to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living. No, no, allow me to expire. I know that all that is required now, in order to bring this horrible matter to an acceptable conclusion is to make this submission, this admission, this fidelity to failure, a new occasion, a new term of relation, and of the act which, unable to act, obliged to act, he makes an expressive act, even if only of itself, of its impossibility, or its obligation.

Oh writer, [he wrote triumphantly to an imaginary literary rival beside a drawing of a heart] what words can you find to describe the whole arrangement as perfectly as is done by this drawing? For lack of true knowledge you describe it confusedly and convey little true knowledge of the shapes of things… My advice is not to trouble yourself with words unless you are speaking to the blind.

One of the minimal definitions of a modernist painting concerns the function of its frame. The frame of the painting in front of us is not its true frame. There is another, invisible frame, the frame implied by the structure of the painting, the frame that enframes our perception of the painting. These two frames by definition never overlap -an invisible gap separates them. The pivotal content of the painting is not rendered in its visible part, but is located in this dis­location of the two frames, in the gap that separates them. This dimension in-between-the-two-frames is obvious in Kazimir Malev­ich; what is his Black Square on White Surface if not the minimal marking of the distance between the two frames? Again recall Edward Hopper’s lone figures in office buildings or diners at night, where it seems as if the picture’s frame has to be redoubled with another window frame; or, in the portraits of his wife who, close to an open window, is exposed to sun rays. Here we have the opposite excess of the painted content itself as regards what we effectively see, as if we see only the fragment of the whole picture, the shot with a missing counter-shot. Again, recall the droplets of sperm and the small foetus-like figure from The Scream squeezed between the two frames in Edvard Munch’s Madonna. The frame is always-already redoubled: the frame within ‘reality’ is always linked to another frame enframing ‘reality’ itself. Once introduced, the gap between reality and appearance is thus immediately complicated, reflected­ unto-itself: once we get a glimpse, through the Frame, of the Other Dimension, reality itself turns into appearance. In other words, things do not simply appear, they appear to appear. This is why the negation of a negation does not bring us to a simple flat affirmation: once things (start to) appear, they not only appear as what they are not, creating an illusion; they can also appear to just appear, con­cealing the fact that they are what they appear.

dramatic stories should be thrown out. they have nothing whatsoever to do with cinema.

it seems to me that when one tries to do something dramatic with film, one is like a man who tries to hammer with a saw. film would have been marvelous if there hadn’t been dramatic art to get in the way.