This Is Exactly What I Was Saying In The Tags. But This Person Nailed It.

from Persian Letters from Romania - Newsha Tavakolian

you ask a student in april how they're doing and they'll say "oh i'm fine" but in reality they are treating themselves in such a way that violates the geneva convention on treatment of prisoners

Language is presented as an instrument of fraud and cruelty (the blaring newscast; Elizabeth’s cruel letter to the psychiatrist which Alma reads); as an instrument of unmasking (Alma’s excoriating portrait of the secrets of Elizabeth’s motherhood); as an instrument of self-revelation (Alma’s confessional narrative of the beach orgy) and as art and artifice (the lines of Electra that Elizabeth is delivering on stage when she suddenly goes silent; the radio drama Alma turns on in her hospital room that makes the actress smile). What Persona demonstrates is the lack of an appropriate language, a language that’s genuinely full. All that is left is a language of lacunae, befitting a narrative strung along a set of lacunae or gaps in the ‘explanation’. It is these absences of sense or lacunae of speech which become, in Persona, more potent than words while the person who places faith in words is brought down from relative composure and confidence to hysterical anguish. Here, indeed, is the most powerful instance of the motif of exchange. The actress creates a void by her silence. The nurse, by speaking, falls into it – depleting herself. Sickened almost by the vertigo opened up by the absence of language, Alma at one point begs Elizabeth just to repeat nonsense phrases that she hurls at her. But during all the time at the beach, despite every kind of tact, cajolery and anguished pleading, Elizabeth refuses (obstinately? maliciously? helplessly?) to speak. She has only one lapse. This happens when Alma, in a fury, threatens her with a pot of scalding water. The terrified Elizabeth backs against the wall screaming “No, don’t hurt me!” and for the moment Alma is triumphant. But Elizabeth instantly resumes her silence. The only other time the actress speaks is late in the film – here the time is ambiguous – when in the bare hospital room (again?), Alma is shown bending over her bed, begging her to say just one word. Impassively, Elizabeth complies. The word is ‘Nothing’. At the end of Persona, mask and person, speech and silence, actor and ‘soul’ remain divided – however parasitically, even vampiristically, they are shown to be intertwined.

Persona | Review by Susan Sontag

shit my bad. let me just change my perspective dawg.

i bet positive thinking goes so hard when youre a normal person

i don't really care about anything anymore. my best friend is coming back for a few days. life has colour again.

Zindagi Tamasha (Circus of Life), dir Sarmad Khoosat

was excited to hang out with people this summer but after one movie and a family hangout i don't think i want to hear another person speak till july.

behind the scenes of mulholland dr. (2001)

Ad for horror films from Lions Gate Home Entertainment in Rue Morgue Issue 34 (July/August 2003)