Hello All, Louis Proyect wrote an interesting and quite good review of the recent movie, "The Quiet American". In passing LP writes:
LP, While the novelist can create a deeper reality through such words, the cinematographer is somewhat limited in what he or she can do. Despite various tricks at their disposal, the camera is ultimately a passive mechanism to record the way that things look. Doyle A bold assertion indeed, but I both wonder what that can mean, and think the concept is confused. This seems like an unexamined thought that someone might have about seeing movies that on a thoughtful turn would be worth questioning. What does it mean to say watching a movie is passive? The internet thinker, Clay Shirky, has opined that most media is audience based. A movie is shown in the theatre or on TV and we cannot talk back to the image. The polar opposite being group process media like this listserv for PEN-L. In this sense LP is right about movies in the current culture are audience based and passive. But what does passive mean in a bit more explicit way? To be active in communication is to speak and listen. To share a conversation. Therefore, LP is claiming ultimately that movies are incapable of being used in a conversational way. That is what I don't agree with. For example, if one took a video camera, and walked about with it pointing here and there, the audience would see the motion of the camera person through the world. They would get it that the camera operator was active, not passive. So any movie is at least not passive for one person, the operator. In the production process, the editor takes the movie and cuts it up and re-arranges the structure from the raw footage to a finished movie. The editor interacts with the movie, and is not passive. The editor makes the content of a movie work, conceptually. So there are at least two examples of movies not being passive. A movie therefore is not ultimately passive. But the industry is audience driven. Now if LP read the book "The Quiet American", that also would be a passive experience. So the writer is not necessarily doing something with writing that a movie maker does by showing in theatres. Rather the structure of the media that leads to an audience rather than a conversational group is the key issue. In order to use a movie in a non-passive way we would have to interact with it. The word interact is one of those neutral sounding words from science used to describe various computer activities. So the word does not adequately convey what would be active about using a movie in some sense by which LP meant not passive. A much more clear word is conversational. Now if we do do that, assume not being passive is being conversational, does that get us anywhere understanding movies? Yes in an everyday sense. For example, if one is having a video conferencing in a business meeting, we can see someone talking to us. Their face shoots information at us, more or less like movies, we see the emotion that comes out. And we can literally talk to each other. That is not a passive sense at all. The point here that LP might bring up is the conceptual possibilities inherent in language over that of the movie. For example we don't edit the video conference in real time. But books take forever to write, and a long time to read. So we could compare writing to movies and find rough parallels without directly addressing a possible concern that LP might raise. On another level, again using the video conference in a business meeting, we might prepare a power point slide show which is displayed through the moving imagery. We might do any number of manipulations of the images. And we could share those resources over the web and both work on the same document. In that sense we actually might consider that pictures and movies has some general properties more powerful than writing. For example, in an ordinary sense, we might be walking down the street with a blind person trying mightily to describe what we see. A difficult task because unexpected sights constantly challenge us for some possible word to describe the wealth of imagery flying past as we walk along rather slowly. But if I brought a video camera along, the camera could record the imagery readily with no trouble. Giving us a real insight about how much more powerful a movie might be in a non-passive way than would be writing. just some thoughts on the ultimate nature of a movie. Doyle
