Louis Henderson. A Balloon in a Forest (2009)

A Cinema in a Provincial City

The Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the History of Cinema

Sancho Panza enters a cinema in a provincial city. He is looking for Don Quixote and finds him sitting off to the side, staring at the screen. The theatre is almost full; the balcony – which is a sort of giant terrace – is packed with raucous children. After several unsuccessful attempts to reach Don Quixote, Sancho reluctantly sits down in one of the lower seats, next to a little girl (Dulcinea?) who offers him a lollipop. The screening has begun; it is a costume film: on the screen, knights in armour are riding along. Suddenly, a woman appears; she is in danger. Don Quixote abruptly rises, unsheaths his sword, rushes toward the screen, and, with several lunges, begins to shred the cloth. The woman and the knights are still visible on the screen, but the black slash opened by Don Quixote’s sword grows ever larger, implacably devouring the images. In the end, nothing is left of the screen, and only the wooden structure supporting it remains visible. The outraged audience leaves the theatre, but the children on the balcony continue their fanatical cheers for Don Quixote. Only the little girl down on the floor stares at him in disapproval.

What are we to do with our imaginations? Love them and believe in them to the point of having to destroy and falsify them (this is perhaps the meaning of Orson Welles’ films). But when, in the end, they reveal themselves to be empty and unfulfilled, when they show the nullity of which they are made, only then can we pay the price for their truth and understand that Dulcinea – whom we have saved – cannot love us.

Giorgio Agamben. Profanations

Marcel Broodthaers “A Voyage on the North Sea” 1974

Louis Henderson. Homage to Marvin (2009)

Metamorphoses of the Curiosity Shop

The year that Hegel died, Balzac published his novel La Peau de Chagrin. At the beginning of the novel, the hero Raphael enters the show-rooms of a large curiosity shop where old statues and paintings are mingled with old-fashioned furniture, gadgets and household goods. There, Balzac writes, ‘this ocean of furnishings, inventions, works of art and relics made for him an endless poem’. The paraphernalia of the shop is also a medley of objects and ages, of artworks and accessories. Each of these objects is like a fossil, wearing on its body the history of an era or a civilization…
…In the show-rooms of Romanticism, the power of the Juno Ludovisi is transferred to any article of ordinary life which can become a poetic object, a fabric of hieroglyphs, ciphering a history. The old curiosity shop makes the museum of fine arts and the ethnographic museum equivalent. It dismisses the argument of prosaic use or commodification. If the end of art is to become a commodity, the end of a commodity is to become art. By becoming obsolete, unavailable for everyday consumption, any commodity or familiar article becomes available for art, as a body ciphering a history and an object of ‘disinterested pleasure’. It is reaestheticized in a new way. The ‘heterogeneous sensible’ is everywhere. The prose of everyday life becomes a huge, fantastic poem. Any object can cross the border and repopulate the realm of aesthetic experience.

Jacques Rancière. The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes