Anna, I appreciate that you just want to get along, want to discuss film, etc. If so, though, you'll want to avoid personalizing the discussion with phrases such as "Fred's fantasy life."
In my experience on FrameWorks, when debates devolve into issues of personal misunderstandings, dictionary definitions, etc., almost no one is interested anymore. If you think we don't disagree about cinema, fine. I personally think the only reasonable reading of your use of the word "ugly" in conjunction with super-8 projection as an evaluation of my stated preference, for a particular film, for dimmer super-8 over video. You don't think that's what you meant? Fine, but it was written in immediate response, it seems, to my post, so trying to be clearer in the future would help. You wrote: "I know that some people do make such distinctions - that clear is always better than blurry, beautiful is always better than ugly, coherent is always better than incoherent, tonal music is better than banging on a trash can, etc. But I'm certainly not one of them." But your list already has biases in it with respect to the kinds of distinctions we have been arguing, or so it seems to me. I didn't introduce the word "ugly" into this discussion. I didn't object to showing facial blemishes. My oppositions were not between "beautiful" and "ugly," but sharp and less sharp, bright and less bright, showing blemishes and not, and so on, and I don't value any of these over any other. You, it seemed to me, translated those into "beautiful" and "ugly." "Ugly" is generally understood as a strongly evaluative term. Few would defend "incoherence" in film, stated that bluntly. I would generally use it as a criticism: "As far as I could tell, your film was incoherent." In avant-garde film, the operative oppositions for great films might be between different kinds of coherence, such as between rather obvious "coherence" and films that might seem "incoherent" at first but really are deeply organized and expressiv; between, say, films by Jordan Belson and Christopher Maclaine. And I might suggest that a more interesting and also more obvious opposite of tonal music than "banging on a trash can" (not, in your nomenclature, I note, simply "banging on a can," which would echo the title of a well known new music festival) is atonal music, as in Schoenberg, Webern, Hauer, Babbitt, and many others, music that is often called "incoherent," and that can seem that way on first hearing, but is anything but. Fred Camper Chicago _______________________________________________ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks