have a better candidate??
-----Original Message-----
From: Film-Philosophy Salon [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Aaron Smuts
Sent: Monday, May 25, 2009 4:16 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: FILM-PHILOSOPHY medium
I don't think we want to say that smoke signals are texts. They have
semantic content and we can interpret them. But I don't see why we
want to say that we read them. However, they are far more like a
language than anything that we could attribute to film editing. Of
course, it depends on what the language is supposed to be composed of.
It's more plausible to sayt hat we read smoke signals than it is to
say that we read movies.
I don't see how calling, say, editing a language helps understand film
in any way. We'd still have to figure out what the "language"
consists in. Calling it a language doesn't help understand it.
Further, it's probably misleading. I doubt that we come to understand
continuity editing, for instance, in the same way that we come to
learn to read. Classical continuity editing likely builds on some
basic aspects of our psychology in ways disanalogous to learning to
read. Everyone just gets it. That's not the case with learning a
language or learning to read. Why? Well, that's a story for
psychologists to answer. One in which I'm only marginally interested
. . .
In any case, I don't like these kinds of metaphors--"film text,"
"reading a film," and "cinematic language". They promote
equivocation.
I don't think that anything of importance in the film as philosophy
debate hinges on whether we can call film texts. Dan does? Where's
the disagreement, exactly? I suspect that we have different notions
of what constitutes a text. If so, we are talking past each other.
The fault is the metaphor, "text".
Cheers,
Aaron
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