i would love to stop calling a movie a "text" but we have, i think, no better word
which of course means that i now have to try to identify the parameters of "text" -- or at least what I mean by "text" -- and i wish i didn't have to
but here goes: a text is an object -- an intentional object? -- understood as made by human consciousness [thus a cloud formation is not a text] to communicate/convey meaning and/or some other psychological affect . . . and [IMPORTANTLY] examined in order to find those meanings and affects
thus a sculpture -- to use aaron's example -- is certainly a piece of metal, say, with a specific weight and color and chemistry and physics -- and no doubt there are approaches to the sculpture [by scientists or movers] that do not treat it as a text [just a book-binders do not deal with texts, only with the paper they're printed on] . . . but when you're in a museum looking at the sculpture in the way we generally look at sculptures in museums we are in fact looking at a text
no???
-----Original Message-----
From: Film-Philosophy Salon [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Aaron Smuts
Sent: Monday, May 25, 2009 10:59 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: FILM-PHILOSOPHY medium
A few thoughts:
I wish we could stop calling movies "texts." Why don't you refer to
it as "the movie" or "the work"? It doesn't sound so odd to call a
movie a text because there is often lots of talking in the movies.
But it's really odd to call a painting a text, or a sculpture a text.
Not everything that means something is a text, except in some really
loose metaphorical sense that sows confusion.
I don't see why you'd think that film is a language. It's only a
language is a very loose metaphorical sense. Is the language supposed
to be in the editing? Sure there are conventions for conveying
meaning. But there is no language to be found in film. I wonder if
you can make any logical connectives in film? Can you represent "not"
in film without using a symbol?
Again, I don't see why we'd want to say the medium is film. It's not
always celluloid of any type. I don't understand what it means to say
that cinema is a "culture/set of practices." The "/" confuses me.
(In general, how is one supposed to read "x/y"? Can it even be read
aloud?) It's not a culture. That's for sure. Perhaps it is a set of
practices. I suppose any artform might be described this way. But
I'm lost as to the distinction. Teaching old words new tricks is kind
of confusing. . . .
Yes, different lenses, film stock (if you are filming on film and not
DV), lighting sources, audio recording techniques, etc. will give you
a different product. Artists choose accordingly and the choices often
come with different constraints. (For example, Bordwell has a recent
paper describing how the limitations of the lenses used for
cinemascope caused an odd thinning of things on the edges of the
frame. This lead to staging practices that concentrated figures in
the middle. . . . ) Different tools, different result. You get a
different artwork if you use DV or film stock of a particular kind.
But you've still created a movie. The work would have been different.
But either way you would have made a work in the same artform.
Admittedly, I'm not altogether clear about what artforms are. . . .
I guess an interesting question is how is watching a movie (shot on
film stock intended to be projected) on TV playing a DVD different
from reading poetry in translation, or perhaps a closer analogy,
looking at a photograph of a painting?
Aaron
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