From: bryan mckay (email suppressed)
Date: Fri Feb 13 2009 - 08:40:11 PST
I think that may be partly a question of pre-awareness. If you go into
something expecting a sequence of deterritorialized images, you might
process that in a different way than if you were expecting something
more structurally/thematically cohesive. And this might also help
explain the idea of becoming a more active viewer on repeated
viewings. Once you have an idea what to expect, you're able to
structure the experience in a way that becomes more meaningful to you
as a viewer rather than absent your conscious self from it completely.
Also, as far as viewing and listening in different ways -- it's true
that every viewing and every viewer has a different set of
circumstances attached, but if we're talking about cognition, our
brains all work in more or less predictable ways and I do think (even
if we haven't done it yet) we can boil much of this down to cognitive
brain activity.
On Feb 13, 2009, at 11:14 AM, malgosia askanas wrote:
> Bryan wrote:
>
>> Nathaniel Dorsky talks about the nihilism of contemporary montage,
>> where the viewer is assaulted with a constant parade of meaningless
>> cuts. Perhaps this is what Simonetta is talking about. If a
>> filmmaker were to intentionally create this sort of nihilistic
>> effect, that wouldn't be too out of line with the Dada ethos. When
>> the cuts rapidly add up to nothing, the viewer is forced to step
>> back and simply watch the shots pass by, unable to actually engage
>> with or decode the film.
>
> But I think that a conceptual difference needs to be made between
> (1) what one does when one "tunes oneself out" in the presence of a
> barrage of cuts that appear, for one reason or another, as not worth
> processing, and (2) the strategies of awareness one employs in the
> presence of a sequence of deterritorialized (to use a Deleuzo-
> Guattarian term) images that one approaches with the intent of
> viewing art. For a slightly different example, there is a
> considerable difference between listening to a long political speech
> that appears as a meaning-deprived stream of platitudes, and
> listening to Kurt Schwitters' "Ursonata" - even though it too,
> purposefully and even more so, is a stream of sounds devoid of
> textual meaning.
>
> Of course, the "one" here also has to be posited carefully -
> different people view and listen in different ways.
>
>
> -m
>
>
> __________________________________________________________________
> For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.