To chris et. al.

     One of the most important things driving this evaluative process is the
desire to understand what cinema is.  As Plato observed, understanding requires
the ability to rank order something in terms of quality.  Without generating
some such evaluative hierarchy, one's understanding of cinema remains very much
in question.  conversely, one reveals one's understanding of cinema very well if
you do see the hierarchy one generates (e.g. AFI's top 100).

     Here, more than anything else, the evaluative process is subject to the
imagination of the evaluator.  the gestalt that s/he takes on film, in large
measure a creation of the imagination of the viewer, shapes one's expectations.
Also, one is either predisposed favorably or negatively towards most films
before seeing them.

dan

     But that does not make one subservient to the intending author.

Chris Perrius wrote:

> >Karen Bardsley wrote: When we ask, say,  "Did you see the latest Austin
> >Powers?" are we merely >asking "Did you hold  your eyes open for most of
> >the screening of a certain collection of images
> >known as the Spy Who Shagged Me?", or do we have in mind ... a certain
> >experience, perhaps
> >one that involved a particular sort, or sorts, of mental experiences or
> >activities?
>
>         I think that this typical opening question refers less to an
> experience than to the evaluations that the other person has undoubtedly
> made about the film (experience), and I would argue that, at least among
> experienced viewing populations, evaluation is a universal aspect of film
> viewing (one always assumes an opinion, and that is what one is asking for
> in that question).  The conversation that ensues generally involves shared
> appreciations and criticisms (Didn't you love/hate X? Thumbs up or down?)
> and/or interpretations (What did you make of Y?).   These criticisms and
> interpretations are not about our experience of the film so much as about
> the film as a product, aren't they?
>
>         I'm curious about just what compels such evaluative work, and
> whether this question might help with the imagination question.  First
> there is the idea that since representations refer somehow, the ambiguous
> relations between the representations and their multiple referents compels
> evaluation.  That is, since the relations are ambiguous (eg, the image of a
> protagonist on screen refers both to an imaginary referent, say the
> president character as played by John Travolta, and to several levels of
> real referents, in this case Clinton, the US presidency, powerful white
> American males in the 20th century, humans with intentionality, etc), the
> viewer reconstructs them by figuring out which ones work and which don't.
> This happens on several levels: both in terms of the viewer's opinions
> ("That's exactly Clinton/a president/ a power-hungry white politician") and
> in terms of the viewer's reconstruction of the author's intentions ("They
> wanted the president to be unsympathetic but I liked him").  So it's
> crucial to this process to hypothesize what the film or the filmmaker
> intends to refer to, and therefore evaluation depends upon belief in an
> intending author.  If evaluation is universal, and it necessitates the
> positing of an author, then the strong imagined seeing
>
>         I also wonder about the status of the film in a consumer market,
> where it has always existed.  It's an interesting aspect of film, and
> narrative works in general, that you cannot preview or test the product
> before buying.  You have to rely on ads and reviews (and the line betwen
> these is blurry) and word of mouth.  So first you buy the product, and then
> you evaluate it, and this lack of foreknowledge might mean that its very
> openness to evaluation is part of the package (a different kind of
> imaginative reconstruction than filling in plot gaps to complete the
> story).  You might buy other things with the idea "Is this thing good or
> not? I'll buy it and find out" but I guess the difference is that the
> quality of narrative works is always unknown and the game of figuring out
> what's good and what isn't, determining where one's taste falls relative to
> others, and similar imaginative games that are outside of yet intertwined
> with the "primary" (?) imagination of the film experience are always a part
> of the total experience ("I'll buy it _in order to_ find out if it's good").
>
> Chris Perrius
> Chicago

--
Dan Shaw
Professor of Philosophy and Film
Lock Haven University of PA
Rm. 412 Raub Hall
Lock Haven PA 17745
"For beauty is the beginning of terror we are still able to bear, and why we
love it so is because it so serenely disdains to destroy us."  Rilke's First
Elegy




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