It's almost impossible for me to distinguish between intellectual,
emotional or pure pleasure. Whenever I went to a film to for pure
pleasure - films I knew that they were bad but I just wanted to see some
explosions or some giant waves flooding through the streets of New York
as in T/he Day after Tomorrow/ - I was mostly extremely dissappointed,
it doesn't work out.
Many films I have seen and liked would count as pure pleasure or as
only entertainment, but automatically, they have some 'object qualities'
that turns them into 'good' works of film art, the films move me to feel
and to think something that goes beyond pure pleasure.
My favourite example is the movie version of /Starsky and Hutch/, which
is extremely entertaininig and funny, but which I regard at the same
time as a film about friendship and acknowledgement, it offers some
utopian moments of intimacy, for example when Hutch is singing a song to
impress two cheer leaders but the camera suggests that he is exclusively
adressing Starsky who stares at him with growing admiration.
I think we could divide between more kinetically based pleasure and more
emotionally based pleasure and more intellectually based pleasures, but
the pleasure are always grounded in the experience of a film. I refer to
Stanley Cavell, who says that pleasure is not some distinct quality
like the size or the colour of an object, but something that has to be
determined by a reading of a film.
The greatest pleasure a film has ever given me was /Laputa, Castle in
the Sky/ by Hayao Miyazaki. When I left the cinema, I literally felt
like flying as the main subject of the film was different forms of
flying. But I am sure I would have never had this feeling of
weightlessness, if the film would not have offered many other qualities
like its epic story telling, the way it creates complex characters, or
how it deals with imagination, etc.
But there was also some feeling of weightlessness I had after leaving
the Cannes winning film /Entre les Murs /last night, a film that would
count as art and intellectual cinema.
I think if we are talking about that a film offers pure pleasure for
stimulating us kinetically, as was suggested with the example T/he
Bourne Ultimatum,/ it could make us assume that everybody is supposed to
have the same feelings, because the pleasure is based on some immediate
effects. But I didn't like the film at all, it was too fast for me to
follow, I got completely confused and I lost interest in the characters
and the narration. We have the stereotype of the thrill ride movie, but
do they really exist?
Wittgenstein was said to have loved the movies. He seemed to have sought
for immersive effects. He prefered cheap action movies and he used to
sit close to the screen so that he could only focus parts of the film
screen.
Maybe he knew better than I what it means to go to the movies for pure
pleasure.
Herbert
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