Fair enough. However, there are differences between the TV set and the
cinema screen, and, as a maker, one might well want to consider these
different presentational forms when making work. Film and video artists
have made work specifically designed to be seen on TV sets, and not
projected. For example, David Hall's TV interventions had the intended
context of broadcast TV, and were made when most people had boxes in
their homes, as opposed to projectors.
Taking account of these distinctions doesn't necessarily make one's
work essentialist. Film is not video, TV sets are not projectors.
Projection screens are not TV screens.
Nicky Hamlyn.
PS. This doesn't mean I agree with Mark Kermode. I just provided the
link to his rant!
On 26 Mar 2007, at 07:01, Henry Taylor wrote:
> This old-fashioned topic of the cinematic is what classical film
> theory dealt with, trying to establish the medium as a legitimate art
> form. Who cares about film being an art? Film is important whether it
> is art or not. Any claim of x,y or z being 'cinematic' and a, b or c
> being 'non-cinematic' is essentialist. A truly non-essentialist
> approach to film would have to acknowledge that there is no such thing
> as cinematicity. Film is, as Bazin correctly observed, basically (but
> not essentially) an impure form which can best be understood in terms
> of (probabilistic) clusters of properties rather than essences. Not
> even the visual, the moving image, is cinematic, as there have been,
> especially in experimental film, attempts to produce and question
> cinema without a projected image (e.g. by Michael Snow or Valie
> Export).
>
> H
>
>
>
>
>> Diverting from the Zizane thing:
>>
>> The Kermode diatribe in the Guardian does raise some ideas about what
>> is cinematic. Inconvenient Truth is Powerpoint, The Queen is
>> television, Zizane is gallery video, Sin City is comic book (I
>> suspect K might think Sin City was cinematic), Michael Moore is
>> whatever... and so on. Each of these films may deserve or be worthy
>> of criticism but hardly for sinning against the magic category of the
>> cinematic. Kermode seems to dislike documentary cinema and wishes
>> cinema was all Powell and Pressburger and Disney (Mary Poppins) etc
>> (he cites an indiosyncratic and small set of examples of the
>> cinematic). Godard (always a paragon of good sense) said somewhere
>> something like a film can contain anything. I like the idea of film
>> inspired by or quoting Powerpoint. (I wish 99% of Powerpoints were
>> more cinematic). Why shouldn't a film be televisual. (Just what is
>> televisual?)
>>
>> And just what is cinematic? This is a much abused term. Like
>> narrative. Kermode uses it as a kind unspecified touchstone. Bad
>> thinking, bad argument, bad journalism. Still, just as cinema can use
>> the televisual, the Powerpoint, the CCTV, the comic strip, etc, etc
>> etc we can use this peculiar concept of the cinematic. It has some
>> currency, it does sort of refer to something.
>>
>> Ross
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