letter to jlg

Dear Jean-Luc,

Thank you for making movies. They have taught me a lot and will teach me a lot more.



When I first watched your films, I did not understand them. I was petty enough to insult them, and occasionally insult you. I would like to apologize for that. Since then I have grown, and no longer try to reduce films to my narrow ideas of artistic worth. Instead I take films as a potential experience for personal growth; and by experiencing your films, I have grown in valuable ways, even when I find myself frustrated by your methods. I am sorry for ever insulting your films. I hope you can forgive me.



Your early career is very popular; those films are fun and at the time presented a lot of new and energetic ideas. I am particularly fond of your portrayals of Paris and modernity in those pictures.




I also like their characters and their physical spontaneity and earnest digressions into social issues.




But it is your more recent films that have been most rewarding, and I find in them the seeds of dense ideas which root and sprout in many ways in my mind. You have a way of leaving ideas open and allowing others to interpret those ideas in their own way. I like that. I also like the way you compose your shots; the way you frame them, stage them, light them -- very distinctive. I think they are beautiful.




Although I have to admit, there are times when I still do not quite understand what you are doing.



Altogether, your career has been remarkable. You have challenged me in ways no other modern filmmaker has. I appreciate this, and want to thank you. Thank you for making pictures that have challenged me and countless others around the world. Thank you for choosing cinema, believing in the image, and standing by it after all. Thank you for being the marvelous exception to the ever-powerful and stifling rule. Thank you for working your soul into an increasingly spiritless art. Thank you.



I hear that this upcoming film will be your last. If true, this is depressing news. To retire from work is to retire from life; eternity is all that remains -- the possible of the impossible. I will be sad to see you go. You have spent your career fighting for the exception of art against the oppressive rule; now that you have reached the end, I beg you to fight against that most final of rules for the most impossible of exceptions. Must you go quietly? Rage, rage...

Sincerely,
Ian

my winnipeg

Finally saw it, finally disappointed. Citizen Girl, however, is someone I will fantasize about for all time.

shklovsky's formalism

I have been using this quote for several school papers and wanted to comment on it in my own way. It's from Shklovsky's essay "Art as Technique" (1917):

"art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged."

This passage needs two considerations: one, as a definition of art which gives an aesthetic basis for judging and deciding just what "art" is (that which makes the stone stony); two, as an active ideal which art must live up to and try to accomplish (that is, art must work to defamiliarize the world).

Well and good. But maybe not. Point: although it is accurate that we are all habituated to our senses and art renews our perception in some fundamental way, we are all singular and individual who have become habituated in singular and individual ways. What will stir my stagnant sensual spirit will not stir yours, or, if it does, we will not be stirred in the same way. How applicable is this definition of art, then? Point: as culture changes and humans change, so do the habituation of the senses. What stirred a Russian peasant in the early Soviet days will have an entirely different effect today. Imagine the soul-stirring our rapid, vapid Hollywood violence would do to that noble Soviet peasant -- and can yet rock us to sleep. Point: without personal context, few of us our challenged by art. A poem in a foreign language, however lyrical it may sound, is still a foreign language. How can one defamiliarize the world, as through language, while remaining understandable to those approaching the challenge?

In my papers, I referred the quote to Vertov, who was all about defamiliarizing the world as a way to strike up social consciousness. I think all three points challenge his dream. Although people still find him stimulating, his techniques are co-opted by the average television commercial -- our media has become hyper and insane, and it is no longer dazzling effect that stony-s the stone, but the long and meditative camera (as is common in our modern art-house). Vertov also remains incomprehensible; when presenting my project on The Man with a Movie Camera in class and arguing that it is a highly political film, the most coherent response I received was "I'll have to think about that one." Heartbreaking.

I still find myself, however, drawn to this definition of art, whatever its problems. Or maybe because of them. With points considered: art must be diverse, giving us enough room to roam our individual consciousness, especially as that changes.

English is full of words which have lost meaning -- thrown around with half-a-thought, stretched to cliche, buried by sentiment. How does one reclaim that meaning? The same is true with the image, with color, with sound... How is consciousness to be restored? How is meaning to be retaken? I side with Shklovsky; I stand by art.

Some final questions: is there some basic, universal human mode of perceptual habituation that art can disrupt? Does the proliferation and diversity of art lead only to further habituation and meaninglessness? Can meaning only be retaken by the few thanks to the many who accept the meaningless? etc.