Quotes from Frank Lentricchia

Our personal past is only available to us now through black-and-white film, it's a medium for communication with the dead, including our dead selves, the way we used to be, which is why we're drawn to it.

People are mysterious, even to themselves.

No one can be the total cure for another person.

In the end, everything is found to be wanting.

The camera has a mind of its own--its own point of view. Then the human bearer of time stumbles into the camera's gaze--the camera's domain of pristine space hitherto untraversed is now contaminated by human temporality. Intrusion occurs, but the camera remains transfixed by its object. It doesn't care. The camera has no human fears.

I want to die, stripped, by myself, of all fantasies. That's the goal. I want to feel what is real, at the end, and only what is real. Grip fiercely with my eyes all that is around me--the people of my intimate life, the objects in the room, without the evasions of fantasies.

Only the past is real.

that out of the quarrel with others we produce rhetoric, matter for the editorial page, while out of the quarrel with ourselves we create art.

Take the road to contradiction, it'll lead you, I promise, to the palace of wisdom.

Here's the most startling irony I know in film history: Antonioni, who is often denigrated by left-wing critics as a formalist and aesthete gives us radical realism through the long take, and what he gives us--this is his metaphysical wager--is real outside the film, off the set, beyond the camera and underneath the surface of everyday life.

Let's be honest. We all in our secret minds live elsewhere, or who could survive in this freakin' world?

Tom said people should repaint their houses in and out, especially in, at least once a year—because who wants to live with the memories of themselves?