>One doesn't find in Bazin or Kracauer (or in the works
>of their peers) the superfluous coining of phrases which practically
>defines contemporary film writing--they earned their keep by shaping
>their ideas out of the same language used by those they were in
>disagreement with.
This I take as axiomatic. I wondered in my earlier post about where we
might find such clarity now. For me one example, which the mention of Bazin
brings to mind, is Dudley Andrew, and especially the book on French cinema
of the 30s, Mists of regret. Here the title will do for a moment: Andrew is
unafraid of _using_ language to evoke, to dramatise, to impassion. I think
here of the concluding lines of Bazin's essayon Umberto D and its echo of
Mallarme. Poetry is a quality of this medium and the attempt to exclude it
from our work _in this medium_ seems rash. I agree there's a danger off
self-indulgence too, and most of us recognise unneccessary jargon when we
see it in our peers or our students. One of the qualities of jargon is that
it is an attempt to anchor meaning so firly that it no longer slips, a
decent aim in itself, but mistaken since it also sets itself against the
evolution of the language. Film writing in general is less bogged down
than, for example, mass comms prose, for exactly this rerason (plus many of
us came through humanities degrees rather than social science ones, and are
less framed by the disciplinary rills of sociology). I don't dislike
difficulty: any new thought will be difficult. But some old ones can be
made that way.
I guess I'm still asking whether we have models of excellenece in this
difficut craft of translation that we undertake, working with the
audiovisual in verbal forms (and yes I am thinking of that other artificer
of words, Walter Benjamin, and his description of translation as like
making a new vase out of the shards of another)
best
sean
Sean Cubitt
Professor of Screen and Media Studies
The University of Waikato
Private Bag 3105
Hamilton
New Zealand
T (direct) +64 (0)7 856 2889 extension 8604
T/F (department) +64 (0)7 838 4543
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http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film/
Digital Aesthetics
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/digita
The Dundee Seminars
http://www.imaging.dundee.ac.uk/people/sean/index.html
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