“If in our century, something sacred still existed, if there were something like a sacred treasure of the cinema, then for me that would have to be the work of the Japanese director Yasujirô Ozu… For me never before and never again since has the cinema been so close to its essence and its purpose: to present an image of man in our century, a usable, true and valid image in which he not only recognises himself, but from which, above all, he may learn about himself.”
Wim Wenders
German poster for DESPAIR, Designer Petrus Wandrey (b. 1939)
DESPAIR was selected for the 16th New York Film Festival in 1978.
‘There’s something inherently wrong with the human personality. There’s an evil side to it. One of the things that horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious: we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly.’
Stanley Kubrick, discussing his attraction to The Shining with Jack Kroll of Newsweek magazine in 1980.
one goes to a horror film in order to have a nightmare—not simply a frightening dream, but a dream whose undercurrent of anxiety both presents and masks the desire to fulfill and be punished for conventionally or personally unacceptable impulses. this may be a matter of unconscious wish fulfillment, following freud; of confronting a hidden evil in the culture, as in ‘alien’ or ‘the stepford wives’; or of voyaging through the land of the dead and indulging a nostalgia for ritual […] horror films function as nightmares for the individual viewer, as diagnostic eruptions for repressive societies, and as exorcistic or transcendent pagan rituals for supposedly post-pagan cultures. they can be analyzed in all these ways because they represent a unique juncture of personal, social, and mythic structures and because each of these structures has a conscious/official and an unconscious/repressed dualism, whose dialectic finds expression in the act of masking.
“When [Francois] Truffaut spoke to me about doing the score for the film, I said, ‘…You’re a great friend of [avant-garde composers] and this is a film that takes place in the future. Why shouldn’t you ask one of them? ‘Oh no, no,’ he said. ‘They’ll give me music of the twentieth century, but you’ll give me music of the twenty-first.’
I felt that the music of the next century would revert to a great lyrical simplicity and that it wouldn’t have truck with all this mechanistic stuff. Their lives would be scrutinized. In their music they would want something of simple nudity, of great elegance and simplicity. So I said, ‘If I do your picture, that’s the kind of score I want to write- strings, harps, and a few percussion instruments. I’m not interested in all this whoopee stuff that goes on being called the music of the future. I think that’s the music of the past.’”
-Herrmann, quoted in Steven Smith’s A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann
![Title: FAHRENHEIT 451 ¥ Year: 1966 ¥ Dir: TRUFFAUT, FRANCOIS ¥ Ref: FAH002CE ¥ Credit: [ ANGLO ENTERPRISE/VINEYARD / THE KOBAL COLLECTION ]](http://sgtr.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/fahrenheit.jpg "Title: FAHRENHEIT 451 ¥ Year: 1966 ¥ Dir: TRUFFAUT, FRANCOIS ¥ Ref: FAH002CE ¥ Credit: [ ANGLO ENTERPRISE/VINEYARD / THE KOBAL COLLECTION ]")
In Mexico, Latin and Central America, preparations are underway for Día de los Muertos.
