> At the risk of bringing up an old issue here, I am disturbed that nowhere in > the debate is it mentioned that there is a unique aesthetic value, for many > films, to presenting them as originally intended, on film.
Not true because we haven't even had a debate. I posited that we are in a moment of crisis, and that we need to start at ground zero by figuring out why these films matter, what they offer. No one has addressed that. Until we actually start identifying values, we can't have debates about their relative importance, how various technical means do or do not convey those values, and what values we might choose to put in the back seat in order not just to preserve other values that are currently under threat, but to extend them. If an aesthetic value depends on celluloid projection, what is that value? How does it compare with other aesthetic and/or cultural values of the work? > if the members of this list won't even acknowledge the particular qualities > of film projection, and that so many of the greatest works of the avant-garde > were made with those particular qualities in mind, and that such works often > lose hugely on video, then the "battle" is over before it has even begun. You > can hardly try to find projectors and rental funds if you don't even care. We are talking about the survival of works of art over time, and beyond that the socio-cultural function of art. Are the things that make experimental moving picture work worth saving to be made available only to a very few? It's not a question of whether I care about the particulars of film projection or whether the members of this list care about the particulars of film projection. It's a question of whether enough people in the world care enough about the particulars of film projection to make film rental and projection economically viable in the 21st century. I think the answer is 'no.' Now, to get personal for a moment, I'd like to inform my interlocutors here _I_ did happen to care. Most of you don't have even the vaguest idea of how much time and effort I spent fighting the good fight, trying to acquire working projectors and put together some print rentals within the given constraints of my situation. EVERY bitch I make about the difficulty of doing this stuff in a college setting comes from me walking the walk, as hard and as long as I could. Don't even think of pontificating 'well, you could have done more!' I put every piece of energy I had into that job, I had no life outside of work, I went way over and above what any of my colleagues were doing, and in the end I had one too many nervous breakdowns and just lost the ability to function. Three years out from my last day in the classroom, I'm still trapped in a chronic generalized anxiety disorder that gives me debilitating attacks of the nerves every day. EVERY. FUCKING. DAY. So don't even hint that I didn't care or didn't do enough, or toss some glib-liner against my reports of realities I lived and struggles i waged for 10 years. Fred, if you hadn't just knee-jerked a reply upon see a form of the word 'digitize' in my post, you would have seen that the specific thing I was proposing in response to Scott's query was to make projection more practical for schools, not replace it. More people would rent prints if the students had a way to study the work after the screening. > This does not even acknowledge that there are still filmmakers, still living > filmmakers, perhaps even in my view some of the very greatest of filmmakers, > who refuse to "digitize" their work because they feel too much > is lost. Well, I didn't acknowledge that because it seems obvious in terms of FRAMEWORKS. And certainly any living artists who did not want digital study copies to accompany print rentals of their work would have the right not to make those available. > Is there no respect at all for the artist's intentions with regard to her or > his work? For me, very little, but a personal debate on that particular aspect of aesthetics is not on my agenda at the moment. What is important, is that I think for both the existing audience for experimental film and the potential audience beyond that, the answer is that very few people give a rats ass about the artist's intent. They care about how the work speaks to them. Again, we are talking about survival over time, which is an economic question. That which will survive is what people with resources will devote some of those resources to in aid of that survival. _______________________________________________ FrameWorks mailing list [email protected] https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
