glen norton wrote:

What is boredom except the grip of empty
> time? What if film allowed us to experience time as somehow "empty"?

i'd be careful to separate a 'state' of boredom from a cultural text 
that is judged to be boring. 

Paul Corrigan's work entitled "Doing Nothing" is a brief glimpse of the 
rituals practised by young people in the east side of London circa late 
1960s early 1970s to create fun and interesting things to do from a 
position of relatively little material wealth. He argues that 
the 'street' is pregnant with potential for things to happen. The 
assessment that someone is 'bored' is an expression, not of empty time, 
but of the first stage of potentialising a particular facet of 
the 'street'. The rituals of 'boredom' are social mechanisms for the 
production of interest. 'Interest' here is meant in the affective sense 
of Thompkins, ie 'interest-excitement', there is probably a more 
complex configuration of affects at play including 'distress', 'anger' 
and so on. To potentialise the immediate 'street' environment means to 
accelerate in one's body the manifestation of 'interest' with one's 
peers along the continuum of interest-excitement. Having a laugh and 
smashing bottles or having a fight is the result. The signalling 
of 'boredom' is a trigger ritual. The threat of 'empty time' never 
actually actualises. At the very minimum discussion of one's boredom is 
in effect the 'nothing' that is being done.

the space of the cinema (here I mean the actual cinema as viewing 
space, not some abstract entity) could also be a space similar to 
the 'street' of Corrigan's "smash street kids". 

My point is that 'boredom' has its own positivity that needs to be 
addressed. the issue is not whether a given text manifests affects of 
interest-excitement or whatever, but for who and in what cultural 
contexts. So rather than a 'politics of taste' there is a 'politics of 
interest'. being told a text is "good for us" makes a number of 
assumptions about "us", but it is also an expression what the person 
making the suggestion is interested in. Such interest based politics 
are evident in cultural formations that use highly esoteric or 
technical languages to express subjective formations of interest, or 
even in those situation involving people who do not express interest 
through discourse at all.

when I have been bored in the cinema, it is when I have found my mind 
wondering. that is, I have been more interested in my own thoughts than 
whatever movie I was watching. quitting smoking has made this a less 
frequent experience.

Ciao,
glen. (but a different one)


-- 
PhD Candidate 
Centre for Cultural Research
University of Western Sydney

Read my rants: http://glenfuller.blogspot.com/

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