david d'heilly wrote:
> At 14:23 -0000 10.02.99, John Daigle wrote:
> > >??? I still don't get the "virulent" part ???
> >
> > >yours, david
> >
> > Virulent... as in memetic, media virus... the sale of a philosophy.
>
> I didn't mean to say that I'd never heard of the word virulent. I am
> unfamiliar with your use of it though.
Sorry, I was just punning... virulent, in that I was attempting to be somewhat
vitriolic, and virulent, as in introducing a virus.
> > the viral message, encapsulated, can be broken down into simple memes,
> >such
> > as "class is a function of parking" or "personal freedom (access to
> > transportation), not money, is the currency of the modern class system" or
> > "I drive, therefore I'm rich."
>
> This "viral message" operates entirely within your own assumptions, and has
> nothing to do with anything I've ever said or thought. What's more, it
> didn't infect me. It's a memetic dead-end.
>
Oh well... all social theories must die sometime. Perhaps you'll mention it to a
friend, as an illustration of a frustrating conversation or ridiculous notion...
he'll mention it to someone, and eventually, a huge movement of lower class
people will arise, demanding better parking...
> > To quote a car commercial quoting a popular song "Go where you want to go,
> > do what you want to do." That, more than wealth or power, is what being
> > "upper class" is all about, thats why car companies rely on it so much to
> > sell the basic vehicle of class mobility.
> Um. I think that one could argue that the advertiser is merely "tagging"
> lifestyle points, reinforcing that wealth (to purchase their automobile)
> and power (to go and do as you please, i.e. be "leisure class") are the
> lifestyle/identity that you can show off when you trade your labor for
> their product. This is pretty traditional advertising, based on class
> values that would have been familiar to someone 50 if not 150 years ago.
>
Sorry... I was punning again... sell the basic _vehicle_ of class _mobility_ (
metaphorically and literally.)
>
>
> Fact is, a lot more people can make films today than very before, and their
> numbers will continue to increase for the forseeable future. (Vague, yes I
> know. Still...) A lot of genres were created from production strictures
> which are no longer tenable. We can make documentaries which do not need a
> "holy book" of procedures, whether issued by the BBC or elsewhere. We can
> make hardboiled kung-fu Jaques Tati films devoid of any semiotic irony
> whatsoever. We can go back to the very rhymes and reasons of how these
> people derived their angles, lighting, editing, etc. techniques and follow
> through similar procedures, arriving at places where genres fear to tread.
> We don't need to continually beg the "affect" ability of our cameras and
> cutting tables. In many cases, we will be better served by reinvented
> grammars than by knee-jerk "resistence" pieces.
>
> Let's move on?
I agree about the grammar... I've tried, in my work, to push the envelope
selectively (violate a 180 rule here, a sight line there, jump cut somewhere
else) while maintaining a smooth narrative flow, with some success. Other film
makers have of course done the same thing with more success... the French new
wave pushed a few envelopes, Kieslowski's Blue, Red White (Do I mean kieslowki,
or someone else) were striking to the Hollywood viewer... The American T.V.
Show, "Homicide: Life on the Street" abounds with triple takes, jump cuts, and
offset angles (less so this season than in previous seasons.)
I think that as viewers are growing more sophisticated in their ability to read
the cinematic world, from an almost constant exposure to motion picture media,
cinematic techniques can become more overt without breaking the viewer out of
the flow...
Cognitively speaking, I guess the question of editing grammar is this... can we
train the viewer to not think like a disembodied, flying, chimpanzee and instead
think like a disembodied, flying, magic (not bound by ordinary rules of space
and time) chimpanzee?
j. daigle
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