Deep Thoughts on Film

edited 2012-08-23 10:46:22 in General

films do’t do anything; they subvert nothing. they do give us quite a bit of information about the people and class who make them. what they really say about audiences is far less clear, and the assumption that because they are somle kind of “art” and can narrate or image certain legible notions that they actually individually do something ideological to the audience is unfounded; no audience member sees just one film. they are not a blank slate going in coming out trained by this one single film, isolated. critics take up a pose towartd film which is a conscious posture - they image themselves as an educated reader, picking up all nuance and reference, and they imagine simultaneously a tabula rasa idiot watching beside them, and the criticism is created in between, in the space this close reading practise creates. What it actually describes is not clear.

A critic will denounce a film as right wing propaganda - obviously for that critic it hasn’t been. If the critic says oh this film is a subversive meditation on deleuzian becoming, then we know it was propaganda, because the critic has bought it. Has been taken in. What else they may have imbibed along with the deleuze they brought into the theatre neither we nor the critic knows, except this - that they are dependent on the corporation for philosophy and insights, for enlightenment and stimulation, for affects, for everything, for their own brains.

Comments

Sign In or Register to comment.