[Frameworks] Film and video

[Fred Camper]

Anna, I appreciate that you just want to get along, want to discuss  
film, etc. If so, though, you'll want to avoid personalizing the  
discussion with phrases such as "Fred's fantasy life."

In my experience on FrameWorks, when debates devolve into issues of  
personal misunderstandings, dictionary definitions, etc., almost no  
one is interested anymore. If you think we don't disagree about  
cinema, fine. I personally think the only reasonable reading of your  
use of the word "ugly" in conjunction with super-8 projection as an  
evaluation of my stated preference, for a particular film, for dimmer  
super-8 over video. You don't think that's what you meant? Fine, but  
it was written in immediate response, it seems, to my post, so trying  
to be clearer in the future would help.

You wrote: "I know that some people do make such distinctions - that  
clear is always better than blurry, beautiful is always better than  
ugly, coherent is always better than incoherent, tonal music is better  
than banging on a trash can, etc. But I'm certainly not one of them."  
But your list already has biases in it with respect to the kinds of  
distinctions we have been arguing, or so it seems to me. I didn't  
introduce the word "ugly" into this discussion. I didn't object to  
showing facial blemishes. My oppositions were not between "beautiful"  
and "ugly," but sharp and less sharp, bright and less bright, showing  
blemishes and not, and so on, and I don't value any of these over any  
other. You, it seemed to me, translated those into "beautiful" and  
"ugly." "Ugly" is generally understood as a strongly evaluative term.

Few would defend "incoherence" in film, stated that bluntly. I would  
generally use it as a criticism: "As far as I could tell, your film  
was incoherent." In avant-garde film, the operative oppositions for  
great films might be between different kinds of coherence, such as  
between rather obvious "coherence" and films that might seem  
"incoherent" at first but really are deeply organized and expressiv;  
between, say, films by Jordan Belson and Christopher Maclaine. And I  
might suggest that a more interesting and also more obvious opposite  
of tonal music than "banging on a trash can" (not, in your  
nomenclature, I note, simply "banging on a can," which would echo the  
title of a well known new music festival) is atonal music, as in  
Schoenberg, Webern, Hauer, Babbitt, and many others, music that is  
often called "incoherent," and that can seem that way on first  
hearing, but is anything but.

Fred Camper
Chicago