Otium Tibi Molestum Est

After having spent the entire afternoon in daydreams I opened a book and found this.

The Most Beautiful Six Minutes in the History of Cinema

                              

Sancho Panza enters the cinema of a provincial town. He is looking for Don Quixote and finds him sitting apart, staring at the screen. The auditorium is almost full, the upper circle - a kind of gallery - is packed with screaming children. After a few futile attempts to reach Don Quixote, Sancho sits down in the stalls, next to a little girl (Dulcinea?) who offers him a lollipop. The show has begun, it is a costume movie, armed knights traverse the screen, suddenly a woman appears who is in danger. Don Quixote jumps up, draws his sword out of the scabbard, makes a spring at the screen and his blows begin to tear the fabric. The woman and the knights can still be seen, but the black rupture, made by Don Quixote's sword, is getting wider, it inexorably destroys the images. In the end there is nothing left of the screen, one can only see the wooden structure it was attached to. The audience is leaving the hall in disgust, but the children in the upper circle do not stop screaming encouragements at Don Quixote. Only the little girl in the stalls looks at him reprovingly.

                                                                                                               

What shall we do with our fantasies? Love them, believe them - to the point where we have to deface, to destroy them (that is perhaps the meaning of the films of Orson Welles). But when they prove in the end to be empty and unfulfilled, when they show the void from which they were made, then it is time to pay the price for their truth, to understand that Dulcinea - whom we saved - cannot love us.

                            

- Giorgio Agamben, Profanations

Comments

[Qfwfq]

Pffft!

Sancho the Bansho

[Citizen Pane]

"What? No Sweet Rolls?"
Nor html either I guess

http://frenchfilms.topcities.com/index3.html#http://frenchfilms.topcities.com/nf_Barrabas_rev.html

[Jodi]

I love you, therefore I mutilate you.

[amie]

Idly wondering, just slightly troubled, why this scene is set in -- or at -- a cinema, a provincial cinema?
Thanks very much for the translation David.

http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=1955

[david]

i read the book as well, and i was also moved by this closing remark by agamben.
here is a review i wrote about The Time That Remains.

http://formoflife.blogspot.com/

[Amie]

David, thanks for the link to your really fine review.

[david]

thank you amie, for your comment on my review.
i think that when agamben writes about "something unlived in a life" he has in mind Benjamin's idea that we need "to read what was never written in the book of life."
i put a link to your beautiful site on my new blog

[Amie]

David, that's a very astute connection between Agamben and Benjamin.
i've just been trying to no avail to find my Benjamin books (in the German), so have to quote from the English translation. (perhaps you or someone else could supply the German text, if so inclined?)

"To read what was never written." Such reading is the most ancient: reading before all languages, from the entrails, the stars or dances. Later the mediating link of a new kind of reading, of runes and heiroglyphs, came into use. It seems fair to suppose that these were the stages by which the mimetic gift, which was once the foundation of occult practices, gained admittance to writing and language. In this way language may be seen as the highest level of mimetic behavior and the most complete archive of nonsensous similarity: a medium into which the earlier powers of mimetic production and comprehension have passed without residue, to the point where they have liquidated those of magic.
(Benjmain, "On the Mimetic Faculty," from "Reflections," trans. Edmund Jephcott)

[Mess]

But isnt this VERY Christian. Is it not a wooden cross behind the screen?