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From: FILM-PHILOSOPHY automatic digest system <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Nov 2, 2005 7:00 PM
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Subject: FILM-PHILOSOPHY Digest - 2 Nov 2005 (#2005-366)
Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2005 10:04:26 +0100
From: Herbert Schwaab <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Reply to Koehler on the magic origins of film
"I have found myself asking: How could
film be art, since all the major arts arise in some way out of
religion? Now I can answer: Because movies arise out of magic; from below
the world."
(Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed, Cambridge, Mass. 1979, 39)
> Herbert offers a very good and brief summary of Cavell's views in this
> area. But this citation by Herbert of Cavell's writing in 1979 must surely
> give Cavell's supporters pause. It is true, as Cavell notes, that the
> other major arts arose in one way or another from religion. Yet this is an
> historical phenomenon, stemming from developments in the arts during a
> phase in human history when religion was institutionalized as the power
> center of politics, culture, even economics. The cinema arose during a
> period after the Industrial Revolution and the development of science and
> secularism, replacing religion as a center of counter-power. In this
> light, Cavell is simply wrong. Movies did not arise out of "magic" (and
> what, pray tell, does this mean?). Movies arose out of science.
> Robert Koehler
Does this really contradict the 'magic origins' of film? Cavell refers to
what films mean to him, or meant to him as a youth. In comparison to other
arts, film arises out of nowhere, giving relief to a subjectivity troubled
by modernism in the major arts. It is this difference that counts. But if
Cavell was wrong in determining the origins of movies in magic, then you
have to explain to me, how does film with his origins in science look like?
Of course, you could refer to Benjamin (as Cavell did) and others but that
doesn't convince me of a striking difference to other arts and it doesn't
have implications for how I see movies and talk about them. Of course,
movies arise out of science, but that says nothing to me about my life (with
movies). So please tell me, what does this mean?
<SNIP>
for a brief, perhaps tangential, consideration, why not look at Erik Barnouw's slim volume of
1981, The Magician & the Cinema.
martha rosler
here and there, but not everywhere
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