Who Owns It?

The sea at rest need not hear the gale to know that it is vast and deep.
— Par Lagerkvist, The Eternal Smile

This is how I sum up for myself what I wish to convey to those who work here with me:
I am dead because I lack desire;
I lack desire because I think I possess;
I think I possess because I do not try to give;
In trying to give, you see that you have nothing;
Seeing you have nothing, you try to give of yourself;
Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing;
Seeing you are nothing, you desire to become;
In desiring to become, you begin to live.
— From one of the last letters of René Daumal (1908-1944) in the Afterword by Véra Daumal to his symbolic, utopian quest novel Mount Analogue which was published in an incomplete version after his death.

     On the other hand, those who wish to believe that he spun his theories from his own inner consciousness alone will consider that it is diminishing his originality to show the sources of his raw material, to show whence he may have borrowed his ideas. But the power of invention seems rarely to accompany great literary genius; it is the minor writers who conceive the brilliant ideas which they drop carelessly by the wayside for greater writers to pick up. All great writers have robbed the hives of diligent bees and, paradoxically, genius might be said to be the faculty for clever theft.
     It is natural that Rimbaud should have gone to literature rather than to life for his material. He was not yet seventeen, his most intense form of living had been, on the whole, through books, and the world of literature had been to him a kinder world than the material world. He possessed a unique power of assimilation and his imagination and memory were a rich storehouse of literary and philosophical ideas. From the wealth which he had consciously borrowed elsewhere, he created something that was his alone.
— Enid Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud, pp. 96-97.

     People ask what are my intentions with my films — my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer: I try to tell the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it. This answer seems to satisfy everyone, but it is not quite correct. I prefer to describe what I would like my aim to be.
     There is an old story of how the cathedral of Chartres was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then thousands of people came from all points of the compass, like a giant procession of ants, and together they began to rebuild the cathedral on its old site. they worked until the building was completed — master builders, artists, laborers, clowns, noblemen, priests, burghers. But they all remained anonymous, and so no one knows to this day who built the cathedral of Chartres.
     Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, which are unimportant in this connection, it is ny opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. He lived and died without being more or less important than other artisans; "eternal values," "immortality" and "masterpiece" were terms not applicable in his case. The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility.
     Today the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic existence. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny the existence of each other. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the ganster's whim and the purest ideal.
     Thus if I am asked what I would like the general purpose of my films to be, I would reply that I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon's head, an angel, a devil — or perhaps a saint — out of stone. It does not matter which; it is the sense of satisfaction that counts. Regardless of whether I believe or not, whether I am a Christian or not, I would play my part in the collective building of the cathedral.
—  Ingmar Bergman, from the Introduction to Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman, pp. xvi-xxii, 1960, in Film: A Montage of Theories, R. MacCann (ed.), pp. 145-146.

     Overnight our place was busting its seams with idiotics.
     Anything went, and every fool thing you might think of under the influence of hashish or a hangover went big.
     We were awash with pretty women, clowns, and storytellers who couldn't write. We made a million dollars so fast my fingers ached from trying to count.

     We did the best we could with what we had.
     We made funny pictures aa fast as we could for money.

     : I, Mack Sennett, the Canadian farm boy, the boilermaker, was the head man.

— Mack Sennett, King of Comedy, from pp.86-90, in Ibid. pp. 163-164.