If you've known me for a while, you'll have heard the Pretentious Film Studies Class anecdote in which a lecturer asks:
We were studying experimental cinema - short movies made as Art. It's the greatest class I attended at Kings, and the only film class that got me trying to make movies. We saw *everything* in that class. Week 2, the lecturer noted that not many people had shown up, perhaps because they'd already read the essays. I hadn't read the essays. She also noted that people tended to vomit or walk out, but we weren't allowed to do either. Well now I'm terrified. So we watched an 8-minute silent video of real world autopsies. Followed by an amazingly tender video of a childbirth-in-close-up. If ever I tell you I don't want kids, you can hold Stan Brakhage to blame. Another notably wanky week was spent debating whether Sadie Benning - a young white dyke who didn't leave her bedroom for four years and made movies on this horribly cheap camera which couldn't be edited - was oppressing black people by recording music by black artists off the radio. My hunch is, she was a teenager just mucking around with music she liked...
We also had the Is It Art Or Is It Porn week, which was less awkward-boner-ific than you might expect, though I still kept a lot of my thoughts to myself. One of the films we watched was strange, made of disconnected body parts - though in a cuddly, not objectifying way. Which is when the famous comment was made. I guess because you didn't really get characters doing things, sex just kinda occurred between the frames.
Two months later, tuition fees were raised despite protests and violence, and our very depressed class tramped to the pub together. This afternoon was what uni was meant to be like. And they were talking about the violence, and though the same phrase wasn't used, the concept was the same.
They noted that in the papers, violence was a "phenomenon" - something that just spontaneously occured - instead of an "act", which implies an "actor" with motivation. No one was asking why people were doing violence, but violence "happened". A phenomenon, not an act.
The distinction is really powerful, and I now see it all the time. Been thinking about my brain recently, and what things in there are phenomena which are meaningless and random, and what things have motives, and reasons, and causes to blame.
"In this film, do you locate the 'fuck' as a phenomenon or an act?"This morning it occurs to me that, with the passage of time, I've started taking the notion quite seriously.
We were studying experimental cinema - short movies made as Art. It's the greatest class I attended at Kings, and the only film class that got me trying to make movies. We saw *everything* in that class. Week 2, the lecturer noted that not many people had shown up, perhaps because they'd already read the essays. I hadn't read the essays. She also noted that people tended to vomit or walk out, but we weren't allowed to do either. Well now I'm terrified. So we watched an 8-minute silent video of real world autopsies. Followed by an amazingly tender video of a childbirth-in-close-up. If ever I tell you I don't want kids, you can hold Stan Brakhage to blame. Another notably wanky week was spent debating whether Sadie Benning - a young white dyke who didn't leave her bedroom for four years and made movies on this horribly cheap camera which couldn't be edited - was oppressing black people by recording music by black artists off the radio. My hunch is, she was a teenager just mucking around with music she liked...
We also had the Is It Art Or Is It Porn week, which was less awkward-boner-ific than you might expect, though I still kept a lot of my thoughts to myself. One of the films we watched was strange, made of disconnected body parts - though in a cuddly, not objectifying way. Which is when the famous comment was made. I guess because you didn't really get characters doing things, sex just kinda occurred between the frames.
Two months later, tuition fees were raised despite protests and violence, and our very depressed class tramped to the pub together. This afternoon was what uni was meant to be like. And they were talking about the violence, and though the same phrase wasn't used, the concept was the same.
They noted that in the papers, violence was a "phenomenon" - something that just spontaneously occured - instead of an "act", which implies an "actor" with motivation. No one was asking why people were doing violence, but violence "happened". A phenomenon, not an act.
The distinction is really powerful, and I now see it all the time. Been thinking about my brain recently, and what things in there are phenomena which are meaningless and random, and what things have motives, and reasons, and causes to blame.
