___ Ross ___
| To the two existential approaches you identify in cinema, the
| mystic and the hopeless, I would add the (anti-existential?)
| comic approach.
 ___

Ah yes, how could I have forgotten.  Further that style of existentialism is
epitomized in one of my favorite liteary - film characters: the fool in
_King Lear_.  The Kurosawa version is amazing at the end, with the blind
walking on wall.  The thing I always loved about a Shakespearean fool is
that he often was the only one who really knew what was going on.  He would
speak the truth, but in a manner which no one would understand except to
assume it was a joke.

Even as we moved into a culture where we didn't have a formal fool, as in
the era of Shakespeare, we adopted other characters with similar roles.  In
this way actors like Groucho Marx take the role held by this classic
character.

I don't recall the details, but I seem to recall reading a paper on film
that suggested that the only way we really can deal with the tragic
absurdities of life is through comedy.  Only there can we tell truths too
horrible to speak of otherwise.

I think you are correct as well to see this is Nietzsche.  It is hard to
read _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ without seeing the comedic and satirical
elements.  Further, as in many comedies, he seems to push the extreme to get
a reaction.

There was, a few years ago, an under-appreciated version of _Don Juan_ that
I think captured this.  It was passed off as a romantic comedy, but I think
many took at face value the elements in the film.  However as I watched it,
it expressed a very Nietzschean approach to the tragedy of life.  In it a
character played by Johnny Depp "thinks" he is Don Juan and wanders America
seducing women until he is locked up in an Asylum to be analyzed by Marlon
Brando.  The key moment is Depp finally admitting that he knows all about
reality, but that this act is a conscious creative act to recreate life in a
palatable fashion.  This is not the solipsism of the delusional, but rather
a conscious creation with perspectivism - but one with a very ironic edge.
Further a one that allows the "romanticism" to spurt forth from life.  It is
very much like Nietzsche's letting Dionysus play.

Don't get me wrong.  It's not a great movie.  It needs a bit more "bite" to
it.  And I'm sure people will point out that we are once again discussing
mundane so-so films. <grin>

Perhaps a better example of a very similar approach to life is Benigni's
_Life is Beautiful_.  Once again we have the fool, only this one is much
more a traditional fool.  Then we see the power of the fool in the midst of
a world gone truly mad.  Unlike _Don Juan_ though, the Benigni film has more
depth.  We are left with some doubt as to whether the father really was
doing the right thing by lying to his son.  And because Benigni moves from a
foolish utterance that speaks the truth to a foolish lie that protects his
son, he no longer fits the classic Shakespearean mold.  Perhaps this is
because some aspects of life are so horrible, that even the fool's head is
bent against it?  Or is it the fool triumphant?

 ___ Ross ___
| 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.
 ___

This is an other excellent point.  While we sometimes elevate those who move
either towards the surreal (Lynch, Jeunet, etc.) or to the overly symbolic
(Bergman, etc.) I personally find that it is in the realist approach that
the most depth of interpretation is possible.  My own opinion is that this
is because, unlike other forms, the objects dealt with in the film are the
very objects we encounter in their everydayness.  When a clock is simply a
sign as part of a sign-system of the author it loses the depth that the
clocks we normally encounter hold.  While the dream worlds of someone like a
Jeunet or Lynch are engrossing and resonate with something primal in us,
they are most successful when dealing with more everyday events.  (i.e.
Jeunet in the every day harmonies presented as an accidental symphony in
_Delicatessen_, or Lynch's most powerful film, _Blue Velvet_, which has its
surreal tones encased in the events of the small towns we've all been
through)

The biggest problem with most science fiction, whether popular or more
artistic, is that the realist sense is considered expendable.  The great
science fiction (_2001_, _The Day the Earth Stood Still_, _Stalker_) are
ones that are told in a realist sense.  While there are fun films, like
_Star Wars_, they lack a certain depth that these other films have.

 ___ Ross ___
| 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.
 ___

Yes.  As I alluded, Giordano Bruno's art of memory basically was the use of
our everyday encountering with the world as a kind of mnemonic device.  It
was, unlike many other memory schemes, essentially spatial.  You don't
simply relate something to something else but create a grand museum and
stage you walk through in your mind.

Because of the way film works - communicating both space and motion - many
of the elements Bruno and Renaissance philosophy used to communicate ideas
work quite well in film.  Of course there were elements of this approach to
space and movement long prior to Bruno.  In some ways Dante's comedy is the
best example.  And Dante's layers of meaning and significance are so dense.
. .  I can think of no other work that comes close.

I should add in an other reference to a not well thought of film - the Dante
references and mentions in _Hannible_ were outstanding.  A lot of the subtle
humor in that film involves some familiarity with the Renaissance.  The book
depends upon Yate's discussion of Bruno's art of memory quite a bit as well.
There are elements of that in the film that Scott captures quite well.  Even
though I know most hated that film, I must admit that it was one of my
favorites of that year.

I'm not quite sure why I keep bringing up these sorts of films.  I admit
most of the films I mention are very flawed.  But perhaps it is because they
capture the mainstream so much more than the art house film.  So I find them
that much more intriguing, even though I love foreign and art house films.

 ___ Ross ___
| 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.
 ___

I'm not following you.  It consists of *glyphs*.  But the very essence of
math, especially in its anti-realist form, is that these glyphs are
contentless.  All we deal with are rules about manipulating the glyphs.
Until we apply them, they have no meaning.  Thus algebgra seems to treat its
glyph's in a way irreconcilable to a Peircean notion of icon.  Admittedly
Peirce lived before the rise of constructivist views of mathematics.
However I think the same rules apply.

While it is true that we ascribe a special sense to certain operators, such
as + or -, in modern algebra even this is not true.  Thus + or - may reflect
rotations of a geometric figure rather that operations on the set of
integers or other numbers.  Even the nature of the glyphs themselves aren't
iconic, unless one take the minus sign as an icon of crossing out.  Yet
since the cross out has been abstracted from such an act (and the original
history lost) I'm not sure it counts as an icon anymore.

If Peirce sees math as iconic in some sense, it probably is because it is
the structure divorced from what is structured.  Thus perhaps one could say
that Peirce takes a positivist approach to logic (he did consider it a
science) and then views math as a whole in logicist terms.  (Since he lived
prior to Whitehead's and Russell's failure on that point, this probably is
defensible)

However if we move to this style of approach (which I think probable in some
form or an other) then we lose the sense of the glyphs themselves as
graphically iconic.

I know some have played up the iconic nature of mathematical symbols.
Wasn't it Lacan who made the egregious decision to iterpret complex numbers
( -i ) in Freudian terms?  I really think that icons don't play that big a
role in math, except as perhaps the occasional aid to thinking.  (i.e.
thinking of graph theory as actual lines between nodes)  One really big
problem with an iconic notion of mathematics is the problem of extensive use
of isomorphisms in mathematics.  (i.e. graph theory problems are typically
transformed into problems in matrix theory or linear algebra or vice versa)


-- Clark Goble --- [log in to unmask] -----------------------------