From: T. Siddle (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Jun 09 2008 - 22:53:11 PDT
I don't want to touch this argument (for many reasons not the least of which
is simultaneous elitism and hypocrisy on my part) with a fifty foot stick
but...
I agree that that the Sharits and the Kren didn't translate well to web
video (and arguably cannot) however that youtube Frampton is of quite better
quality than any of the actual film prints I've actually seen of Snowblind.
On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 7:23 AM, James Cole <email suppressed> wrote:
> I've got to take a little bit of issue with one of your points/assumptions.
>
> > To dismiss it is to ignore the wonderful gift it
> > represents, and its ripost to decades when access to this work was
> tightly
> > controlled.
>
> > I wonder what this says about the
> > different attitudes amongst poets and film makers to their work and how
> it
> > is made available. A look at the poetry selections reveals that key
> > practitioners - such as Jerome Rothenberg - have also become involved as
> > section editors. Why are film makers not doing this? Perhaps different
> > artistic disciplines have failed understand each others ways of working.
>
> Different artistic disciplines differ not only in ways of working, but
> in ways of experiencing the final product. A poem, for example, can
> be reproduced with a very high degree of fidelity on the Internet.
> There is very little about a sonnet that doesn't carry over from a
> book to a webpage. Granted, their are likely some issues of
> typography and spacing, etc.; I don't claim to be an expert. That
> said, the majority of poetry can be read on a computer screen without
> the experience being seriously compromised.
>
> It should be clear that you can't say this about film. A few examples:
>
> http://youtube.com/watch?v=xSJ7TBc7pO0
> http://youtube.com/watch?v=C8xwdS5vbWk
> http://www.ubu.com/film/kren.html
>
> I mean, these are a fucking joke! Even a good rip of a film (which is
> emphatically not what you get on Youtube, Ubu, etc.) doesn't compare.
> You can't get a good fullscreen on most of these, and even if you
> could, you can't even come close to a true cinematic experience on
> your computer screen.
>
> If we can take a lesson from the music industry: online downloads of
> work hurt cd sales. Of course it's not a perfect 1 to 1 analogy, but
> it seems to me that people watching a facsimile of a film on their
> computer screen could lead them to be less likely to go see it at
> their local film society/independent theatre. The amount of resources
> that this type of film practice has is already SO limited, the
> filmmakers' budgets SO strained, the Co-ops' budgets SO stretched,
> that I'm not convinced that the availability of photocopies of this
> work outweighs the possible damage these things can do. A lot of this
> work isn't, as you say, "tightly controlled" by their makers, or by
> venues, or by academics, or by the government. It is controlled by
> (and this is ugly) practical, financial, concerns. Concerns which
> ubuweb can only possibly hinder, as opposed to the liberation from
> these concerns that seems to be a working assumption under which ubu
> runs. I'm skeptical, to say the very least.
>
>
> __________________________________________________________________
> For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
>
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.