Long Pauses

Tag: Author: MacDonald

  • P. Adams Sitney on Film Bloggers

    The other day I was talking to a group of younger filmmakers about a current situation I simply cannot understand. There seems to be a tremendous revitalization of avant-garde filmmaking now, but there’s absolutely no one publishing anything about it, anything. . . .

    The universities have completely imploded. They’re the places to go if you believe that the media discourse of French philosophers is the only viable approach to film, and that the empirical relationship of the viewer to the work of art is utterly passe. . . .

    I can only fantasize about young independent people who love these new films and want to write about them.

    — in an interview with Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema, Vol. 4, May 2000

    Okay, so technically he wasn’t talking about film bloggers. Or, at least he didn’t know he was talking about film bloggers.

  • That Narrative Drive

    Eye tracking technology now allows us to create “heat maps” of visual spaces. It’s of particular use to those of us with an interest in website layout and navigation. The image above is from a recent study that compares the markedly different ways that psychologists (left) and artists (right) look at photographs:

    So why do artists look at pictures — especially non-abstract pictures — differently from non-artists? Vogt and Magnussen argue that it comes down to training: artists have learned to identify the real details of a picture, not just the ones that are immediately most salient to the perceptual system, which is naturally disposed to focusing on objects and faces.

    Related:

    The main problem with narrative in film is that when you become emotionally involved, it becomes difficult to see picture as picture. Of course, the laughing and crying and suspense can be a positive element, but it’s oddly nonvisual and gradually destroys your capacity to see.
    — Michael Snow, speaking to Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema, Vol. 2

  • The Politics of Form

    The Politics of Form

    Peter Watkins in a 1981 interview with Scott MacDonald (A Critical Cinema vol. 2), discussing the television miniseries Roots (if the quote seems jerky and repetitive, it’s because I mashed together snippets from several pages):

    It’s pukemaking. I really can’t look at a narrative film anymore — not one with these traditional rhythms going on. The manipulation is so patent. . . . I would go so far as to say that to put the black experience into a conventional narrative structure is racist. Because you are feeding into a language that neutralizes it. How many people say, “I can’t even remember the film I saw last night.” You put the slave experience through the same rhythms as Kojak and Love Story and . . . well, I think that’s a real problem now. . . . In Roots, you’re given a seemingly bleak or radical look at history, which in fact isn’t at all because you’re swimming along in this warm reassuring Jell-O: the narrative form in which it’s given to you. . . . The point that I keep trying to hammer home these days is not only that the ideas on TV are conservative, but that the form with which they’re presented (even if there were ideas with which you and I might politically agree) defuses them.