From: Myron Ort (email suppressed)
Date: Sat Mar 28 2009 - 18:09:05 PDT
at a certain point I stopped looking at paintings to gain the
information I could get from photographs, so information about the
exact spot where the painter stood is only mildly interesting to me
in comparison with my involvement in all other aspects of the
painting. vision. Exact information about the specific apples in
the bowl with Cezanne is even less important to me. fortuitous
Mythopoeia aside, sometimes I think too much is made of the literal
material from which the filmmaker's vision is constructed especially
when that filmmaker is clearly more concerned with vision than with
narrative. When pursuing vision, I simply let "subject matter" take
care of itself, its inevitable and inescapable anyway, unless one
goes to great lengths to delete all possibilities of the
referential...... (in film and/or painting...) Most art historians
and most critics barely ever get this, imho.
Myron Ort
On Mar 28, 2009, at 1:02 PM, John Matturri wrote:
> Well, I think there's a bit of a distinction between the
> intentional fallacy, which defines the work by what the artist
> intended, and the issue of information external to the work, like
> the identity of Sirius. Brakhage might have made the film to work
> out his emotions concerning his dog's death, but that doesn't
> necessarily mean that he intended the film as a work of art to be
> about that specific dog.
>
> Obviously a strong reliance on artist's stated, or even private,
> intentions is a mistake. Pasolini may have stated that the use of a
> bottle cleaning factory in Accatone was a reference the paintings
> of Morandi; not sure if his statement was that strong but if not
> imagine he did say that. But given that the shots of the bottle
> factory are compositionally nothing like Morandi paintings --
> unless I'm especially dense I can't imagine an audience making a
> reliable connection without specific knowledge of Pasolini's
> intentions -- I don't think you can say that the filmmaker's
> intentions here have much to do with the significance of the scene
> in the film. Pushed too far, however, the intentional fallacy
> itself becomes a fallacy. Having this knowledge of Pasolini's
> intentions could possibly lead the viewer to attend to the scene in
> a certain way and pick up things that are actually in it that
> otherwise might have been missed. To suggest that the viewer must
> totally ignore what the artist says is unreasonable.
>
> Private knowledge is a hard to define area. Wavelength plays in
> various ways with what is inside and outside the frame. At one
> point after the body is discovered Amy Taubin makes a phone call to
> "Richard". Now I would imagine most viewers wouldn't know that she
> was married to Richard Foreman but I've always thought that that
> additional play between what is in the fictional frame and what
> lies in the non-fictional world outside that frame adds an
> additional interesting bit to the film. But would it be legit to
> make reference to this in a published article? Would it make a
> difference if the audience for Wavelength in 1967 could be expected
> to have been so small that the marital status of the performer was
> common knowledge? Would it make a difference if the name was in the
> script rather than improvised. If Snow thought of or did not think
> of this relationship? Don't think that there are any answers to
> these questions. Perhaps there needs to be some rough weighing of
> obscurity of the information and the aesthetic or interpretive
> clout that comes from taking the info into account. After all,
> there is no authority behind the notion of "legit' I used above.
>
> j
>
>
>
> Chuck Kleinhans wrote:
>>
>> On Mar 27, 2009, at 6:31 PM, Jim Carlile wrote:
>>
>>> In a message dated 3/27/2009 3:27:01 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
>>> email suppressed> writes:
>>>
>>> The intentional fallacy arises when the maker isn't offering an
>>> interpretation, but is claiming that there is content in the
>>> work
>>> that the work does not really contain.
>>>
>>> Not sure what 'intentional fallacy' you're talking about, but the
>>> I-F comes into play when critics or outside observers assess the
>>> artist's "intent" when judging the work. The whole "fallacy" part
>>> is when critics judge 'intentionality' (sic) to be germane as to
>>> what the work is about.
>>> According to I-F theorists (if they still exist) what counts is
>>> the work itself and 'how' it works to do what it does-- even if
>>> the artist is unaware of what's going on, which is often the case.
>>> BTW, artists can say anything they want to about their works,
>>> but their words are not the I-F. That can only be committed by
>>> the outsiders, strictly speaking...
>>
>> A landmark day! Carlile and I actually agree about something.
>> The New Criticism literary critic William K. Wimsett in his book
>> The Verbal Icon, wrote essays on the Intentional Fallacy and the
>> Affective Fallacy (co-authored with philosopher Monroe Beardsly).
>> I don't have my books at hand, but to roughly summarize, he said
>> that the meaning of a work of art is in the work itself, and that
>> it is a mistake to think that whatever can be gleaned from what an
>> author/artist said they intended provides a definitive
>> interpretation. (Artists can lie, and sometimes do; they can also
>> be deluded or misleading.) Likewise, it is a mistake to assume
>> that because a work of art produced a certain effect in the reader/
>> viewer/audience that that was "in" the work itself, and offers a
>> necessary and sufficient explanation. (One's immediate personal or
>> deep psychological situation might shape one's interpretation/
>> experience but that doesn't make the individual's idea universally
>> true.) The Wikipedia entry for Wimsatt has excellent summaries.
>>
>> A pragmatic way of understanding why this was important to New
>> Criticism is to think of what they were trying to do: get down to
>> the art work itself as the core of study and analysis and
>> interpretation and evaluation.
>> Before that, it was often the case in literary studies to provide
>> the author's biography as a sufficient explanation for what a text
>> meant. In experimental film circles, esp. in the 50s and 70s, the
>> privileged form of presentation was the visiting artist
>> introducing, screening, and then having a q and a about one or
>> more films.
>> Or, whatever personal experience one had with the text/film was
>> taken as universally valid. This is, of course, often the
>> familiar form of film reviewing in which the reviewer reports
>> their own personal reaction/evaluation and then assembles some
>> details or arguments to back it up. If your reaction was
>> different, you are mistaken, flawed, or whatever. When two
>> critics disagree, it's King of the Mountain.
>>
>> A simple case in point of the two trends could be Water Window
>> Baby Moving. One can "interpret" it in terms of Stan Brakhage's
>> writings, statements, personal history to that point in his life,
>> etc. Sitney's discussion in Visionary Film essentially does this.
>> (And quite well.) Or one could take Maya Deren's reaction, which
>> was that she was repulsed and disgusted and angered at the film as
>> an invasion of women's privacy. (Its effect on her, her affective
>> response to it, was the last word on the film for her.) Or one
>> could take Jane Brakage's writings about the film (in the Film
>> Culture reader, as I remember) as another interpretation.
>>
>> Another example: Brakhage's Sirius Remembered is a film that
>> depicts the carcass of a dead dog over changing seasons. It
>> really 'helps" to know that this was the family dog (who appears
>> in Dog Star Man). Sitney's discussion of the film in Visionary
>> Film depends on having this information. IF you saw the film with
>> no preparation whatsoever, your understanding of it would probably
>> be very different. (You wouldn't know who or what Sirius was,
>> seriously.) You probably wouldn't figure out it was a carcass
>> right away, (and maybe not at all that it was a dog) and you
>> wouldn't know of the emotional link of maker and depicted object.
>> Or that the scene was the Brakhage family cabin in Colorado, and
>> that they decided to leave the body to open nature rather than
>> bury it.
>>
>> Today, we are often likely to come across experimental work on
>> YouTube (Deren, say) or UbuWeb with no information about the
>> maker, or intentions, or critical context, etc. The Canyon and
>> FMC descriptions do tend to shape interpretation in many cases,
>> but they must be known. Some masterful interviews, like Scott
>> McDonald's various volumes of Critical Cinema, are there to inform
>> and inspire and context.
>>
>> (officially) My intention in writing this was to teach and inform
>> the members of Frameworks about an important aesthetic issue.
>> (sneaky subtext) If it has the effect on Cari Machet of making her
>> feel dumb and shutting up, mission accomplished. ;-)
>>
>> CHUCK KLEINHANS
>>
>>
>> __________________________________________________________________
>> For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
>>
>
>
> __________________________________________________________________
> For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
>
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.