Re: why we shoot film/contrast ratios and sensitivity

From: Freya (email suppressed)
Date: Sun Mar 05 2006 - 16:07:51 PST


--- Jon Jost <email suppressed> wrote:

> This discussion, which it is hard for me to believe
> rages on after all these
> years, is an irrational one, kind of like talking
> religion. The irony of
> FRAMEWORKS is that it purports to be about "avant
> garde" cinema, and is
> mostly conducted by hard-core conservatives, not
> only in their resistance to
> technical change, but - from my not very frequent
> exposure to so-called
> "avant-garde" cinema shown at festivals, etc. - also
> aesthetically. Most of
> what passes for "avant-garde" in the academies, and
> in the festivals, is
> anything but. Rather for the most part it is stale
> re-runs of things done
> far better 30 or 50 or even 100 years ago.

It could be that some of the people making the stuff
aren't aware it has already been done, however because
they have never seen the earlier works.

I think the aesthetic thing is much more serious than
the technological one.

The techonogy seems to me to be somewhat irrelavent
you just make whatever you want the way you want to
make it
with the technology available but I guess the
aesthetics is a more serious issue. I would also say
that the concepts and ideas in a work can also be
important too but the technology is just the stuff
along the way or sometimes in the way.

> Mitsu is correct in ascribing most of this "feel it,
> smell it" etc. attitude

Perhaps, but sometimes people just like the smell of
things. I'm not sure what film smells like for
instance but I can imagine that I could sniff it and
it might smell nice anyway. I probably have a strange
attitude because I'm not very nostalgic about anything
much, in fact I sometimes have the opposite problem.
The only thing I can think of that I feel nostalgic
about is bagpuss and the clangers..

Nostalgia might not be the only reason at least for
sniffing things anyway. :)

> to "nostalgia". Nostalgia is the trump card of
> conservatives of all kinds.
> Taken to extremes, as it is in general on this
> board, it converts into
> something else - fetishism. This has nothing to do
> with art, aesthetics,
> "avant-garde" but rather a kind of pathological
> attachment which becomes
> obsessive, closed-minded, and most often is terribly
> destructive of
> creativity. Not that I would expect any consent
> for this from here.

I dunno, but I just don't know how all this film vs
video stuff kicks off, it just seems so irrelevant
really. People go on about the smell and the signal to
noise ratio and the resolution, and all these things
just seem so irrelevant. Look at the images from the
pxl camera, they have none of these things, and they
are still wonderful and beautiful.

None of this stuff matters.

and you know what, I think people like talking about
things like the death of film or film vs video etc
etc, because these are things that are completely out
of their control and so they feel better to talk about
them than some of the real issues.

But hey I think that's okay too. It's nice to talk
about the rain and how cold it is today and other
things too.

...and really I don't know why I'm even really having
this discussion now or what it's even about really.
Maybe it's to do with the fact that people like to
communicate with one another. *shrug*

love

Freya

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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.