24 frames per second: new movie thread

[Andrew_TSKS]

oh shit! hahaha.

and by the way:

Are there color representations of Ian Curtis?  Purely curious about this.

apparently the last pic deborah took of him, from 5 days before he died. i'm guessing the baby is their daughter natalie.

and i mean, there's also the "love will tear us apart" video.

[diesel_powered]

And I felt like the direction and particularly the choice to do the film in black and white got the mood of the film across much more effectively than a myriad of other choices could have. I'm surprised that I'm impressed by Anton Corbijn as a director of moving images, but I am.

Well, looks like I have to go out and watch this movie now. I'm more familiar with Corbjin as a photographer than a film director, but I've always found his sweaty, greasy B&W work mildly revolting. However, this sounds like an occasion where that manner of photography might actually work for me.

[Nick Ink]

I thought Control had got nothing but love? Especially from the critics here.

[diesel_powered]

I'm shocked! Shocked by this! 

[elpollodiablo]

I'm fairly certain my film instructor has never heard of/is unfamiliar with the specifics of intentional fallacy, which leads me to believe that he's pretty much unfamiliar with the major critical movements as apply to his field over the past several decades.

Witness:

Other student: (responding to a comment from the instructor about what you can glean from movie credits): Is that really what the filmmaker intended, though?
Instructor: Yes.
Me:That's not really relevant, though, whether or not it was his intention, it's an arguably valid way to read the film.
Instructor: Well, actually it is important. You can evaluate a film just based on your own impressions and not look for any deeper meaning or what the filmmaker was intending, but that's not going to advance your understanding very much.
Me: But--
Instructor: There's a million ways to look at these films, but there are only a few right ways. Now let's contextualize this film and draw spurious and ultimately meaningless connections to events which took place the year it was produced.

I mean, maybe he knew what I meant and just doesn't truck with it (which I don't know is necessarily any better), or he doesn't know what I'm talking about.


This experience has pretty much reinforced my opinion that film/film studies, at least at this university, is mostly a gigantic joke and if I'd have been a film major I could have had the same GPA with about 1/10th of the work.

[edison]

Wow.

[Greg Nog]

Dang!

I saw the new Hulk last night.  Not too bad, a little bland, but okay overall.  Definitely better than the Ang Lee one, and I was excited by how many things they borrowed from the Bruce Jones comic run.  Mainly, though, it just made me excited about the upcoming Avengers movie.

Oh, and Liv Tyler was hilariously awful.  I dunno what that was all about.

Anyway, there was a trailer for Hellboy II beforehand, and I hadn't seen that before.  So I'm completely psyched about that.  Less than two weeks away, now!

[elpollodiablo]

Also he pronounces 'aesthetics' as 'A-esthetics'

What the fuck Ohio University

[C of heartbreak]

He doesn't overuse "aesthetic" as a noun does he? Because that gets on my nerves.

[coldforge]

I'm always a little concerned about zealous applications of the intentional fallacy. While its weak formulation, 'the validity or interest of a film is not dependent solely on how well it fulfills its creator's intentions', is patent, some of its strongest forms—'the validity or interest of a film has nothing to do with whether its creator intended the interpretation in question, acknowledged it, had thought of it, or indeed could have possibly thought of it'—also make me very uncomfortable.

I'm not sure how I feel on the subject. But I think that there's more room for intention than it is contemporarily common to admit. I'd be interested in responses from the assembled, especially ones that didn't take the intentional fallacy as a given.

[Greg Nog]

some of its strongest forms—'the validity or interest of a film has nothing to do with whether its creator intended the interpretation in question, acknowledged it, had thought of it, or indeed could have possibly thought of it'—also make me very uncomfortable.

Do you know people who claim this on the regular?

[hannah]

film studies ain't no joke

this is a joke:

knock knock
who's there
boo
boo who
why is a baby answering the door

[elpollodiablo]

Yeah I think outside of a theoretical context you cannot apply the intentional fallacy to its utmost and expect to make any kind of sense--obviously there's room for interpreting intention, if the artist/director/author is interested in talking about what his or her intention was in creating a certain work (and while this often happens, I've never, personally, been all that interested in hearing about it; brings to mind the recent interviews with David Simon when the Wire was ending its run, and he would, in one breath, say that certain aspects of the show were completely open to interpretation, and in the next breath say how frustrated he was that no one had yet "got it right"--a pretty cogent example, I feel, of how useless one's documented professed intentions are in the interpretation of a text), or even if he or she isn't. But I think the most practical advantage of this mode of interpretive thinking is that it fosters the realization that intent is, regardless of the creator's expressed thoughts on the matter, ultimately unknowable for a whole host of reasons. I would argue that there's absolutely nothing 'validating' in an interpretation coinciding well with the expressed intentions of the work's creator, unless your principal interest in critiquing art is to "figure it out," and you regard the process as a zero sum game--that's fine, if that's your thing, but it's incredibly uninteresting to me.

One part of your post, Z, that was particularly interesting to me, was this:
"...or indeed could have possibly thought of it."

I think the worst thing about the intentional fallacy is that it's often used to prop up readings that are improbable or anachronistic. Whit and I were talking about this in this very thread a few pages back; some critics will ascribe a chronologically-untenable set of like progressive political motives, for example, to a text written at a time when those motives wouldn't have even occurred to the author. That's a real problem and not at all helpful, granted.

[coldforge]

some of its strongest forms—'the validity or interest of a film has nothing to do with whether its creator intended the interpretation in question, acknowledged it, had thought of it, or indeed could have possibly thought of it'—also make me very uncomfortable.

Do you know people who claim this on the regular?

No. But I know a lot of people who reflexively invoke the intentional fallacy whenever anyone starts talking about intentions, so that's why I wanted to, you know, drill down. Explore the subject. Roll up my sleeves. That sort of thing.

[coldforge]

Thanks, pollo. That's exactly what I was looking for.

[Almanzo]

I'm fairly certain my film instructor has never heard of/is unfamiliar with the specifics of intentional fallacy, which leads me to believe that he's pretty much unfamiliar with the major critical movements as apply to his field over the past several decades.

Witness:

Other student: (responding to a comment from the instructor about what you can glean from movie credits): Is that really what the filmmaker intended, though?
Instructor: Yes.
Me:That's not really relevant, though, whether or not it was his intention, it's an arguably valid way to read the film.
Instructor: Well, actually it is important. You can evaluate a film just based on your own impressions and not look for any deeper meaning or what the filmmaker was intending, but that's not going to advance your understanding very much.
Me: But--
Instructor: There's a million ways to look at these films, but there are only a few right ways. Now let's contextualize this film and draw spurious and ultimately meaningless connections to events which took place the year it was produced.

I mean, maybe he knew what I meant and just doesn't truck with it (which I don't know is necessarily any better), or he doesn't know what I'm talking about.


This experience has pretty much reinforced my opinion that film/film studies, at least at this university, is mostly a gigantic joke and if I'd have been a film major I could have had the same GPA with about 1/10th of the work.

I actually agree with the prof here...New Criticism is complete fucking "find your own truth, BRO" fratboy bullshit.

[Andrew_TSKS]

everyone remember not to feed the troll.

[coldforge]

Well, thus concludes the section where we respectfully discuss our positions on the topic. Thanks for your input, everbody. Hannah, see me after class.

X-POST: Sorry, TSKS.

[auto-da-fey]

not to flog a dead or dying horse here, but wasn't the whole point of the new historicism in the 1980s to circumvent this debate by moving beyond the already-obsolete notion of "the author" to instead frame the origins of texts in the discursive circulation of--what did Greenblatt call it?--"social energy"?

i mean, "social energy" is probably a notion that can be questioned a bit, but still.

also i may watch a movie soon. not sure what--lost lumet from 1972? more frank perry? softcore porn with don johnson? choices, choices.

[elpollodiablo]

Thanks, pollo. That's exactly what I was looking for.

I actually really enjoy discussions like this, because I feel like I've got a pretty good handle on it as far as how it informs my critical viewpoint--obviously I haven't fully grasped all the implications of it and likely never will, but one of the really great things about the intentional fallacy and Barthes' whole death of the author trip is that it is initially really simple, but does have all of those broad and far-reaching implications which are going to necessarily affect how you read a text. Before I was really introduced to this concept early in my undergraduate courses, I had some intuitive grasp of it (probably stemming from my all-encompassing moral relativism--thanks, hippie parents!), but couldn't really articulate the particulars in a concise way--untrained, my approach to fiction was probably closer to reader-response than anything (and I'd argue that this is often the default approach many people unknowingly take; our Mr. Balgeary is a big proponent of this way of reading, whether he'd cop to it or not). What's funny is that looking back, my approach to music was actually much closer to the mark in terms of evaluating texts with the intentional fallacy in mind: I was never very interested in the author/artist/musician as subject, though I was sort of counterintuitively drawn to the singer/songwriter model of performer. This led me, knowingly or otherwise, to be drawn to artists who wrote very personal songs, but remained (for the most part) ciphers themselves: Will Oldham, Bob Dylan*, the Gandalfs. I always intentionally avoided interviews, because supplementary literature never really enriched my experience/interpretation of the songs so much as it made me second-guess myself and the artist's intentions. Oldham's constantly-changing stage persona struck a chord (HAR HAR) with me, because he seems to make a conscious effort to shirk the associations one forms with a name (which of course is a kind of intentionality in itself, but I dunno that we need to take it to that level for the purposes of this discussion). The Gandalfs are, well... yeah. You all know how it goes, probably better than I do.

*Obviously Dylan is a very prolific interviewee and has undoubtedly spouted untold volumes about his intentions w/r/t this song or that over the years, but Bob Dylan as an artist/author will always have a very slippery definition in my mind, and that's just how I like it.

[elpollodiablo]

not to flog a dead or dying horse here, but wasn't the whole point of the new historicism in the 1980s to circumvent this debate by moving beyond the already-obsolete notion of "the author" to instead frame the origins of texts in the discursive circulation of--what did Greenblatt call it?--"social energy"?

i mean, "social energy" is probably a notion that can be questioned a bit, but still.

This is pretty much a complete blind spot for me; could you elaborate/give me some links? Like I said, I feel like I've got a pretty good understanding of the basics (after only four years of study!) but I definitely lack a complete historical understanding of how these lines of thought have changed and progressed over the decades.

[Almanzo]

Well, thus concludes the section where we respectfully discuss our positions on the topic. Thanks for your input, everbody. Hannah, see me after class.

X-POST: Sorry, TSKS.

Yeah, having emphatic opinions instead of polite, milquetoast parlor-room sighs is "not cool, bro!" Buncha self-fanning wilting flower NPR liberals up in here...

[Andrew_TSKS]

* Andrew_TSKS not taking his own advice

* Andrew_TSKS removing the evidence of his not taking his own advice

[jebreject]

F'real

(Delete your posts so it looks like I'm agreeing with Almanzo!)

[rockmeamadeus]

Almanzo probably thinks it is funny. Posts like he does, then sits in his cave updating the page every 30 seconds, cackling maniacally every time he makes someone think he is a douche.

Who is the real enemy here?!?! HUH?!?!?!

THE INTERNET IS THE REAL ENEMY.