cinema, literature, philosophy, linguistics, atheism, theology, nihilism, Marxism, surrealism, gnosticism, aestheticism, psychoanalysis, existentialism, Romanticism, modernism, dialectical logic, irrationalism, metaphysical pessimism, la politique des auteurs, Cyrenaism, aristocratic radicalism, suicide, anti-cosmism, hermeneutics, the history of ideas, anti-foundationalism, rhetoric, radical solipsism, antinomianism, the human sciences, Western classical music, philology, absurdism, economic theory, the decadent movement
(If life occupies the first place in the hierarchy of lies, love comes immediately afterward, lie within the lie. Expression of our hybrid position, love is surrounded by an apparatus of beatitudes and torments thanks to which we find in someone a substitute for ourselves. By what hoax do two eyes turn us away from our solitude? Is there any failure more humiliating for the mind? Love lulls knowledge; wakened, knowledge kills love. Unreality cannot triumph indefinitely, even disguised in the appearances of the most exalting lie. And moreover who would have an illusion solid enough to find in the other what he has vainly sought in himself? Would a furnace of guts afford what the universe could not give us? And yet this is the actual basis of this common, and supernatural, anomaly: to solve á deux—or rather, to suspend—all enigmas; by means of an imposture, to forget that fiction in which life is steeped; by a double murmur to fill the general vacuity; and—parody of ecstasy—to drown oneself at last in the sweat of some accomplice or other. . . .)—E.M. Cioran
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gustav Mahler, Ludwig van Beethoven, Joseph Haydn, Franz Schubert, Igor Stravinsky, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Claudio Monteverdi, Johann Sebastian Bach, Claude Debussy, Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Ravel, Anton Bruckner, Dmitri Shostakovich, Béla Bartók, Jean Sibelius, Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner, Hector Berlioz, Sergei Prokofiev, Hugo Wolf, Erik Satie, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi
Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais, Alexander Sokurov, Kenji Mizoguchi, Nagisa Oshima, Andrei Tarkovsky, Roberto Rossellini, Shohei Imamura, Manoël de Oliveira, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Vittorio de Seta, Luchino Visconti, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Carl Th. Dreyer, Ermanno Olmi, F.W. Murnau, Michelangelo Antonioni, Miklos Jancsó, Georges Franju, Chris Marker, Alexei Gherman, Ritwik Ghatak, Luis Buñuel, Peter Greenaway, Chantal Akerman, Joris Ivens, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Theo Angelopoulos, Wojciech Has, Leos Carax, Philippe Garrel, Jean Eustache, Dmitri Kirsanoff, Louis Lumière, Louis Feuillade, Sergei Eisenstein, Alexander Dovzhenko, Sergei Paradjanov, Forugh Farrokhzad, Jean Vigo, Yasuzo Masumura, Otar Iosseliani, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Marlen Khutsiev, Seijun Suzuki, David Cronenberg, Victor Erice, Györgyi Szalai and István Dárday, Raúl Ruiz, Yasujiro Ozu, Yuri Ilyenko, Jacques Tati, Léonce Perret, Marguerite Duras, Jean Genet, Michael Haneke, Abbas Kiarostami, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Mikio Naruse, Valerio Zurlini, Jean Painlevé, João César Monteiro, Hiroshi Shimizu, Philippe Faucon, Joseph Losey, Jean Epstein, Marcel Hanoun, Jean-Pierre Melville, Béla Tarr, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Hugo Santiago, Wong Kar-Wai, Terence Davies, Eduardo de Gregorio, Chen Kaige, Edward Yang, Alain Tanner, Monte Hellman, Claude Chabrol, Max Ophüls, Jean Renoir, Sergio Leone, Georges Méliès, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Jacques Rozier, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Cimino, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, John Boorman, Andy Warhol, Charlie Chaplin, Andrzej Wajda, Jerzy Skolimowski, Robert Aldrich, Budd Boetticher, Frank Borzage, George Cukor, Blake Edwards, John Ford, Samuel Fuller, D.W. Griffith, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Buster Keaton, Fritz Lang, Jerry Lewis, Joseph H. Lewis, Ernst Lubitsch, Edward Ludwig, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Anthony Mann, Leo McCarey, Vincente Minnelli, Robert Mulligan, Gerd Oswald, Abraham Polonsky, Otto Preminger, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk, John M. Stahl, Erich von Stroheim, Joseph von Sternberg, Frank Tashlin, André de Toth, Jacques Tourneur, Edgar G. Ulmer, King Vidor, Raoul Walsh, Orson Welles, Paul Wendkos, Billy Wilder, Kenneth Anger, Robert Beavers, Jack Chambers, Joseph Cornell, Ken Jacobs, Larry Jordan, Peter Kubelka, Gregory Markopoulos, Jonas Mekas, Chris Welsby, Bruce Baillie, Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, Jack Chambers, Bruce Conner, Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr, George Landow, Arthur Lipsett, Christopher Maclaine, Pat O'Neill, Sidney Peterson, Ron Rice, Harry Smith, Jack Smith, Michael Snow, Warren Sonbert, Joyce Wieland, Terrence Malick, John Cassavetes, Robert Flaherty, Johnny To, Abel Ferrara, Charles Burnett, Satyajit Ray, Elio Petri, Marco Bellochio, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Marco Ferreri, Milos Forman, Roman Polanski, Heinosuke Gosho, Leni Riefenstahl, Vittorio Cottafavi, Barbara Loden, Robert Kramer, Jean Rouch, Hugo Fregonese, Daniel Schmid, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Maurice Lemaître, Artavazd Peleshian, Yevgenii Bauer, Boris Barnet, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Mani Kaul, David Brooks, Paul Verhoeven
"Cinema, when it functions as art, depends upon the precise articulations made between different frames, and between different areas of light within the frame. Video, by effacing the differences upon which cinema depends, renders the rich complexity of a film masterwork as an inarticulate haze. A film realizes itself in the gaps between frames, and in the contrasts between light and dark, one color and another, foreground and background, movement and stillness, that it mobilizes towards its expressive ends. In video, those gaps are blurred and bridged, producing an ever-vibrating, ever-alive continuum."
E.M. Cioran, Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph de Maistre, Eduard von Hartmann, Leszek Kolakowski, Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo, Arthur Schopenhauer, Theodor W. Adorno, Lev Shestov, V.V. Rozanov, Konstantin Leontiev, Gershom Scholem, Karl Marx, Nikolai Berdyayev, Fyodor Shperk, Julio Cortázar, Franz Kafka, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Stirner, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Giacomo Leopardi, Heinrich von Kleist, Harold Bloom, George Steiner, Hans Jonas, Simone Weil, Walter Benjamin, Raymond Abellio, Eric Voegelin, Alexander Herzen, José Donoso-Cortés, Søren Kierkegaard, José Ortega y Gasset, Philipp Mainländer, Julius Bahnsen, Claude Brunet, Albert Camus, Blaise Pascal, Paul Ricoeur, B.P. Vysheslavtsev, Carlo Michelstaedter, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Benjamin Fondane, Guido Ceronetti, Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Klages, Emmanuel Levinas, Maria Zambrano, Ladislav KlÃma, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, P. Adams Sitney, André Bazin, Hegesias of Cyrene, G.K. Chesterton, Karl Löwith, Jean Grenier, Adolfo Levi, Pierre Boutang, Jules de Gaultier, Arnold Gehlen, Giuseppe Rensi, Sigmund Freud, the Marquis de Sade, Jean Genet, Georges Bataille, André Breton, Oswald Spengler, Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes), the J writer, the Job poet, Max Horkheimer, Pierre Klossowski, T.E. Hulme, Jacob Burckhardt, Alexandre Kojève
V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky