I can imagine digging out philosophical ideas from Wavelength and
attention to facets of the film -- like the play of what's
inside-outside the frame (of the final picture, of the windows looking
out onto Canal Street, of the two sides of the conversation, etc. --
certainly bear a somewhat intellectual scrutiny but the film seems to
work (for me) more to generate an experience than to yield anything that
can be captured in a proposition (which I take to be central to
philosophy). It seems closely allied to Ernie Gehr's Serene Velocity,
which I don't think that many would consider to be philosophical.
So the two questions become: what makes a film philosophical (and is
this different from a film being film-as-philosophy). And what makes
Wavelength such.
I've always been a bit skeptical of Scott MacDonald's smart
epistemology-oriented analysis of Hollis Frampton's Zorn's Lemma.
Certainly that film involves reference to philosophy -- the metaphysics
of light and set theory -- but does such use of philosophy make the work
philosophy. Beckett is pretty explicit that his use of Berkeley in Film
is just a starting point.
Not saying Wavelength can be considered philosophical, and suspect that
I could make a go of it if I tried, but not certain that is the most
productive way to go about it. You can get philosphical ideas out of
almost anything -- as the anecdote of Sartre and the drink glass
suggests -- but does that make such an object philosophical?
(An interesting thing is that movies in part evolved from what were
called "philosophical toys" though I wouldn't place much importance on that.
j
n 10/10/10 1:54 PM, Nicky Hamlyn wrote:
> Eisenstein did this in his films and theories of montage in the 1920s.
>
> By the way Deleuze's "analysis" of Snow's "Wavelength" (1967), a
> philosophical film if ever there was one, is utterly pathetic.
>
> Nicky Hamlyn.
>
>
> On 10 Oct 2010, at 17:09, hunter vaughan wrote:
>
>>
>> instead, deleuze is praising cinema's ability to challenge the very
>> logic of our thinking.
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