From: Jonathan Kahana (email suppressed)
Date: Tue Nov 01 2005 - 09:17:33 PST
Douglas,
I am in complete agreement about the cognitivist approach; I don't know
how I appeared to be even-handed in my post. Must have been the font I was
using.
> Really, I just find it
> Ironic that someone like Bordwell was critical of psychoanalytic
approaches for
> being "abstract" while advocating methodologies that were also rather
> abstract.
You're not alone in this, and it extends to other work by this school.
Some of us who teach undergraduate film studies with Bordwell and
Thompson's FILM ART puzzle over this every time we enter the classroom. I
happen to find FILM ART a quite effective text for many things, but it
often requires students to (that ugly term) "overlearn" logical concepts.
The book's description of only two kinds of documentary, and two types of
experimental film - and identifying the traits of each category becomes
the point of analysis - are a good example of what you mean by too
rigorous and not rigorous enough. Speaking of which, I have to go into the
classroom now to explain why there are only three categories of sound in
film, all derived from the language of music.
If anyone has any thoughts about teaching experimental with this textbook,
or any other, by the way, I'd be very interested to hear them.
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