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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