‘My films are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.’
Michael Haneke, "Film as Catharsis" quoted by Mattias Frey at ‘Senses of Cinema’. Full Mattias Frey article at ‘Senses of Cinema’.
‘In interviews, Haneke has in turn emphasised his intention to leave the work of interpretation to the spectator: “I try to make anti-psychological films with characters who are less characters than projection surfaces for the sensibilities of the viewer; blank spaces force the spectator to bring his own thoughts and feelings to the film. Because that is what makes the viewer open for the sensitivity of the character”. Haneke, in other words, goes to extremes in withholding information in order to compel the spectator to “think with” and “feel with” the film, instead of simply consuming it..’
Mattias Frey at ‘Senses of Cinema’. Full article at ‘Senses of Cinema’.
‘Ono finds herself in the vanguard of a contemporary art whose most recent theoretical expression is Nicolas Bourriaud's exploration of what he terms a practice of ‘relational aesthetics’. Increasingly prevalent in contemporary art practice, it emphasises interaction with, and the participation of, the public in the creation of art. For Bourriaud contemporary art since the 1990s has epitomised the Duchampian ideal through sociability, through acts of direct participation between an art work or an artist and their audience, the micro-community that emerges through ‘a momentary grouping of participatory viewers’. In this way, he says, a contemporary work is no longer simply a space that one moves through, but becomes a time to be lived through, ‘like an opening to unlimited discussion.’
Jonathan Cate in ‘Art and Christianity’ 48, October 2006.
‘I should like to think that it were possible to use this mythological language of God ‘out there’ and make the same utterly natural and unself-conscious transposition as I have suggested we already do with the language of the God ‘up there’. Indeed, unless we become used to doing this and are able to take this theological notation, as it were, in our stride, we shall cut ourselves off from the classics of the Christian faith, just as we should be unable to read the Bible were we to stumble at its way of describing God. I believe, however, that we may have to pass through a century or more of reappraisal before this becomes possible and before this language ceases to be an offence to faith for a great many people. No one wants to live in such a period, and one could heartily wish it were not necessary. But the signs are that we are reaching the point at which the whole concepton of a God ‘out there’, which has served us so well since the collapse of the three-decker universe, is itself becoming more of a hindrance than a help.’
John Robinson, ‘Honest to God’, pp. 16-17.