Thanks again Clark for all the interesting ideas. And Doyle too.
Quick random responses only.
To the comment, This isnt just aesthetics. Far from it., I would say that I
think aesthetics isnt just aesthetics. The good in art and the good life are
proper philosophical concerns of philosophy and the ones that I find in the
films I like
What I have liked in 2001 is the pace, the dancing space craft and,
especially the comedy. The Hal story. It is the witty, cheeky side of
Nietzsche I like too. To the two existential approaches you identify in
cinema, the mystic and the hopeless, I would add the (anti-existential?)
comic approach.
I should say that I particularly like a remark that Serge Daney made about
Stalker. At the end of an article in which he says that it is a film made to
invite many interpretations (I would say that it lures watchers into making
interpretations (perhaps it stalks them)) Daneys last sentence is, The film
Stalker is also a realist film.
Scientific films. Films of the way plants move are a wonder. A David
Attenborough film of blackberry stalking, and a vine twining, made me
understand how a viny rainforest could develop the peculiar structure it
has. Plants live in another timescale that film can show us.
Film as showing. The idea that philosophy is about something made me think
about how film is about something. The *guiding myth* of film in Bazins
sense is that it is about physical or empirical things and that we enjoy
(indulge in) the absence (the apparent absence) of a medium between the
object and its presentation.
Memory and vision. I like the point that writing as mnemonic technology is
conducive to mathematics. But I also think that the mnemonic technique of
the old rhetoricians - the loci and imaginis of Simonides - uses an
especially spatial, visual skill of humans. We are quite adept animals at
storing a lot of information in places.
I agree that icons (likenesses) need not be visual or spatial. For instance
a narrative string is a temporal icon. I even think language, including
speech, is a very schematic icon of what it represents. Writing can put this
icon visually and spatially and not just in the timebound medium of speech.
Written mathematics is iconic in this way. By the the graphic character of
mathematics I dont mean the illustrations of Venn Diagrams or geometrical
figures, I mean the kind of icons we see in an equation. Algebra consists of
icons all the way down the page.
Ross
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