“That’s a fragment of something Andrei Tarkovsky said. He said that art is different than life because art is a representation of life and therefore it doesn’t contain death. Life contains death. So making art is life-affirming. So even if the art is tragic, it’s still optimistic. There can never be pessimistic artists, there can only be mediocrity.” — from John Del Signore‘s 5.5 piece for the Gothamist about Lou Reed and Julian Schnabel discussing Berlin, a film about Reed’s 2006 revival performance of his 1973 album at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.

Berlin will open in Manhattan at Film Forum on July 18th. (Who’s the publicist? I’d love to be able to see it this week sometime.) The Schnabel-Reed sitdown concluded the Tribeca Film Festival’s “Conversations in Cinema” series.