___ John ___
| But transcending a genre doesn't necessarily mean not
| using the expectations associated with it. The
| Searchers transcends the traditional Western in, for
| example, its moral ambiguity but that ambiguity gets
| part of its meaning from the context of less
| ambiguous Westerns.
___
The structuralist in me would say that is true of *all* films.
However the "pigeon-holeable" films don't simply get meaning from the
context of other films. Rather they *repeat* other films. i.e. rather than
have their own meaning, they simply repeat. It is this notion of
repeatability that I think gets to the heart of what I was getting at.
Other than that I agree. Films (or any literature) that are good, tend to
be good because they adopt what I might almost call a transcendent aspect.
It is the idea that rather than the author *forcing* the elements of the
story into a structure (the repetition of a previously existing form) that
the story has a logic of its own. In a way it writes itself. I think
everyone has experienced that to one extent or an other, even if only in
essays or papers they've written.
-- Clark Goble --- [log in to unmask] -----------------------------
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