Re: [Frameworks] FrameWorks Digest, Vol 13, Issue 21

From: Jennifer Peterson <jenniferpeterson1_at_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2011 20:32:41 -0600

I have found, like Brook, that a number of my students, mostly age 18-23,
hunger for challenging films. I teach silent-era film, which is its own sort
of challenge, and each year I have a few who tell me that Dimitri
Kirsanoff's MENILMONTANT (1926) is the most amazing film they have ever
seen. Moreover, many of them are cynical and dismissive of facebook and
twitter, at the same time that they use it. But most importantly, and this
is my point: like any population, no generation is monolithic, and neither
is an era's attention span. There are always some who reject "commercial"
films and others (the majority) who prefer the easily digestible fare, and
still others who can appreciate both. Anyway, to me, nothing conjures up a
picture of solitude more than the image of millions of people sitting alone
before their computer screens. It's just a different kind of solitude,
perhaps a needier one.

Fred Camper wrote: "To be honest, though, my gut prejudice is to fear that
Facebook, texting, and Twitter are turning us away from the whole idea of a
solitude in which the mind struggles to understand itself and the world, and
perhaps tries to remake itself and the world, in favor of the mind instead
as one interdependent cell in a beehive that produces a lot of noisy buzz
and not much honey."

--Jennifer Peterson
(who writes about film)
(and who teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder)



_______________________________________________
FrameWorks mailing list
FrameWorks_at_jonasmekasfilms.com
https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
Received on Tue Jun 14 2011 - 19:33:03 CDT