Reality and fiction were crossing each other.
"Yes, they’d begun to reverse — the only point of reality was our own minds. It seemed to me that the only way to write about all this was to meet the landscape on its own terms. Useless to try to impose the conventions of the 19th-century realistic novel on this incredible five-dimensional fiction moving around us all the time at high speed. And I tried to develop — and I think successfully — a technique of mine, the so-called condensed novels, where I was able to cross all these events, at right angles if you like. Like cutting through the stem of a plant to expose the cross section of its main vessels. So this technique was devised to deal with this fragmentation and overlay of reality, through the fragmentation of narrative."
ballard
the five obstructions
"An unclassifiable film-school exercise—one part documentary, one part psychodrama, and one part mock manifesto—The Five Obstructions mainly serves to illuminate the game-like nature of Lars von Trier's aesthetic project.... The Five Obstructions is an essay on art as a matter of solving problems posed by a capricious deity—that is, an exposé of von Trier's own method, both of making a movie and directing actors. Von Trier compares this to therapy, although Leth hardly seems convinced. Eventually, he will be punished for his cleverness when von Trier withdraws his rules. Von Trier confesses that his desire is to "banalize" Leth and reduce him to the situation of "a tortoise on his back." But he fails once more when Leth proves resourceful enough to make something in a mode that both men profess to despise."
mediascapes
"The city comes to life through the overlapping ambiences it hosts: as a kind of software, in cultural movements, or a kind of hardware, in the physical forms of the architecture of the city itself. The unique nature and identity of any urban location emerges in an irreducible resonance that is produced between that 'software' and 'hardware'. In the case of the contemporary global city, the intensification of this relationship has produced a more radical set of bifurcations, no longer resolved as the outcome of a binary logic ('physical versus virtual'), but rather as a cascading construct of parallel realities, life worlds, and temporalities. Design of the city now has to ask how we can harness globally networked systems of capital, transnational entities, and technologically enabled relationships and use them to energize the city. In truth, design of the city today means more than ever the design and construction of an entire world."
Ed Keller,
Parallel Realities, Trans-national Archipelagos, New Urban Ambiences
werner herzog
"With a singular vision continually blurring the fine line between reality and fiction, Werner Herzog has become one of cinema's most controversial and enigmatic filmmakers. A strong authorial presence pervades each of his films, whether fictional features or documentaries. For Herzog, there is no distinction between the two styles – they are all just “films” – because real life and fiction feed off each other for mutual poetic inspiration...."
by David Church
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/06/herzog.html