raul-ruiz

Raul Ruiz, director of Mysteries of Lisbon and Night Across the Street, from the second volume in his Poetics of Cinema:

“What we have seen is something new, something the art of memory could not have foreseen: images striving for their independence. They aim to make themselves noticeable, to have greater worth than that of being a mere sign. As they say in my country: ‘They are telling themselves their own story.’ Well, that and not much else is what happens in a film, when we shift our attention from the course that the narration proposes, and allow ourselves to be carried away by the involuntary associations that proliferate among images.”

Thanks to Ryan Holt for sharing this quote on Facebook.