Capture

Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Les Quatre Cents Coups. Absolutely wonderful. One really gets stuck to movies like that -- in which you recognise something of yourself, as is or as would be. There's Antonioni's La Notte, too, watching which I fell in love with Jeanne Moreau, in that scene where she walks out of the house and keeps walking, without direction, with nothing before her but the next step. It really shook my bones. I partook of that emptiness, resented it, and wanted to fill it.

Fellini's 8½: towards the end, when they're putting up that giant scaffolding. I couldn't write what it means to me without being embarrassingly trite; it may be just enough to say that the notion of a giant framework -- flimsy in itself and made of flimsy materials, but making a solid and substantial shape -- reaches the core of my clumsy, architectural heart.

Inconsequentially, but quite naturally, one thing (in film, in the head) leads to another (in real life, in the head): so that one doesn't quite know what to make of one's own life, whether there's a shape in one's scaffolding (if you stand far enough to see the whole) or whether one is walking through a city that is familiar but whose bodies resist capture. Like driving a sieve through water. What is retained, and what of that is important? Only that which isn't forgotten? All of it?

Open to impression, closed to reality: infinitely vulnerable.