Re: how much of what we see is black?

From: Tom B Whiteside (email suppressed)
Date: Wed Oct 31 2007 - 10:55:06 PDT


>My gut reaction to the above position is, "great, more cinephilia" (as in
necrophilia).
>So many things contribute to this concept of "having time to think."
Duration of shots, Speed of camera movement... the list goes on.

Yes, Frampton is a good one to consider when dealing with the subject of
necrocinephilia. ("Gloria!", the last machine, all of that.) And although
I didn't intend for it to be contentious, there is a considerable amount
of "one medium versus the other" in that idea. Please do consider that
whatever it was he wrote (I crudely paraphrased) it was at least 20 years
ago and video projection back then by-and-large didn't look very good at
all.

But back to the issue of having time to think - as for duration of shots,
speed of camera movement, etc. those are things that I can measure -
that's exterior to me, I can use procedures and tools that help me
understand how the moving image was constructed. But the black interval is
something that is too short for me to measure - it is interior, it is part
of the way that I view the world. I think of it as the way our senses are
tuned. (It's different for dogs, for example.) Scientists can measure it -
they have different procedures and tools.

Someone else might parse this better than I can, but it does seem basic to
me - the black interval in cinema (and hey, you've got to have a dark room
to start with) does create a viewing experience quite different from the
continuous light of video projection. Is it "time to think?" I'd say yes.

And of course there is some beautiful video projection out there, and it's
getting better all the time.

        - Whiteside

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