From: Myron Ort (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Jun 09 2008 - 08:38:22 PDT
Seems to me that there are many levels of "I get the idea" short of
having the ultimate sensory experience of watching a perfect print in
a perfect theater with a fresh projector bulb, with a perfect
audience, in a perfect state of receptivity with no distractions
inner or outer. In this so called "information age" and era of neo-
conceptualism, many mistake a sensual experience for a cognition or
recognition of an "idea" or something that can be reduced to a verbal
description.
I have only read about Satie's "Vexation" (and many performances by
John Cage as well) , so on some mental level "I get the idea" which,
of course, falls short of sitting through the whole performance,
which falls short of sleeping through half of it, which falls short
of walking out after a couple of hours, which falls short of walking
out after a few minutes, which falls short of only listening to one
"chorus", which falls short of hearing a box set LP, which falls
short of the box set CD, which falls short of hearing it on a car
radio, which falls short of hearing about the performance second
hand, which falls short of reading about it. These Youtube glimpses
fall somewhere between seeing the actual film and reading a
description of the film. There are many levels of "I get the idea".
When I make my living room dark and watch the Brakhage Criterion
collection on my TV screen, somehow, on some level, I feel like "I
get the idea" and look forward to the rare opportunity that I will be
able to see the real thing(s) someday, and in some cases, the DVD
reminds me of having seen some of the actual films years ago in a
theater. There is some kind of continuum to all of this. Seems like I
own an 8mm print of Mothlight and WWBM....how much of a compromise
were those?
Myron Ort
On Jun 9, 2008, at 7:23 AM, James Cole 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>.