Victoria Carvey asks:
>I'm doing an assignment on David Lynch's Eraserhead and how it
demonstrates
>"the counter-ideological/cinematic practices it employs." Can anyone
>recommend a website that would help or does anyone have any ideas? I
really
>don't know where to start! Its all in relation to avant garde and
>underground cinema. Vix
I don't have the address of a website that will give you the answer to
your assignment, but I do have a suggestion about reframing the
assignment. I just read the following from Lea Jacobs:
"The very notion of a subversive text must be approached with caution
... .This mode of analysis has been criticized as anachronistic and
historically untenable. For example, Richard Maltby argues that the
process of finding subversive meanings is unbounded, "restrained only by
the subjectivity of the critics," and thus necessarily ahistorical. The
problem is the status of textual analysis as evidence, that is, finding
viable ways to delimit and contextualize the process of interpretation."
(Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin, University of Wisconsin Press, 1991, pp.
24-5; footnote deleted).
The key here is Jacobs' phrase "The problem is the status of textual
analysis as evidence" - of finding contextual evidence to confer upon
the film the label counter-ideological, or "counter-cinematic" (whatever
that means).
Warren Buckland
Associate Professor, Film Studies
Chapman University
School of Film and Television
One University Drive
Orange
CA 92866
USA.
phone: (714) 744 7018
fax: (714) 997 6700
Editor, "The New Review of Film and Television Studies":
http://www.taylorgraham.com/journals/nrfts.html
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