Mike,
You're right. Babies and even the pre-natal foetus respond to music, as you would expect if music is partly psychosomatic, but without yet fully entering the musical world. I believe it might apply to cinema to the extent that both of them have various language-like functions without full compliance with the grammatical and syntactic functions of language, which as Ross puts it, ‘makes film logically poor but semantically extravagant.’ The reference, by the way, is to The Naked Man.
Michael
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i was unfamiliar with this bit of levi-strauss so i’m speaking – as it were – in a void . . . . but i think there’s evidence that infants, and perhaps even the pre-natal fetus, respond to music . . . this response is presumably entirely neurological rather than in any way cognitive, but it still [or precisely therefore] would seem that it does not depend on any kind of language .
in any case i can’t see how this analogy applies to cinema for, unlike music – at least music without words – typically has a clear referential dimension
mike
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From: Film-Philosophy [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Michael Chanan
Sent: Sunday, October 24, 2010 9:39 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Yet Another New Thread)
Dan asks "Under what circumstances could cinema be considered a unique and independent language?"
Perhaps it's similar to music the way that Lévi-Strauss construes it. Music, he says, retains the negative imprint of the formal structures and semiotic functions of language: 'there would be no music if language had not preceded it and if music did not continue to depend on it.' If music speaks, 'this can only because of its negative relation to language'. Music is like language without meaning. It is understandable if the listener, 'who is first and foremost a subject with the gift of speech,' should feel irresistibly compelled to make up for the absence, 'just as someone who has lost a limb imagines that he still possesses it through the sensations present in the stump'.
Michael C.
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