As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000) 90% 6★

Without knowing, unknowingly, we carry…each of us, we carry with us somewhere deep, some images of Paradise. Maybe not images…some vague, vague feeling where we have beensome place… There are places, there are places in which we find ourselves in our lives. I have been in such places where I felt, ah, this must be like Paradise, this is Paradise, or something like that. A little fragment of Paradise. Not only the places… I have been with friends. We have been together, my friends, many times, and we felt some kind of togetherness, something special, and we were elated and we felt, ah, we felt like in Paradise.
But we were right here on this Earth. But we were in Paradise… Those brief moments, those moments… And that is maybe what it’s all about… Forget eternity, enjoy.

– No judgement here… positive, negative, good, bad… They’re just images and sounds,…

– Yes, people are bad, cinema is innocent, innocent. People are not innocent. They are not.

– I saw happiness and pain in your eyes and reflections of the Paradises lost and regained and lost again, that terrible loneliness and happiness. Yes, and I reflect upon this and I think about you, like two lonely space pilots in outer cold space, as I sit here this late night alone and I think about all this.

– These are images that have some meaning to me, but may have no meaning to you at all. Then, suddenly, this being midnight, I thought: there is no image that wouldn’t relate to anybody else. I mean, all the images around us, that we go through our lives, and I go filming them, they are not that much different from what you have seen or experienced… From what you have seen or experienced. All our lives are very very much alike. Ah, my dear Blake! Just a drop of water. We are all in it and nothing, there is no big difference, no essential difference between you and me, no essential difference.

– You must by now come to a realization that what you are seeing is a sort of masterpiece of nothing. Nothing. You must have noticed my obsession with what’s considered as nothing, in cinema and life, nothing very important. We all look for those very important things… Very important things. And here there is nothing important, nothing. It’s all little daily scenes, personal little celebrations and joys. Nothing important. It’s all nothing. Nothing. That is, if you have never experienced the ecstasy of a child making the first steps… The incredible importance of that moment, of a child making his first steps. Or the importance, the incredible importance of a tree in the Spring suddenly all in blossoms. All in blossoms! The miracle… Miracles of every day, little moments of Paradise that are here now. Next moment maybe they are gone. Totally insignificant… but great.

– My dear viewers, I guess you have come to another realization by now: and that is, that I am not really a filmmaker. I do not make films. I just film. I am obsessed with filming.

– Why do they always, when they paint Paradise, show it just full of exotic trees? No! Paradise, my Paradise was full of snow! I tell you: Paradise was full of soft, white snow,…

– I do not understand, I never really understood, never really lived in the so-called real world. I lived… I live in my own imaginary world, which is as real as any other world, as real as the real worlds of all the other people around me. You also live in your own imaginary worlds. What you are seeing is my imaginary world, which to me is not imaginary at all. It’s real. It is as real as anything else under the sun.

– My dear viewers: as we continue I do not feel any guilt making you watch these very personal insignificant moments of my life. We all look for something more important… for something more important… But, as life goes, at some point we realize that one day follows another, and things that we felt were so important yesterday we feel we have forgotten them already today.