What’s a good question?
When in need of justification, insert a quote pulled from the internet. Ideally someone who is dead and ideally in a different context to that which the quote was originally intended. And so:
Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers. - Voltaire
One of the key to a good life (however you want to define that) is to ask the right questions. But what are the right questions?
The 3-2-1 newsletter from James Clear, author if Atomic Habits, is good place to start. It offers 3 short ideas, 2 quotes from other authors, and 1 question to ponder during the week.
An even better place to start is this blog post which collates all of the questions from 2019, 2020 and 2021.
And if you need further proof:
“I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.” - Richard Feynman
3 and half hours on the Quai du Commerce.
In 1952, the British film magazine Sight & Sound canvased film critics for their list of the best films ever made.
That year de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves was voted top and Sight and Sound decided to make the poll a decennial event.
By the 1962 Citizen Kane had been voted top and it would remain there until 2012 when Ozu Yasujiro’s 1953 film Tokyo Story superseded it. Kane was down to the joint 2nd (with 2001: A Space Odyssey), but whatever else it might tell us about the shifting cultural values and critical reappraisals of certain films and directors, the entire thing was to a great extent static and ossified.
Until 2022.
In doubling the number participants polled from 846 in 2012 to 1,639 one assumes that consciously or not they also expanded the number of younger programmers, archivists and critics, the number of women and the number of non-caucasians.
Kane is still at number 3 (Hitchcock’s Vertigo is at 2). But the number of modern films increased (including one Portrait of a Lady on Fire released just a few years previously). Several included in the lower reaches of the 2012 poll leaping into the Top Ten (Mulholland Dr., Beau Travail and In The Mood For Love).
The number of films from women increased being severally under represented and marginalised even in the 2012 poll there were films from Maya Deren, Chantel Ackerman, Věra Chytilová, Claire Denis, Agnes Varda and Céline Sciamma in the top 30.
And Number One?
Chantel Ackerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. A film I had previously avoided watching, mainly due to its nearly 3.5 hours of running time. But the film is amazing. Everything within the film unwinds at a glacial pace, scenes unfold in real time, we watch for ten minutes as the eponymous protagonist make breaded veal for dinner. The film has a slow hypnotic rhythm, and, twenty years before Dogme 95 seemingly it’s own strict set of strict internal, aesthetic rules. Seemingly every camera angle is a medium shot from the same height and perpendicular to the events captured. Where there is a cut in a scene, that camera set-up will be perpendicular to the previous set-up and so on.
And yet there is art here. Something proto-Wes Anderson about the set design. The continual presence and reflection of a blue light outside the apartment, a foreshadowing of the police she mist surely be waiting for when the film closes. There is also, I think something to be said for a film that demands to be viewed on its own terms, a film you need to find three-and-a-half hours to watch.
The full list can be found here.
Picture This.
Molly Bang’s Picture This: How Pictures Work is a great primer on something which much of us take for granted: visual literacy. Why do we feel different about rounded shapes than we do about angular ones? Why do diagonal lines feel more dynamic than vertical or horizontal ones?
In this book the authors explores and visually demonstrates the impact that shape, line, space and colour have on our emotional perception of an image.
Hope you enjoyed this week’s collection!