JERZY DROZD Deserto Rosso
Dear Antonioni …
Nietzsche distinguishes two figures: the priest and the artist. Priests we have aplenty, from every religion or indeed none at all; but artists? I should like, dear Antonioni, to be allowed to borrow some features of your work to enable me to pin down the three forces — or if you like, the three virtues — which to my mind constitute the artist. I shall name them at once: vigilance, wisdom, and, most paradoxical of all, fragility.
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Salvador Dalí, Los Elefantes, Rome, 1948. Private Collection. Salvador Dalí Museums.
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Dear Antonioni, I have tried to set forth in my intellectual language the reasons which make you, over and above the cinema, one of the artists of our time. This compliment is not simple, as you know; for the artist today is in a position no longer supported by the good conscience of a great sacred or social function. Being an artist does not give you a cosy spot in the bourgeois Pantheon of Guiding Lights of Humanity. It means in each work confronting in oneself those spectres of modern subjectivity which are (from the moment one is no longer a priest) ideological lassitude, social bad conscience, the attraction and disgust of facile art, the quivering of responsibility, the constant scruple which leaves the artist strung out between solitude and gregariousness. Today, therefore, you must take advantage of this peaceful, harmonious moment of agreement when a whole collectivity joins together to recognise, admire and love your work. For tomorrow the labour begins again.
Roland Barthes, Bologna, January 1980
Opening and closing fragments of the letter of Roland Barthes to Michelangelo Antonioni on the occasion of the granting of the most important prize awarded by the city of Bologna, L'Archiginnasio d'oro, to this film maker. Translated by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith from the French text as published in Cahiers du Cinema no. 311, May 1980.
THE COMPLETE LETTER MAY BE CONSULTED IN THE DESCRIPTION CARD OF JERZY DROZD DESERTO ROSSO CREATION
Nietzsche distinguishes two figures: the priest and the artist. Priests we have aplenty, from every religion or indeed none at all; but artists? I should like, dear Antonioni, to be allowed to borrow some features of your work to enable me to pin down the three forces — or if you like, the three virtues — which to my mind constitute the artist. I shall name them at once: vigilance, wisdom, and, most paradoxical of all, fragility.
[ ... ]
Salvador Dalí, Los Elefantes, Rome, 1948. Private Collection. Salvador Dalí Museums.[ ... ]
Dear Antonioni, I have tried to set forth in my intellectual language the reasons which make you, over and above the cinema, one of the artists of our time. This compliment is not simple, as you know; for the artist today is in a position no longer supported by the good conscience of a great sacred or social function. Being an artist does not give you a cosy spot in the bourgeois Pantheon of Guiding Lights of Humanity. It means in each work confronting in oneself those spectres of modern subjectivity which are (from the moment one is no longer a priest) ideological lassitude, social bad conscience, the attraction and disgust of facile art, the quivering of responsibility, the constant scruple which leaves the artist strung out between solitude and gregariousness. Today, therefore, you must take advantage of this peaceful, harmonious moment of agreement when a whole collectivity joins together to recognise, admire and love your work. For tomorrow the labour begins again.
Roland Barthes, Bologna, January 1980
Opening and closing fragments of the letter of Roland Barthes to Michelangelo Antonioni on the occasion of the granting of the most important prize awarded by the city of Bologna, L'Archiginnasio d'oro, to this film maker. Translated by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith from the French text as published in Cahiers du Cinema no. 311, May 1980.
THE COMPLETE LETTER MAY BE CONSULTED IN THE DESCRIPTION CARD OF JERZY DROZD DESERTO ROSSO CREATION
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