From: malgosia askanas (email suppressed)
Date: Fri Feb 13 2009 - 08:14:46 PST
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
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