NOTES to the preface and the critical essays introducing each of the four parts of this book appear immediately following the preface and each essay. Notes to the anthology selections immediately follow each selection. The anthology notes are mine unless otherwise indicated: those written by the author of the selection are marked Au; those by the translator, if other than myself, are marked TRANS.
Explanations, analyses, interpretations, are no more than frames or lenses to help the spectator focus his attention more sharply on the work. The only justification for criticism is that it allows us to see more clearly.
John Berger, About Looking (1980)
[History] has taken as its primary task, not the interpretation of the document, not the attempt to decide whether it is telling the truth or what is its expressive value, but to work on it from within and to develop it: history now organizes the document, divides it up, distributes it, orders it, arranges it in levels, establishes series, distinguishes between what is relevant and what is not, discovers elements, defines unities, describes relations. The document, then, is no longer for history an inert material through which it tries to reconstitute what men have done or said, the event of which only the trace remains; history is now trying to define within the documentary material itself unities, totalities, series, relations. . . . history is one way in which a society recognizes and develops a mass of documentation with which it is inextricably linked.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)
As for me, I wanted to see the film as close up as possible. I had learned in the equalitarian discomfort of the neighborhood [cinemas] that this new art was mine, just as it was everyone else’s. We had the same mental age: I was seven and knew how to read; it was twelve and did not know how to talk. People said that it was in its early stages, that it had progress to make; I thought that we would grow up together. I have not forgotten our common childhood: whenever I am offered a hard candy, whenever a woman varnishes her nails near me, whenever I inhale a certain smell of disinfectant in the toilet of a provincial hotel, whenever I see the violet bulb on the ceiling of a night train, my eyes, nostrils, and tongue recapture the lights and odors of those bygone halls; four years ago, in rough weather off the coast of Fingal’s Cave, I heard a piano in the wind.
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words (1964)