I was, however, very happy with that whole period of frameworks, the time when there was that flaming. It was remarkable simply because the writers were unfamiliar.
But I might be forgiven if I take Jesse McLean to draw this thought out (without any intention to ignore the obituary). If you saw it, in one of her videos McLean uses Warhol quotations to draw out a thought about the artificiality of affect, for example the intensity of the experience of a movie by contrast to the real thing. She includes voiceovers of three different people who comment on an experience that is connected to this. At Experiments in Cinema this year Roger Beebe showed a video in which he presents diary entries recounting the incidents during which he was brought to tears. The emphasis he gives is on men crying, and he relies on his everyday encounters with popular media. As we read these diary entries we also hear popular songs about crying. Then I would mention the film at CUFF about a woman who is asked by a doctor whether she cries. The circumstances are not as important as what she does with this question. The video makes the most of these moments in which she offends friends under circumstances in which you would expect her to be sympathetic and "sensitive." These works strike me as within a woman's discourse. Reeder's video would ramp us this thinking considerably, and I am being politically careful to move on here. But then when I think about the film by Rivers I wonder, who is watching this and what impresses them. With what is the work competing? It's all a case of curiosity, but it's also a concern about a practice. The practice is in film, for one thing, but also it is the kind of work that is recognizably "experimental" because obscure. What is the conversation to be had over such work. (And this is not in competition with anyone else, with any history, with any reputation, nothing but an interest in work seen.) Bernie
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