Andy,

I will look for that scene. If indeed "It has a sort of purpose, but no
meaning" then it is exactly what I'm searching for.

Many thanks

Ittai

On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 7:32 AM, Andy Ditzler <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Consider the brief close-up appearance of the cockatoo around the last
> third of Citizen Kane. Cut to bird, loud bird shriek on soundtrack, then
> back to the story. Welles' purpose in this odd cutaway was to wake up the
> audience, exactly as Tom Whiteside describes with his experience. ("It has
> a sort of purpose, but no meaning" - reference on p. 72 of This Is Orson
> Welles.) I suspect other singularities, at least in the novel use of them
> by Hollywood, have a similar purpose/effect.
>
> D. A. Miller has written interestingly on Hitchcock's cameos in a way that
> could be connected to their "singularity" within each film; but then again,
> the cameos as a whole represent a coherence in that they occur throughout
> Hitchcock's career.
>
> Andy Ditzler
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 2:37 AM, Ittai Rosenbaum <[email protected]>wrote:
>
>> Hi
>>
>> My name is Ittai Rosenbaum, I am a doctoral student at the music
>> composition department at UCSC and in the process of defining my
>> Qualification Exams topics. I wondered if anyone could perhaps have
>> interesting knowledge or insights about a subject in film theory that might
>> parallel one of my topics.
>>
>> I am interested in singular events in composition: events that occur only
>> once, contrasted and incoherent to the main musical language of the work,
>> yet deliberately conceived and intentionally inserted in the composition,
>> contributing, by way of distraction and surprise, to the conception of the
>> piece.
>>
>> Coherence seems to constitute a compulsory element in composition, and
>> even incoherence (surprise, collage etc.) as it happens in the music of,
>> say, Charles Ives, George Crumb or John Zorn, becomes coherent and even
>> homogenous once it recurs. I suspect that *singular*, incoherent events
>> may have a genuine effect, different than that.
>>
>> I am interested in parallel or similar phenomena in film, as my own
>> compositions are more than often related to the visual, verbal, social and
>> other elements usually inherent in film.
>> Far from an expert in films, I do recall several instances where I felt I
>> have viewed such singular events in film: the awakening in Chris Marker’s
>> La jetée – a single moment of two seconds of movement in a film made
>> entirely of stills, some moments that I can't recall now in Fellini's films
>> (although usually there is a certain "homogeneity of singularity" in the
>> ones I saw), and a comic one, in Mel Brooks’s *Silent Movie*, when the
>> famous pantomime Marcel Marceau utters the only single word in the film:
>> “no!”
>>
>> I would be very interested to know if this is something that has been
>> written about and generally what your experience and opinion is.
>>
>> thank you
>>
>>
>> --
>> Ittai Rosenbaum
>> www.ittairosenbaum.com
>>
>> (650) 704-6566
>>
>> PRÆSENTEM
>>
>> http://earbits.com/
>>
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>>
>
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>


-- 
Ittai Rosenbaum
www.ittairosenbaum.com

(650) 704-6566

PRÆSENTEM

http://earbits.com/
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