Dear film-philosophers -
The AMERICAN BEAUTY bag has already come back 'third time as farce' - in
Todd Solondz's STORYTELLING! - part of which is a rather ham-fisted critique
of both AMERICAN BEAUTY (which I hate) and the documentary AMERICAN MOVIE
(which I love). The fact that Solondz can so easily conflate the two films
in his parody says a lot about his limitations as an artist, as far as I'm
concerned.
How great to learn that the paper bag might have been pinched from an
avant-garde film by Dorsky !!
Meanwhile, there is a recent in-depth essay on that selfsame plastic bag in
AUSTRALIAN HUMANITIES REVIEW, called "Documentary Affect: Filming Rubbish"
by performance-theorist Gay Hawkins at:
http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-September-2002/hawkins.html
Here is a snippet to give the philosophical flavour of the piece:
"Three ideas have helped me make sense of the plastic bag. First, the idea
of affect as relationality. Or, in other words, affect is a relation, it's
not a self having feelings, it's a distinctive being in and of the world.
Then there is the performative dimension of cinema, specifically its
capacity to animate everyday things, to make things move, including the
audience. And finally, that bag forces us back to questions of reality and
objectivity- what happens when the real exceeds its representations? When
looking at waste suddenly touches the heart of ethical experience? In
pursuing these ideas I've drawn on two quite disparate theoretical sources:
poststructuralist philosophy, particularly the Deleuzian inflected work on
affect by Brian Massumi and William Connolly, and recent film theory looking
at what Lesley Stern calls the 'specifically cinematic rendering of things'
"
Go forth and philosophise, film gleaners !!!
Adrian
|