Author: dig

Observations on the Long Take, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1967)
Translated by Norman MacAfee and Craig Owens

As long as such actions remain unrelated, be it the language of Kennedy’s last action or that of his assassins, they are fragmentary and incomplete languages, all but incomprehensible. What is needed to make them complete and comprehensible? The relationship which each of them, groping and stammering, seeks with the others must be established. Not through a simple multiplication of presents–as in the juxtaposition of various subjective views–but through their coordination. Unlike their juxtaposition, their coordination is not, in fact, limited to destroying and emptying the concept of the present (as in the hypothetical projection one after the other of the various films at FBI headquarters) but to rendering the present past.

Only completed acts may be coordinated among themselves and thus acquire meaning

[…]

The substance of cinema is therefore an endless long take, as is reality to our senses for as long as we are able to see and feel (a long take that ends with the end of our lives); and this long take is nothing but the reproduction of the language of reality. In other words it is the reproduction of the present.

But as soon as montage intervenes, when we pass from cinema to film (they are very different, just as langue is different from parole), the present becomes past: a past that, for cinematographic and not aesthetic reasons, is always in the present mode (that is, it is a historic present).

[…]

It is thus absolutely necessary to die, because while living we lack meaning, and the language of our lives (with which we express ourselves and to which we attribute the greatest importance) is untranslatable: a chaos of possibilities, a search for relations among discontinuous meanings. Death performs a lightning-quick montage on our lives; that is, it chooses our truly significant moments (no longer changeable by other possible contrary or incoherent moments) and places them in sequence, converting our present, which is infinite, unstable, and uncertain, and thus linguistically indescribable, into a clear, stable, certain, and thus linguistically describable past (precisely in the sphere of a general semiology). It is thanks to death that our lives become expressive.

Montage thus accomplishes for the material of film (constituted of fragments, the longest or the shortest, of as many long takes as there are subjectivities) what death accomplishes for life.

via Pasolini, P., 1967, Observations on the Long Take, in The Cinematic, D. Campany (ed.), 2007. London: Whitechapel and The MIT Press.

From no nowhere not near the sea
on blue field flax
the cemetery’s absolutely solitary
you and you and a third

of a pound of bread
for supper in the refectory
where I would die of hunger
if you–if soon–if on this unday–one

undoing would be undone

Unday, Fanny Howe

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“Bewilderment,” she writes in The Wedding Dress (2003), is both “a poetics and a politics”: “I have developed this idea from living in the world and also through testing it out in my poems and through the characters in my fiction?—women and children, and even the occasional man, who rushed backwards and forwards within an irreconcilable set of imperatives.”

Fanny Howe, The Art of Poetry No. 118

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David Joselit, Pamela M. Lee; Six Propositions After Trump’s Second Victory. October 2025; (191): 3–14. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00542

In his important and all too timely account Late Fascism (Verso, 2024),
Alberto Toscano has diagnosed the enfeeblements of such historical analogizing
in confronting our present conjuncture. His project reads fascism not as a hard-
and-fast set of ideological contrivances, much less a coherent theory or philoso-
phy, but rather “within the totality of its process”—that is, fascism’s longue durée: a
“dynamic that precedes its naming.” If contemporary fascism retains “the racial
fantasy of national rebirth and the manic circulation of pseudo-class discourse,”
“late fascism” (like late capitalism) not only names the radically changed economic
context in which we find ourselves but also underscores how “classic fascist fixes
are out of time.”

[…]

[Lateness] is at once a warning, descriptor, and a prompt. For one, it
forces us to think horizontally about new actors implicated in fascism’s current
constitution, not as an aberration to established authoritarian patterns but as its
logical, if seemingly contradictory, expansion.

[…]

These six short propositions—there could be countless more—provide
blunt, incomplete, and yet still necessary points of departure for further reflection.
We are reminded of the words of a friend that embolden us to move in such direc-
tions, no matter the collective despair: The future is yet to be written. This is indeed
the work of lateness. Repeat: It is never too late.

[…]

it is hard to pretend that art or
the art world can have any direct effect on American politics—or, more accurately,
any effect that isn’t largely illiberal.

[…]

Why have so many who produce discourse around art lost faith in what art can do, and instead persist in asking it to do something it patently cannot achieve?”

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Portable Gray, Volume 8, Number 1, Spring 2025. Pope.L The Chicago Years. https://doi.org/10.1086/737294

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Grounded in the many meanings and ideas of “home,” This Must Be the Place is a major new exhibition showcasing works drawn from across the Walker’s dynamic collections. Walker Art Center. June 20, 2024 – April 29, 2029. Galleries 4, 5, 6.