From: "Tarnay Laszlo" <[log in to unmask]>
Dear List Members,
To the kind query of our Editor, let me just briefly respond.
As one of the organizers, let me make out two remarks which result
from an experience of organizing five conferences in the past three
years.
1) It was a great pleasure to see that people from various
disciplines and with different backgrounds entered into a very
lively, but friendly discussion. Thus, the emphasis on ACROSS in the
title was justified. Maybe this was partly to what Pelin Tan referred
as *the atmosphere*. It happens very rarely that, e.g., Deleuzians
could argue with cognitivists. Surely this is not what is easily
reproducible in a list like this. Still almost all the feedbacks
underlined this aspect of our conference. Surely this was also due in
amny respects to the fact that the schedule was very tough and the
participants spend the three days together in formal and informal
settings.
2) It was a very fruitful amendmend to our previous conferences that
we devoted an entire day to the discussion of target films. We had
quite a few papers, especially on Memento, which sometimes radically
contradicted each other. Still, the discussion was so rewarding that
many speakers expressed their wish to produce a volume containing
some of the papers as different in their methodology and results as
they were.
As for the basic themes and trends that dominated the papers, I would
like to recapitulate three issues:
1) Many speakers, including Branigan, Forceville, and others, based
their approaches toward fiction and nonfiction films on a metaphoric
undestanding of space and time which has much too do with the
cognitive theory of Lakoff, Turner, Fauconnier of bodily schemes like
those of container and path. Branigan examined a huge section of film
history as to how much they used and combined such time and space
schemes like the river, the road, etc.
2) Some papers like Barrett's, Bacon's and ours, addressed a *lower
level* of perceiving time and space. Barrett pointed out the
importance of the phenomenon of change blindeness in understanding
narratives, while Bacon's paper treated the primarily bodily aspect
of phenomenological experience of filmic space and time. We argued
for the relevance of a distributed processing of time and space (the
difference between dorsal and ventral processing is gaining more and
more emphasis and proof in cognitive and neuro-psychology!).
3) One of the most acute debate sprang up about the *Deleuzian*
understanding of Memento. Melissa Clarke argued for its being a time
image, while David Andrew Martin-Jones, Branigan and others strongly
contended that it remains to be a movement image.
Last but not least, to my mind a very interesting argument was
proposed by Gary Bettinson about the musical score of Wong-Kar- Wai's
In the Mood for Love.
This last point may be worth pursuing on this list as well.
Laszlo Tarnay
University of Pecs
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