As I mentioned, conventionalism is all about technique that's developed in order to impart a sense of realism to the audience. This effort is as about as close to conspiracy as one can get. Anti-conventional means "anti-realist" in the sense that if one rejects the effort to portray art as "a reflection of reality", one is obviously not bound to the conventions that propagate any version of reality itself.
Indeed, criticism is all about externality and taste. And Cavell is correct in stating that Hollywood tries to present us with this externality as true. My issue with Cavell is that he seems to believe this truth as presented.
Long takes indeed add a greater- than- the- subject dimension to film. But here again, there are countless versions of long takes that impose a nearly infinite number of possible metaphysical overviews. Ford's for example, offers us a version of singularity, and alone-ness. Well, gosh, how American can you get--particularly in comparison to Mizugucchi's compositions which emphasize The Collective from which an individual story emerges!
Or perhaps we might closely examine Cimino's roller skating scene in which a deep composition (watch for the focal point!) is hidden by a dancing couple. This, by the way, was used by Verhoven in Showgirls, too. 'Interesting, isn’t it, how Americans are confusedly disappointed when perspective distancing is made an object of jouissance!
Yes, ultimately, film is all about pleasure. Mine is Artaudian in the sense that I enjoy being provoked to see and to understand things differently. Yet I strongly suspect that most of my fellow Americans feel other wise, and becoming dis-organized just isn't for them, poor souls that they are.
I would hesitate, then, from forming any generalization other than simply ..."fun" to describe our otherwise mutually incompatible endeavors. As for Cavellian fun, I think it's highly derivative in the sense that he's trying to impart meaning on essentially meaningless stuff.
And yes, I know that in CultureCritWorld nothing is "essential". Furthermore, when we speak of Bring it On as our Huckleberry Finn we're paying homage to a highly extractive critical procedure that began with Bazin amd Cavell. So be it.
BH
----- Original Message -----
From: Herbert Schwaab<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, February 16, 2009 03:15
Subject: Re: convention-cliche / propaganda-realism
This is not about conspiracy theories or believing in realist hollywood story telling agenda, it's about how we are related to the world (which is not the real world, whatever that may be) on film, and there are differences between a cinema that can be identified as being more conventional and a cinema that is less conventional and more modern.
The realist/realism distinction BH mentioned is interesting, but I think it is a question of criticism and of taste to decide at what point we are confronted with something external. This is what Cavell says, that classical Hollywood cinema is in a radical sense external reality to us, and Bazin said that a Hollywood long take cinema of perception gives us an idea of something external to us, and you could also argue that modern cinema, in foregrounding the way something is represented, confronts us not with external reality but with the artist himself, turning the first art form ever created (together with photography) to get rid of the human as creator into an artform which is based on the invidiual artist - but this is probably not a question of film philosophy but of film criticism. (It is for that reason I have problems with some films of Michael Haneke, I am supposed to see a film but I don't see a film but Michael Haneke pointing threatingly with
his fingers at me, and I don't like being adressed in that way).
And in the end, isn't all film about pleasure (cognitive, emotional or kinetic pleasure)? I didn't spend much of lifetime with Cavell's film philosophy because he is a naive realist, but because he gives me at least some ideas to understand the pleasure films have given me (all films, the European as well as the American, Asian etc. films).
Herbert
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