COLE SMITH
Film Director - Screenwriter
Diary
22 / 8 / 25
Quotes
What we call happiness, in the strictest sense of the word, arises from the fairly sudden satisfaction of pent-up needs.
By its very nature it can be no more than an episodic phenomenon.
Any prolongation of a situation desired by the pleasure principle produces only a feeling of lukewarm comfort; we are so constituted that we gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.
Hence, our prospects of happiness are already restricted by our constitution.
- Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.
- Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
Art is not the reflection of a reality; it is the reality of that reflection.
- Jean-Luc Godard, La Chinoise
The three condemned prisoners together stepped onto the chairs.
In unison, the nooses were placed around their necks.
"Long live liberty!" shouted the two men.
But the boy was silent.
"Where is merciful God, where is He?" someone behind me was asking.
At the signal, the three chairs were tipped over.
Total silence in the camp.
On the horizon, the sun was setting.
"Caps off!" screamed the Lagerälteste.
His voice quivered.
As for the rest of us, we were weeping.
"Cover your heads!"
Then came the march past the victims.
The two men were no longer alive.
Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish.
But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing . . .
And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes.
And we were forced to look at him at close range.
He was still alive when I passed him.
His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished.
Behind me, I heard the same man asking:
"For God's sake, where is God?"
And from within me, I heard a voice answer:
"Where is He? This is where—hanging here from this gallows . . ."
- Elie Wiesel, Night
In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information.
In the twenty-first century censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information.
We just don't know what to pay attention to, and often spend our time investigating and debating side issues.
In ancient times having power meant having access to data.
Today having power means knowing what to ignore.
- Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus
Modernity is a deal.
All of us sign up to this deal on the day we are born, and it regulates our lives until the day we die.
Very few of us can ever rescind or transcend this deal.
It shapes our food, our jobs and our dreams, and it decides where we dwell, whom we love and how we pass away.
At first sight modernity looks like an extremely complicated deal, hence few try to understand what they have signed up for.
Like when you download some software and are asked to sign an accompanying contract that consists of dozens of pages of legalese—you take one look at it, immediately scroll to the last page, tick 'I agree' and forget about it.
Yet in fact modernity is a surprisingly simple deal.
The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.
- Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus
The handful of millennia separating the Agricultural Revolution from the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires was not enough time to allow an instinct for mass cooperation to evolve.
- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens
The artist must be blind to distinctions between "recognised" and "unrecognised" conventions of form, deaf to the transitory teachings and demands of his particular age.
He must watch only the trend of the inner need, and hearken to its words alone.
Then he will with safety employ means both sanctioned and forbidden by his contemporaries.
All means are sacred which are called for by the inner need.
All means are sinful which obscure that inner need.
- Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art
No, no, Lou was not such a fool as she looked, in his eyes anyhow.
She knew what she wanted.
She wanted relief from the nervous tension and irritation of her life, she wanted to escape from the friction which is the whole stimulus in modern social life.
She wanted to be still: only that, to be very, very still, and recover her own soul.
- D.H. Lawrence, St. Mawr
Indeed, it is the nature of intelligent life to climb mountains, to strive to stand on ever higher ground to gaze farther into the distance.
It is a drive completely divorced from the demands of survival.
Had you, for example, only been concerned with staying alive, you would have fled from this mountain as fast and as far away as you could.
Instead, you chose to climb it.
The reason evolution bestows all intelligent life with a desire to climb higher is far more profound than mere base needs, even though we still do not understand its real purpose.
Mountains are universal, and we are all standing at the foot of mountains.
- Cixin Liu, Mountain
At one point he said, "You know, your mother's friends will be coming to keep vigil too. It's customary. I have to go and get some chairs and some black coffee."
I asked him if he could turn off one of the lights. The glare on the white walls was making me drowsy.
He said he couldn't.
That was how they'd been wired: it was all or nothing.
- Albert Camus, The Stranger
[...] all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine.
You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it.
You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true.
You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases.
At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multi-coloured universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron.
All this is good and I wait for you to continue.
But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus.
You explain this world to me with an image.
I realise then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know.
Have I the time to become indignant?
You have already changed theories.
So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art.
What need had I of so many efforts?
The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more.
I have returned to my beginning.
I realise that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot for all that apprehend the world.
Were I to trace its entire relief with my finger, I should not know any more.
And you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and hypotheses that claim to teach me but that are not sure.
A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing
to know and live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?
To will is to stir up paradoxes.
Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart or fatal renunciations.
- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
[...] what could be more disillusioned than such sayings as “Charity begins at home” or “Promote a rogue and he’ll sue you for damage, knock him down and he’ll do you homage”?
We all know how many common sayings can be quoted to this effect, and they all mean much the same – that you must not oppose the powers that be; that you must not fight against superior force; must not meddle in matters that are above your station.
Or that any action not in accordance with some tradition is mere romanticism; or that any undertaking which has not the support of proven experience is foredoomed to frustration; and that since experience has shown men to be invariably inclined to evil, there must be firm rules to restrain them, otherwise we shall have anarchy.
It is, however, the people who are forever mouthing these dismal proverbs and, whenever they are told of some more or less repulsive action, say “How like human nature!” – it is these very people, always harping upon realism, who complain that existentialism is too gloomy a view of things.
Indeed their excessive protests make me suspect that what is annoying them is not so much our pessimism, but, much more likely, our optimism.
For at bottom, what is alarming in the doctrine that I am about to try to explain to you is – is it not? – that it confronts man with a possibility of choice.
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism
Is there ever going to be a way to combine the structure of the silent movie with the quick presentation of a TV commercial?
Somewhere, somebody has to be able to take the wonderful ecomonic structural possibilities of the silent movie with the tremendous power that a good TV commercial can generate on a topic in 30 seconds.
I think this would be the most exciting thing that happened since whoever it was cut the two first pieces of film together and realised you could have 'editing.'
It really needs, sort of like, an editing of the mind—which hasn't happened—to just tell the story in a different way.
The real explosion will come when someone finally liberates the narrative structure.
- Stanley Kubrick, A Voix Nue
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