Quotes I Like (8)

Writing about William James in his book The Creative Mind, French philosopher Henri Bergson makes the following observation:

On the stage, each actor says and does only what has to be said and done; the scenes are clear-cut; the play has a beginning, a middle and an end; and everything is worked out as economically as possible with a view to an ending which will be happy or tragic. But in life, a multitude of useless things are said, many superfluous gestures are made, there are no sharply-drawn situations; nothing happens as simply or as completely or as nicely as we should like; the scenes overlap; things neither begin nor end; there is no perfectly satisfying ending, nor absolutely decisive gesture, none of those telling words which give us pause: all the effects are spoiled. Such is human life. And such, no doubt, in James’s eyes, is reality in general.

Robert Plays the Berkshires

Robert on his Lunch Break has been selected to be a part of the New Narratives Film Series at this year’s Berkshire International Film Festival in Massachusetts. This free-to-the-public series is described by the festival as “a collection of movies by emerging filmmakers operating within a cinematic framework directly influenced by the arts. Not determined by commercial pressures and often made with very low budgets, these works give a glimpse into the culture and critical engagements of a new generation, and their experiments with narrative fiction.” All of these films will be shown in Theater #4 of the Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington. Robert will screened on Sunday, June 3rd at 10 a.m. This will be its East Coast premiere, as well as the first time it will be seen via DCP, a fairly recent format that yields a much higher standard of image and sound quality than anything that’s been used to show the film publicly in the past.