Sadly, books take a while to reach us in Godzone, down here in the South
Pacific but there's a comment in Sutton's review which makes my little
heart pause
It's about style. I don't recall anyone saying so in print, but surely we
can agree that Bordwell's prose style is leaden, that 90% of film-critical
writing and 98% of philosophy is a chore to read, not because of its
content (or we wouldn't be here) but because of the stylistics of the prose
(and English prose translations -- we all know notoriously deadly
translations of works which in their origina languages were eloquent and
delightful)
I'm not advocating Derridean wordgames. My preferred model would be John
Berger's lucid, passionate address, thre Barthes of A Lover's Discourse,
Marshall Berman's All That Melts . . . And though I know my own prose is
not everything it should be, the effort to develop a language adequate to
our ideas but also communicative and open is a challenge we should take up,
not one we should dismiss by sinking back into PhD-speak.
We need 'jargon': we need a vocabulary of mid-shot, key light, focal
lengths, and (I still get mail about this one after a throwaway comment in
Screen) the difference between bitmap and vector graphics. But this needn't
mean we should write in the stilted self-conscious imitation of White House
lawyers that seems to happen all too often
Perhaps its tiem f-p members voted for the most eloquent film philosophers:
do we have, in our field, people who are models of lucid, persuasive and
passionate writing? Or are we condemned, in the tedious pursuit of
disciplinarity, to jejune mimicry of the worst aspects of sociological
prose?
Meanwhile thanks for the review anyway: I for one am in a hurry, after
reading it, to get the book and fathom out what's going on -- not least
because, after doing The Image last week, we are doing Movement this week
in Screen 101 (Incidentaly, we started with sound, and with Murray Schafer
on silence. The metaphor we fancied using was still:movement::silence:
sound)
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
[log in to unmask]
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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