<< questions of meaning redux >>
Apologies if this is redundant. My browser crashed after I wrote a response,
and I doubt it got sent.
Ross,
I think your use of the term "polyvalent" to describe the narrative
potential of the film/video image is very insightful. I have long borrowed Paul
Valery's term "omnivalence" to describe the referential potential of the image in
poetic cinema. I think it may be true (tho part of me wants to argue this) that
the film/video image is inveterately narrative when we consider the screen as
a window, but if we consider it as a surface, more like the way the abstract
expressionists considered the canvas, cinema has a different (non) story to
tell.
I was also very interested in Peter Gruppert's review of Graf's book on
Wenders, who I always thought was one of the most interesting characters on the
scene of the cinema of consciousness, along with Peter Greenaway. But neither of
them hold a candle to Brakhage when it comes to the exploration of
"unmediated vision", or Michael Snow when it comes to modulating the ontology of the
image (are we looking at a surface or at a representation of space?)
It's interesting to me also that in this mesage list, I have yet to see any
discussion of the two aspects of cinema which lie absolutely at the bottom of
the whole business: persistence of vision and the phi phenomenon. For some
people shots and cuts are at the heart of cinema, but for others it's frames and
blackness.
dan
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