Subsequent posts on this thread have, it seems to me, only reinforced Tim's
proposition about film's 'survival' beyond a 'proper' context. The discussion
about what exactly is or isn't 'profilmic' recalls the Structural materialist
experimental film makers and their efforts to attain a truly anti-illusionist,
totally reflexive cinema by means of anti-narrative and by numerous tactics to
defeat representation and present the apparatus itself ( eg. scratching on
film, 'revealing' the apparatus of projection via filming a projection in which
the film strip is pulled free of the teeth on the film sprockets as it goes
through the gate, and so forth). None of which, of course, were able to escape
from a strategy of depiction, even if it was depicting (an illusion of) the
materiality of film.

A complementary proposition to Tim's Derridean one: if a film can only find its
meaning in the determination of its proper context, then how can one determine
this context? Would not it be made up of myriad other texts (historical,
social, aesthetic, technological) that each need to be determined in terms of
their proper context (part of which would include the film)?....

Of course, this effort of determination (interpretation) is constantly being
made, and it is not  done in a vacuum of pure relativity: forces are in play,
such as those that insist on the determination of a film's meaning in terms of
its proper context.

Tim Bostwick wrote:

> Recently joined list and have been trying to formulate some kind of response
> to the question of context. It seems to me to recall the Derrida argument
> regarding speech and writing, particularly in the form it assumes in his The
> Post Card....
>
> As a film is only possible in the fact that it survives any context in which
> it might appear (this is evident from the start in the fact that it is a
> record of a pro-fimic event, it only exists in its distance from that
> event), and is therefore something which exists only insofar as it has no
> proper context, what seems to me more interesting is to ask what is gained
> in the contemporary insistence upon a proper context?
>