my passport

is found... After almost two month floating somewhere, this past friday, a faculty member from the agriculture dept emailed me about it. I have no idea nor interested how it got there. It just feels so good when you receive kind act like that from a total stranger. It is because of experience like that in life that makes you wanna continue to do good deeds and be kind to people around you. You know what I mean, you want to be kind to people because you have tasted one. Just like what the movie says: 'pay it forward', please. Thanks P.

my driving license

is valid now..., next, go to the traffic court, get police report, go to chicago and get my new passport...

the mummy and the ontology of cinema

Hmm.. quite productive tonight in my reading... started Andre Bazin's 'What is Cinema?' and trying to finish Linda Cowgill's 'Writing Short Films'. I think Cowgill's is very conventional and more about the 'classic' story telling style, very different from Bresson a few days ago or films that I would consider 'interesting', some, not always. But that's good, at least it gave me some foundational stuffs or a starting point. I will probably dream about three of them tonight...

Robert: "Cinematography is a writing with images in movement and with sounds."

Andre: "The process might reveal that at the origin of painting and sculpture there lies a mummy complex."

Linda: "...these elements endure: Hero, want, action, conflict, climax, and resolution."

Robert: "Two types of film: those that employ the resources of the theatre (actors, direction, etc.) and use the camera in order to reproduce; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create."

Linda: "If the plot is a mere natural sequence of incidents, with no real orchestrated rising action, it'll be ineffective as well."

Robert: "Dismantle and put together till one gets intensity."

Andre: "Our intention is certainly not to preach the glory of form over content."

Linda: "In theater and literature, "the action" means the main subject or main conflict of a story, as disttinguished from an incidental episode."

Robert: "No marriage of theatre and cinematography without both being exterminated."

Linda: "In a film, the climax must be visual and visceral, not internal."

Robert: "When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best - that is inspiration."

Andre: "Viewed in this perspective, the cinema is objectivity in time. The film is no longer content to preserve the object... The film delivers baroque art from its convulsive catalepsy. Now, for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it were."

Robert: "Cinema films controlled by intelligence, going no further."

Andre: "In short, cinema has not yet been invented!"