{ Thursday, March 13, 2003 }
On Alamut today Kenny writes in with a post of a post from this everything2 entry (I reproduce it here only because Alamut doesn't have permalinks, tsk tsk):
"This talk talk talk talk on the phone is just wasted time. We have no record of it. We will not remember it the next time we speak. Why not record the thoughts so that we can go back and fine tune them? Take out what's wrong? Replace it with the correct thing? The meaningful thing we need in order to make sense of it all?"
In spite of being a compulsive life-recorder (in text -- I hardly ever take photographs as longtime Caterina.net readers may have surmised by my never-changing photos page), I shuddered to think of what an even more complete record of my life might look like. I thought of these two things:
1. A nightmare that the experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton once related in which he dreamed that he was the heir of a fantastically rich family, and the parents had had, and were having, their entire life filmed, every moment of every day. He would inherit their vast fortune, if and only if he agreed to spend every minute of every day watching the film of every moment of every day of their lives...
2. The part of A Changing Light at Sandover where James Merrill writes of how he lost his camera:
When I lost the Leica at Longchamps. Never again
To overlook a subject for its image,
To labor images till they yield a subject--
Dram of essence from the flowering field.
No further need henceforth of this
Receipt (gloom coupleted with artifice)
For holding still, for being held still.
And, following a tangent angling off of the mention of Hollis Frampton above, may I present an interesting tidbit written by Mr. Frampton (with which I disagree, but which is interesting nonetheless):
A machine was a thing made up of distinguishable 'parts' organized in imitation of some function of the human body. Machines were said to 'work.' How a machine 'worked' was readily apparent to an adept, from inspection of the shape of its 'parts.' The physical principles by which machines 'worked' were intuitively verifiable.
The cinema was the typical survival-form of the Age of Machines. Together with its subset of still photographs, it performed prizeworthy functions: it taught and reminded us (after what then seemed a bearable delay) how things looked, how things worked, how to do things...and of course (by example), how to feel and think.
We believed it would go on forever, but when I was a little boy, the Age of Machines ended. We should not be misled by the electric can opener: small machines proliferate now as though they were going out of style because they are doing precisely that.
Cinema is the Last Machine. It is probably the last art that will reach the mind through the senses.
It is customary to mark the end of the Age of Machines as the advent of video. The point in time is imprecise: I prefer radar, which replaced the mechanical reconnaissance aircraft with a static anonymous black box. Its introduction coincides quite closely with the making of Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon and Willard Maas's Geography of the Body.
The notion that there was some exact constant at which the tables turned, and cinema passed into obsolescence and thereby into art, is an appealing fiction that implies a special task for the metahistorian of cinema.
--Hollis Frampton, 1971
LINK | 4:14 PM | TB
{ Post a comment }
That was very beautiful, especially the bit about the age of machines.
It reminded me of Gaby Wood's observation in "Edison's Eve," (which was a fun read) about the moment when the very first movie audience witnessed footage of a train moving towards them on the tracks. She claimed that many screamed and ran out of the room.
She also guessed that that may very well have been the largest collective shock that human senses will recieve for a long, long time. Not ever, though. And I don't think that it's the last art to reach the mind through the senses. We may have senses yet untapped.
Marcus | March 14, 2003 7:56 AM