14.04.00 : book of the film

Friday 14th April

dear friends (still living in books) I've been meaning to write to you all about what kind of (which) book I've been living in for all these years and the thought that came to my mind was that I haven't lived in one particular book, but that rather I've been a kind of migrating moth digging furrows through the pages of many books, sometimes not even finishing some of them but jumping on to others and connecting them through tunnels or just collage-ing some pages of one onto another. (bad reader, bad reader, I know).
perhaps all this comes from a certain impatience in regard to reading fiction. I came to hate how fiction books just pull you from page one straight to the final page. fiction books often behave like a river who doesn't welcome the reader, but just dutifully carries him away to the next pier. that's how I came to like texts that look like a pond, quiet, menacing, those that hide their depth and that can be so tricky to navigate. or those that behave like a revolting sea, that you try to enter but are constantly thrown back to the sand.
'the vathek' was a book that I loved to discover particularly because of the way the footnotes get on the way of reading, slowing you down and making the book even more ornate (in the edition I have the notes are printed at the end). they also convey the idea that the book was "finished" (or completed) by someone else than the "author," the author becoming a kind of don giovanni who is only complete with leporello.
this discontentment with fiction books led me to enjoy reading film criticism and one particular book that I read many many times was about the films of joseph losey. (I can‰t remember the author). I just loved reading all that wonderful text crammed with psychoanalytical interpretation of films that I had never seen and which I tried to re-configure in my mind from whatever clues the text offered and of course the product was very fragmented. now, here is the uncanny thing about all this: there was one particular film by losey that I became obsessed with. the text offered a film of sheer beauty which couldn‰t be seen because no copies were available. plus the original film had been chopped up by the distributors in search of commercial reward. in a strange way I felt blessed that the film was unavailable because I could hold on to the thought that it only existed in my mind through the pages of that book. now filmforum, here in new york is showing a new print of a "director‰s cut" of this film, "eve" which of course I will go see.
what does all this mean? am I finally closing that book? I hate that idea. I am afraid that the real film will dissolve this other construction that the book performed; that I'll be finally pushed out of this book that I've been living in for so many years.

Sergio