Re: Multiple Responses: cinema program recommendations

From: Frank, Michael [[email protected]]

i would hesitate to take issue with janet staiger even if i thought that there was a necessary/inherent tension between the two pursuits . . . but she's no doubt right that there doesn't have to be one . . .

still, i do think that the kinds of tension that develop, while in part a matter of resource allocation, have another more substantive dimension which i might most easily illustrate with a bit of anecdotal evidence:  in my own teaching experience i find that practicing filmmakers - by which i mean students taking studio courses in screenwriting, editing, cinematography, usw. - are the students who almost invariably are most impatient with any theory at all, finding it absolutely immaterial to their own concerns [which it may well be] . . . other students, most of whom are looking toward careers in business, are much more open to the universe of theory/history/interpretation, probably for the same reason many [most??] of us got into textual study in the first place:  because it was interesting and seemed [to put this as untendentiously as i can manage]  somehow to add something to our human experience

in any case the question seems to me a principled one, so let me formulate it that way . . .  in looking at a variety of the influential "theories"- and even ignoring such avowedly philosophical approaches as those of, say, deleuze or cavell - i find for example that bazin's ideas about the ontology of the photographic image, or mulvey's about the nature of the gaze, or bordwell's about interpretive schemata seem not particularly useful to a practicing filmmaker . . . . by the same token i don't imagine that a filmmaker's concern with carefully differentiating between lenses as a way of achieving different pictorial effects is going to radically reshape ideas about the cultural or psychological or narratological implications of a given film

i suspect that if i were hot to make a movie i wouldn't give a damn about its ontology, and if wanted to think about ontology, or the epistemology of the long take, i wouldn't want to waste my time thinking about lenses

many of us will remember [no doubt with more detail that i can recollect] the flap a couple of years back when a hollywood executive was outraged to discover that the daughter he had sent to university to learn about movies was being asked to read feminism and deconstruction and aesthetics and post-modernism, and so on . . . i suppose his fury wasn't necessary or inherent in the two pursuits, but it's more than merely coincidental

mike