from it, that are not so much imitations as they are consequences.”

Anyone can only gain by a good translation because a translation acts upon and retroactively transforms the original.

The past doesn’t disappear into the present but thunders into oblivion along with it. The present is meant by the past, even if it’s not the future that the past had in mind.

The nonbinding translations of today, those which attain a specious success (those we are too afraid to judge as bad — bad as translations, as poems) will not be forgiven. When they nestle into the dust of the archive, it will be as well-intentioned messages that exhaust themselves in what they say, not as artworks that continue to unfold in time.

Adnan has begun to worry the surface; she abolishes the impenetrability of her color. She is dealing with fresh problems that she has created for herself. This is one definition of freedom.