1) If we move writing and film making to the same level--artistic
creation--the only distinguishing factor between film and writing is media.
The distinctions made about writing and film in relationship to a historical
mode of production--the use of the script and the scripting process, which
Michael Chanan nicely detailed in a recent post--relate directly to Marxism
and to Derrida. You addressed Derrida in another post, but my point about
the idea of script as "blueprint" or legal document relates directly to this
mode of production. You say, "a script is never a 'blue-print' or a prior
form which is then expressed," but obviously you're not paying attention to
the history of Hollywood where a script is part of the deal. (For instance,
will Jody Foster be in the sequel to the _Silence of the Lambs_ (this movie
was not the first in the series)? It depends on the script.)  Yet, with the
advent of video (_Blair Witch Project_) and inexpensive digital
equipment--the computer (inexpensive animations--_Ants__. . .  )--this mode
of production (agents, scripts, actors, . . . ) may one day fade--but that's
to forget Hollywood's more important product--not film, but celebrity.

2) If we move artistic creation to the same level as production of meaning,
my statement--"all any artistic creation concerns is the articulation of an
idea and the bringing of that idea into being as a particular kind of
media"--holds true: the articulation is the bringing into being. The form of
being making being known is the media. So it is that criticism often creates
the being/meaning of art. Being, media, meaning--all is polymorphous.

Note: Nietzsche does not distinguish between active and passive in the
traditional manner that you employ: Nietzsche  reverses their sense. For
him, creation and being are interrelated, a concept which Heidegger also
grasps. That is, Nietzsche says he does philosophy with a hammer--he both
creates (blissful knowing) and destroys (active forgetting). Criticism is
not a parasitic activity--it is the putting into being of knowledge. See
Nietzsche: _On the Use and Disadvantage [Abuse] of History for Life_ where
he discusses monumental history (hero worship--history as something to live
down or live up to), antiquarian history (history as a collection of
facts--pedantic), and critical history (the creation of history through its
deconstruction).  In history as in art, the destruction (the forgetting) of
one form is the creation (the blissful knowing) of another. To extend this
concept to Derrida, knowledge thus has being as difference.

3) a) You have an interesting suggestion--"if anything I would suggest it is
more useful to think of artistic activity as centered on inarticulacies and
inexpressibles." So meaning is the miasma--the Dionysian. The unbearable
lightness of being or the drug haze of psychedelia.  In fact, this statement
might just be a thesis for viewing French and Italian cinema where what we
get are inexpressibles expressed within tangents: the cliched opening--the
stick tracing the wall, the fence, the sidewalk, the chalk lighting upon the
chalkboard, the reverie
 . . .  .

3) b)  Cliche: "the difficulty of paraphrasing a poem." There's nothing
difficult about paraphrasing a poem.

Interesting: "the inarticulable affect of the artwork may be mapped across
conceptual fields but does that say anything about the artwork's singularity
as an artwork?  does it even breach the very fact of  the inarticulable that
resides in (many or any?) artworks."

Try to the think of the inexpressible in the Derridean sense--as difference.


4) Mock heroic: Singularity--where does that it exist? In the Kantian
imagination of pure space and time? As the Platonic eidos? Have you
discovered something that exists in and for itself--singularly? Or does
everything in this world exist as relationship--as difference? How does your
film exist? Alone? I think not for how would you then know it as film? You
wouldn't. You've reduced meaning--and this I think is the meaning of your
protest
--to singularity. You are--in other words--a Platonist, a
Kantian--attempting to exist outside of history, somewhere beyond the
production of meaning?

5) "at the end of the day though, you can never write a film." See the work
of Bruce Conner--he might get you to question your definition of film.

JMC







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