Gemma Files > Quotes

“I’m pretty sure Mom and Dad didn’t see me coming, either: the kid with the black moods, the kid whose mind was always elsewhere, flinching from real life as from a bruise. Who wanted to lay a fiction-filter on top of everything and pretend it was something else just to keep the sheer disappointment of it all bearable: this limited, empirical experience of ours, trapped inside a decaying shell of meat, mainly able to perceive that nothing lasts, even in our most pleasurable moments.”
― Gemma Files, Experimental Film

“The primal sin of those like myself, mes amis, is that because we were once people who acted like beasts, we are forever cursed to be beasts who know they were once men. (“In The Poor Girl Taken By Surprise”)”
― Gemma Files, The Worm In Every Heart

“In its purest form, done right, watching an experimental film is the closest you can come to dreaming another person’s dreams. Which is why to watch one is, essentially, to invite another person into your head, hoping you emerge haunted.”
― Gemma Files, Experimental Film

“So tell me: were you born broken just like me, born hungry? Are we all of us born with some part of us missing? Are we each us born with a hole?....Born with a hole and no earthly way of finding just the exact right plug to fill it, not 'til you've tried 'em from A to Z and back once more: booze, fags, work, candy, men, girls, heroin, methedrine, methadone, God. Tried having a baby. Tried killing yourself. A hundred religions, from Calvin to the Dalai Lama and back again; tried every damn thing you could think of and some you had to stumble over....You stick a plug in your weakness like a finger in the proverbial dike and let pressure build up let it swell and swell 'til there's nothing left but tension, nothing left but what's left over--the absence, not the presence. The wound you shape your soul around.”
― Gemma Files, We Will All Go Down Together

“Parental love is a matchless thing; if it weren't for that, most of us wouldn't have a pot to piss in, affectionately speaking. But even at its most irreplacable, it's still pretty cheap. Any ape loves their children; spiders lie still while theirs crawl around inside them, happy to let them eat their guts.
The only reason anybody unrelated is ever nice to anyone else, meanwhile, is as a sort of pre-emptive emotional strike - to prevent themselves from being treated as badly, potentially, as they might have treated other people. Which makes love only the lie two brains on spines tell each other, the lie that says: "You exist, because I love you. You exist, because you can see yourself in my eyes."
So we blunder from hope to hope, hollowed and searching. All of us equally incomplete.
And after all these years, still the sting comes, the liquid pressure in the chest and nose, the migraine-forerunner frown. Phantom pain. The ghost without the murder.
But what the fuck? That's all it is, ever. You want to be loved. You tell other people you love them, in order to trick them into loving you back. And after a while, it's true. You feel the pull, the ache.”
― Gemma Files, The Worm In Every Heart

“Free will, that bitch of a thing. Given the freedom to choose, we human beings will always make the wrong choice, every damn time.”
― Gemma Files, Experimental Film

“The problem with all numinous things is that you can't just take somebody's word about them, especially the ones you're warned away from. You have to look at them, eventually, to know they're really there. You look at them even though you know it's not a good idea to. You can't not.”
― Gemma Files, Experimental Film

“it's the things you don't see, in this world or any other--the hidden things, unseen, lost between frames--that will always make all the difference.”
― Gemma Files, Experimental Film

“Yeah, well, maybe magic's like that. Metaphor made real.”
― Gemma Files, Experimental Film

“As time passes, the cast and crew go the way of all flesh, though their celluloid echoes remain--walking, talking, fighting, fucking. After enough time, every person you see onscreen will have died, transformed through the magic of cinema into a collection of visible memories: light on a screen, pixels on a videotape, information on a DVD. We bring them back every time we start a movie, and they live again, reflected in our eyes. It's a cruel sort of immortality, I guess, though it probably beats the alternative.”
― Gemma Files, Experimental Film

“Morrow's rush of disgust, temporary as it might prove, had nothing to do with the truths-turned-insults flung out. No. What riled Morrow ran far deeper - was the sheer perversity of Chess's own nature, that unbreakable wilfulness he'd always revered in himself, as sign and source of his own freedom. His stark refusal ever to be bound, to obey aught but his own whim and want.

Because while he could walk free and hold a gun Chess Pargeter answered to no man - no man, no law, no damn body, motherfucker. No ideal, no cause, no force but sheer chaos, bound and determined to move unimpeded and burn for the sake of burning. To never submit himself to ghost or hex or priest or even God, 'less he damn well wanted to.

No man except Ash Rook, that was - for a time. And after this last betrayal, from now on... not even him.

'Course not, Morrow's anger spoke back, unimpressed by Chess's well-tuned inner litany. That's 'cause you're nothing but a brat who never grew up - a skillet-hopping little hot-pants who knows everything 'bout killing and nothing at all 'bout living. Who spits on friendship, duty and honour not 'cause he's above them, so much as 'cause he don't know what they even mean - same way you don't really grasp how anything's real, 'cept if you want it, or it hurts you. And that's why you ended up givin' everything you had to a man who skinned you alive, then left you stranded down in Hell - 'cause he was what you wanted, and Christ forbid Chess Pargeter ever admit what he wanted was a goddamn bad idea. You made it easy for him, Chess, you damn fool. 'Cause you couldn't believe you deserved anything better. And me? I'd never do that to you, or anyone. Never.”
― Gemma Files, A Book of Tongues

“She is the only true thing.”
― Gemma Files, Experimental Film

“But sometimes I do wonder if I'm love-blind the way some people are colour-blind, or most people are ghost-blind. If love (true or false, thick or thin, requited or un-) really is the only glue ever mortars our sad hearts' bricks together, and me not swift enough to recognize the label any time I happened to pass it by.
Because: living is transience, after all--people aren't really permanent 'til they're dead, no matter what you might've felt for 'em beforehand. Always changing...”
― Gemma Files, We Will All Go Down Together

“For a thought cannot be un-thought, anymore than the world can be un-made, & thus we can never escape the consequences of our mistake, not without great price, & cost, & pain. Or perhaps not even then.”
― Gemma Files, Experimental Film

“In the end, you will always look at the thing you're told not to just because it exists, if only to prove it exists.”
― Gemma Files, Experimental Film

“Yet there are other things as well, you must remember—things which have always been, which fools without true religion sometimes choose to worship, or trick themselves into worshipping. Small gods for small minds, trapped in small places.”
― Gemma Files, Experimental Film

“Funny word, that: "fault." As in San Andreas. The crack through which one world intersects with the next, or vice versa. This crack in my head, still gaping open--a magnet, a haematoma, a dark and spreading pool. A cigarette-burn hole in the fabric of everything I see, or hear, or do; right in the middle, impossible to mend, impossible to disguise. Impossible to ignore.”
― Gemma Files, We Will All Go Down Together

“Here are seven angels, one with peacock feathers for wings and a crown, but no devil. And here also is God, behind it all, who created both Himself and them, whereby everything else was created. Yet there are other things as well, you must remember—things which have always been, which fools without true religion sometimes choose to worship, or trick themselves into worshipping. Small gods for small minds, trapped in small places. And while these creatures' scope is narrow, as with all half-made things, their reach can be long, long . . . just so long as their names are still known in this world, so they may hear them whispered somewhere, recognize themselves, and come calling. . . .”
― Gemma Files, Experimental Film

“Because in experimentalism, the film itself was the point, the question and the answer, all in one. In its purest form, done right, watching an experimental film is the closest you can come to dreaming another person’s dreams. Which is why to watch one is, essentially, to invite another person into your head, hoping you emerge haunted.”
― Gemma Files, Experimental Film

“Being a ghost is like being invisible, so being invisible must be like being a ghost. Like being inside the shadow, always blundering towards people with your hands out, angry that can't see to comfort you.”
― Gemma Files, We Will All Go Down Together

“So tell me: were you born broken just like me, born hungry? Are we all of us born with some part of us missing? Are we each us born with a hole?....Born with a hold and no earthly way of finding just the exact right plug to fill it, not 'til you've tried 'em from A to Z and back once more: booze, fags, work, candy, men, girls, heroin, methedrine, methadone, God. Tried having a baby. Tried killing yourself. A hundred religions, from Calvin to the Dalai Lama and back again; tried every damn thing you could think of and some you had to stumble over....You stick a plug in your weakness like a finger in the proverbial dike and let pressure build up let it swell and swell 'til there's nothing left but tension, nothing left but what's left over--the absence, not the presence. The wound you shape your soul around.”
― Gemma Files, We Will All Go Down Together

“When the witness is ready, the ghost will appear. When things wear thin.”
― Gemma Files, Experimental Film

“Miracles, black, white, and grey all over. Like light on a wall, telling a story; like magic. Like cinema itself.”
― Gemma Files, Experimental Film

“So they're supposed to be God's emanations, these angels, and God delegates most earthly action to them—sort of like how the mediaeval Cathars and other Gnostic-influenced sects claimed the Devil was 'king of this world,' with God's complicity. It's a system that leaves room for a whole lot of animistic deities, spirits of place or concept—the kind you get in ancient Greek, Roman, Aryan-Indian, and Slavic beliefs, or even Chinese Shenism and Japanese Shinto. And these things could be good, could be bad, could be beneficial or malign, but since they all had God behind them, you couldn't really get rid of 'em, not completely. The best you could do is, um . . . stop paying attention. Ignore them, walk away. Don't eve give them what they want.”
― Gemma Files, Experimental Film

“So many individuals in different places, all with the same good idea. All, in their own ways, attempting to use light on a wall to open a window into another world. And how odd is it that the two guys who made the first viable motion picture happened to have a surname that means “light”? Still just coincidence?”
― Gemma Files, Experimental Film

“I will always want to earn what I get, however much it hurts; that I want it because it hurts, because pain gives life a pain, and without it life isn't even death, just . . . nothingness.”
― Gemma Files, Experimental Film

“The Asian idea is that what remains behind after death by violence is less the murdered person his or herself than an echo created by the moment of the person's death--a rip in the fabric of space and time itself. A doppelganger husk, ectoplasm with pretensions. Not "so and so's ghost" so much as just a ghost. Or just ..."ghost.”
― Gemma Files, We Will All Go Down Together

“the tragedy is that the world never does end, ever. That it goes on & on, forcing us to go along as well, until at last there is nothing else, nothing more. Until there is only what was, same as what is and what will be--Only the truth, which never changes. Truth not made flesh but image, for anyone to see.”
― Gemma Files, Experimental Film

“It amazed Chess how he'd really believed, almost all along, that there was nothing he'd miss, leaving this world. Only the whole of it, you ass-stupid fool.

Every bit, the living and the dead, and then some; hot sun on his back, the wind and the rain, full-out galloping into battle, feel of his guns in hand, a good hard fuck. Getting drunk - on absinthe, anger, blood. Stomping twice on some enemy's face for good measure, and laughing while he did it; the sound of Asher Rook's voice preaching, or Yancey's, singing. Ed's heartbeat under his cheek.”
― Gemma Files, A Rope of Thorns

“You could argue—as I have more than enough times, as part of my Film History lecture—that, no matter its actual narrative content, every movie is a ghost story. A film's production forms a time capsule, becoming a static window into a particular moment of a particular era.”
― Gemma Files, Experimental Film