tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8708273719674528189.post73621573595802968..comments2024-03-22T00:20:38.510-07:00Comments on Adam Riggio writes: Narratives Made From a Language of Images, Jamming, 29/07/2013Adam Riggiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14606510835439580828noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8708273719674528189.post-50160807387551600312013-07-29T16:51:16.313-07:002013-07-29T16:51:16.313-07:00Deleuze has a wonderful description of Bergson'...Deleuze has a wonderful description of Bergson's cock-up on the nature of cinema. He says Bergson took a medium that was still nascent in its powers, which no one knew how to use for anything more complex than pointing a camera at a theatrical stage. And he understood this nascent, amateurish use of the medium as all that the medium was capable of. Bergson thought that cinema could only ever reproduce motion by facsimile, perpetuating the illusion that motion consisted of a string of discrete states, instead of motion's true nature as continuous. Bergson's early dismissal of a radical new art form ignored even the potential in his own earlier work for analyzing what cinema could do. I see it as one more sign that, as the 20th century began, even though the 1910s and 20s were the height of his popularity, Bergson was falling out of step.Adam Riggiohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14606510835439580828noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8708273719674528189.post-61465685858972322162013-07-29T12:51:25.374-07:002013-07-29T12:51:25.374-07:00I wonder if Bergson's discomfort was in the ea...I wonder if Bergson's discomfort was in the easy parallel that could be drawn between his description of human experience and film -- e.g. he explains to a hip young colleague or admirer his central insight into experience only to be told, 'oh, you mean like a movie?' <br /><br />I can envision an interesting commentary on this that bounces between two epigraphs: Bergson saying movies are terrible and Godard's quote that is something like 'we look down at television, but we look up at the movies'. To your point about a philosophy of cinema, one could set out from there to move between Bergson's criticism and its implicit tension with his own thought and Godard's idealism, his notion of a transcendental (but profane, inane, childish) realm of experience that is captured through the sacrality of heightened art. One could then unpack both in terms of Histoire(s) du cinema, where Godard more or less posits Bergson's notion of image in time as the core of experience within his deconstruction of genre and technique, showing how the exact same images are reproduced again and again. The mystery at he heart of it all is I think the same: are my image-experiences unique? If so, how do you I know you -- if not, what makes me unique? Because the unreal aspect of cinema to my mind isn't the cut (which we can rescue via Bergson as metonym of experience) but rather the edit, the selection on the part of someone else. Seeing through Scorsese's eyes our own experiences. <br /><br />Didn't get a chance to read the Scorsese piece so I may be mangling this.Tom Crosbiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04942888225118081569noreply@blogger.com