[Frameworks] Avant-garde film, Facebook, and the nature of attention

[Fred Camper]

This message is not about migrating the list to Facebook, or anything  
like that, but was occasioned by the fact that we have had a huge  
number of posts on that topic, showing how much interest the single  
word "Facebook" can generate on this list, and by Brooks's comment  
that for his students, email is just soooo old! (Well, he didn't say  
that exactly, I know.)

Additionally, I've read that Facebook introduced its own email system  
because it found that for its youngest users email was just too hard  
to deal with -- the question of the subject line, for example.

It has often been observed that, in the face of new media, the nature  
of attention has changed radically in recent decades. Television  
channel flipping would be an early example, as would growing up in a  
household where the television is always on. Since television, we have  
moved more and more toward shorter and easier to send forms of  
communication whose products also seem to me to be able to contain  
less and less material of any, um, intellectual interest. Just take a  
look at typical wall of Facebook posts to see what I mean. I have no  
objection to anyone's having fun posting pics of one's life, but for  
many, this seems to have become a dominant activity in terms of energy  
and effort and time. The way many use texting today, it serves as a  
continual interruption.

Now consider some of the key masterpieces of our particular branch of  
art, avant-garde film: "The Art of Vision," "La Region Centrale," "La  
Raison Avant La Passion," "Unsere Afrikareise," "The Chelsea Girls,"  
"The Lead Shoes," "Carriage Trade," "Wait," "Hapax Legomena,"  
"Eniaios." These are all works that, like the finest literature, like  
Bach's "The Art of the Fugue" and other great works of classical  
music, like a painting by Paul Cézanne (but unlike many postmodern art  
exhibits today) require prolonged, sustained, serious attention. They  
are based on, and depend on, a rather serious model of individual  
consciousness, in which the mind of the maker (and, the maker hopes,  
the viewer) is seeking, profoundly alone, to navigate its way through  
the world, or through ideas about the world, or through some  
alternative world, or through ideas about cinema and other media. This  
is art with the power to change the way one sees, to change one's  
life, and even, if more than a few would "get" it, to change the world.

Are such works, and the ideas behind such works, becoming less and  
less accessible to those weaned on Facebook and texting and Twitter?  
Will a new kind of art emerge from this culture of interruption and  
inattention? Has it already? Is there anything in it that I would  
recognize as "art," in terms of offering both aesthetic pleasure and a  
model for consciousness? Of course I'm not sure that any of these  
questions have answers, so feel free to offer no response. To be  
honest, though, my gut prejudice is to fear that Facebook, texting,  
and Twitter are turning us away from the whole idea of a solitude in  
which the mind struggles to understand itself and the world, and  
perhaps tries to remake itself and the world, in favor of the mind  
instead as one interdependent cell in a beehive that produces a lot of  
noisy buzz and not much honey.

Fred Camper
Chicago