Creativity Quote by Esa-Pekka Salonen

Salonen is diagnosing a perceptual rewiring: screen language has trained us to accept teleportation as narrative logic. In film and TV, we don’t live through time; we’re shuttled across it. Cuts erase the connective tissue - the walk down the hallway, the hesitation before the kiss, the slow dawning of regret - and replace lived causality with clean arrival. That’s why his contrast between “A becoming B” and “A jumping to B” lands. It’s not nostalgia for long takes; it’s a warning about what our attention now treats as normal.

Coming from a conductor-composer, the complaint carries extra bite. Music, especially in the classical tradition Salonen inhabits and has helped modernize, is built on transformation: themes mutate, harmonies lean forward, tensions accumulate and discharge. The pleasure is in the “becoming,” the almost-thereness. If an edit is a hard cut, a modulation is persuasion. One teaches your body to accept discontinuity; the other asks you to inhabit continuity long enough to be changed by it.

The subtext is cultural, not merely aesthetic. When transitions feel “foreign,” patience starts to look like dead air, and process becomes suspicious. Politics becomes highlight reels. Relationships become snapshots. Even selfhood can start to feel editable: delete the awkward parts, jump to the glow-up. Salonen isn’t claiming film is bad; he’s arguing that a cut-heavy media diet can shrink our tolerance for gradual change - the kind that art, and life, actually run on.