Quotable Potables: In the American Grain
"Heroically, but pitifully, he strove to fasten to himself that enormous world, that presently crushed him among its multiple small disguises."W.C. Williams
from The Discovery of the Indies
"Heroically, but pitifully, he strove to fasten to himself that enormous world, that presently crushed him among its multiple small disguises."W.C. Williams
from The Discovery of the Indies
Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. "Stop !" cried the groaning old man at last, "Stop ! I did not drag my father beyond this tree."It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We all begin
well, for in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our
own sins writ large in others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves ; but
we grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins the really harm-
less ones to own, nay that they give a charm to any character, and so our
struggle with them dies away.
It has always seemed to me a rare privilege, this, of being an Amer-
ican, a real American, one whose tradition it has taken scarcely sixty
years to create. We need only realise our parents, remember our
grandparents and know ourselves and our history is complete.- Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans
"It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place. In that case, it either "expresses" some deeper irrepressible historical impulse (in however distorted a fashion) or effectively "represses" and diverts it, depending on the side of the ambiguity you happen to favor. Postmodernism, postmodern consciousness, may then amount to not much more than theorizing its own condition of possibility, which consists primarily in the sheer enumeration of changes and modifications. Modernism also thought compulsively about the New and tried to watch its coming into being (inventing for that purpose the registering and inscription devices akin to historical time-lapse photography), but the postmodern looks for breaks, for events rather than new worlds, for the telltale instant after which it is no longer the same; for the "When-it-all-changed" [i.e. Stacey Peralta moment], as Gibson puts it, or, better still, for shifts and irrevocable changes in the representation of things and the way they change."Fredric Jameson
Postmodernism; Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
"One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary [1936] crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage."Walter Benjamin
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Most books analyzing contemporary Hollywood focus on changing subjects and themes, such as the representation of gender, ethnic groups, or cultural attitudes. The results are typically exercises in interpretation, taking films as "texts" to be deciphered. By contrast, this book emphasizes the craft of storytelling. In the spirit of reverse engineering, I want to tease apart the finished films and see what strategies of plot and visual style govern their design. We still lack knowledge of how Hollywood's "ever-vigorous tradition" tells stories in a distinctive way, so my main goal is to expose some central constructional principles of contemporary moviemaking. When we've grasped those principles, we will be in a better position to track both local and long-term changes in the ways movies work.David Bordwell
The Way Hollywood Tells It
Continue reading "Quotable Pototables, David Bordwell Speaks" »
These dynamics partly explain why television is so widely perceived as a postmodernist medium, or at least as a medium that contributes to the postmodernist condition, and why, within this context, intertextuality functions as a powerful vehicle of commodity formation. In this process, the newly emerging subject comes to perceive himself or herself as a gendered commodity around which a whole commercial nexus is organized--just like Garfield, the Muppet Babies, and other TV personalities with whom the child is led to identify. Further, the child comes to believe that this nexus is activated and extended whenever he or she consumes a product. In short, television teaches viewers that commercial interactivity empowers precocious consumers by enabling them to assimilate the world as they buy into the system.Marsha Kinder
Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games
At the ideological level, the goal [of cinema] is to reinforce the unified subject as an intermediate step in reproducing a certain social world. This is not the definitive work of television. Its function is more directly linked to consumption, which it promotes by shattering the imaginary possibility over and over, repeatedly reopening the gap of desire.Beverle Houston
"Viewing Television: The Metapsychology of Endless Consumption"