reading notes from an interview with Carlos Reygadas
«Declaring a philosophical, religious, or social truth will turn it into dogma and therefore will prevent it from being experienced as real; it will always be normative. On the contrary, what feels real is poetic, ineffable, open-ended. Truth, by definition, is intangible.»
«My screenplays are not literary in the way that most screenplays are literary. Mine are images and sounds»
«in Mexican telenovelas, when they want to represent a rural tiendita (a bodega), they’ll have three shelves stacked with the products that people assume are always sold there as well as a middle-aged señora with an apron at the register. Everyone gets used to seeing that tiendita, the code representing it, that is, instead of the real thing. If we went to a real tiendita right now and the camera was rolling, we’d discover a number of incredible surprises there and people would appreciate having access to a different visual experience. Maybe we find a dead cat hanging from a wall, or a poster we’d never imagine we’d find there. Reality has so many things to offer, things you wouldn’t have arrived at via your own imagination.»
«my films are always so much better than I could have ever dreamed of, not because the end result is magnificent, but because they utilize things that were unthinkable to me before making them»
«These are things I didn’t imagine before, I only allowed my camera to absorb them.»
«For the gas-station scene, I imagined the conjunction of something sacred and something all too human and mundane, an engine. Only humans can create music and engines. One is the most poetic, divine, ethereal of our inventions, and the other the most practical, the most functional, but both are distinctly human.»
«I can’t believe that in England, the country that birthed democracy, Japón, to this date, is censored: they cut the scenes in which the pigeon is killed and the village’s veterinarian tickles a little dog. The country with the most infamous colonial history thinks that by censoring my film they’ve paid for their sins»
«Silent Light could be seen as a better documentary on Mennonites in Mexico than one produced by National Geographic. They’ll tell you the whereabouts and indexes of Mennonites in Mexico, but you’ll never see them making love, having an intimate conversation, bathing with their families in a pool, or dying.»