Luciano Duarte

When I think of the sannyasis of India, I realize that I have, of course, renounced nothing, that I lead a life of pleasure and comfort, and that I have faced nothing but minor obstacles in pursuing my calling. If, however, I compare my circumstances with what I have become, if I reflect on the natural path I rejected, on an adult life that has amounted to successive defectio...

To understand what cinema has become, one need only ask: who would read a work of literature written by multiple authors? The answer is very simple: someone looking for entertainment. In a story written this way, there’s no doubt that even the smallest details would be carefully crafted: the story might be an ingenious puzzle, and the plot would unfold by revealing “mysteries...

The moment a film production relies on a team of screenwriters, it forfeits the possibility of producing a work of art. It is the most obvious of the obvious: the filmmaker and the screenwriter must be the same person, and the work must be an individual creation. Cinema, however, has turned the former into a sort of manager, a specialist in scene composition, the person who d...

This past July, I reached seven years without watching a single movie. I didn’t miss them. And when I think back on that old habit of watching at least one a week—on a Saturday or Sunday night—I don’t feel any nostalgia. After all, how many hours were wasted on disappointing experiences? The evolution of cinema is regrettable: productions have become much more expensive, and ...

Since most of our time is always devoted to trivial matters, it should be easier to convince our minds of the need to try to imbue them with meaning. If only! What happens most often is that we see them all as nuisances, as boundless nonsense that erodes our time and motivation. In short, true existence seems to be limited to those rare moments when reason grasps the importan...