Film Theory (600) and the Book of Spectator : "According to spectator theorists (who range from Plato to modern empiricists), knowing is akin to seeing or beholding. Here, in other words, the knower is envisioned as a peculiar kind of voyeur: her aim is to reflect or duplicate the world without altering it—to survey or contemplate things from a practically disengaged and disinterested standpoint." Pragmatism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparatus_theory : Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, Columbia University Press 1986
Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, Columbia University Press 1986
Christian Metz :
Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (ISBN 0-226-52130-3) |
The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (ISBN 0-253-20380-5) |
Language and Cinema (ISBN 90-279-2682-4)
film analysis and film-philosophy
CRITICAL MASS :
Antonioni, Bergman, and the Soul
Rarely are contemporaneous deaths so culturally synchronous as well. The film directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni (who died within hours of each other on July 30) were twin titans of the art-cinema era of the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s — figures who defined metaphysics and aesthetics for a generation and who pushed movies to the center of cultural discourse.
Some critics are calling the events of July 30 cinema's equivalent of the same-day deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Others are using them as an occasion to freshly mourn that now long-departed era when a movie could seem to really change your life. While opinions diverge on how Bergman's anguished existentialism and Antonioni's suave alienation have aged, the nostalgia for their artistic ambitions and solemnity is almost unanimous.
... summer 2007 updates
and NOW?
... "Each film is my last film"
Fanny and Alexander was Bergman's last film made for cinema. But already in 1959 he published the essay Each film is my last film, divided in 1) The Script 2) The Studio and 3) Professional ethics.
... The Script :
"In this connection I should draw attention to another fact which is often overlooked. Film is not the same thing as literature. As often as not the character and substance of the two art forms are in conflict. What it really depends on is hard to define, but probably has to do with the self-responsive process. The written word is read and assimilated by a conscious act and in connection with the intellect and little by little it plays on the imagination or feelings. It is completely different with the motion picture. When we see a film in a cinema we are conscious that an illusion has been prepared for us and we relax and accept it with our will and intellect. We prepare the way into our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings without touching the mind. There are many reasons why we ought to avoid filming existing literature, but the most important is that the irrational dimension, which is the heart of a literary work, is often untranslatable and that in its turn kills the special dimensions of the film. If despite this we wish to translate something literary into filmic terms, we are obliged to make an infinite number of complicated transformations which most often give limited or no result in relation to the efforts expended." *
... I know, of course, that by using film we can bring in other previously unknown worlds, realities beyond reality.
theatre theory * 
