Alan
I think I am a bit of an athiest about 'ultimate truth' and 'deep truth'.
Just as I think I can pretty much get away with just 'nature' to name all
the stuff that is commensurate with my wonder at things (no need for
spirituality or divinity), truth will do me if I want to name what it is for
film (or language) to show or tell what is or what happened. It's just that
truth (or nature) is an huge abstraction - and the devil and pleasure is in
the mess and the detail. And this is probably why truth is so sort of
impossible to define: we can't make it any plainer or simpler or shallower.
But maybe we can at least say under what conditions a shot (or sentence) is
true, and if a shot is true, what follows from that.
Ross
----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan Fair" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, March 28, 2009 5:49 AM
Subject: Re: FILM-PHILOSOPHY
> Hello all,
> I am still a little bemused that people insist on talking about
> documentary as truth telling. While sometimes documentaries might
> represent some facts it is usually only in fiction that we encounter the
> truth. I have just spent a day with Ophuls' 'Le Plaisir',
> it seems to me that the sequence where we see the first communion of the
> madam's niece is about as close as we might hope to
> grasping the truth of a certain kind of sense of community. I am a born
> again athiest and yet this five minutes of film: lighting,
> the grain of the voice, the balletic camera movement, the articulation of
> a sense of personal history, the shifting of interior
> and exterior, the extimate, and yes, a dappled nostalgia, achieves the
> intimacy of humanity's striving toward the sublime.
> peace
> alan
>
> A. Fair
> IDS
>
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