Jujube/synopsis - Revision history

Jujube: /* What makes it cinema/cinematic */

2020-03-08T13:41:35Z

What makes it cinema/cinematic

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Jujube: /* Memory, archive, documentary */

2020-03-08T13:40:10Z

Memory, archive, documentary

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Jujube: /* >> Constance Penley: The Imaginary of the Photograph in Film Theory, 1984 */

2020-03-08T13:38:41Z

>> Constance Penley: The Imaginary of the Photograph in Film Theory, 1984

← Older revision		Revision as of 15:38, 8 March 2020
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	With the semantic categories and the tense created for the images (in fiction, mostly), Wollen concluded his essay reiterating his difference from Barthe. "Unlike him, I am not always longing for a way of bringing the flow to a stop." Wollen's introduction to the semantics of time (and how narrative and time could be combined and created at different levels) is worth considering, especially when creating works around memory, fictional memory.		With the semantic categories and the tense created for the images (in fiction, mostly), Wollen concluded his essay reiterating his difference from Barthe. "Unlike him, I am not always longing for a way of bringing the flow to a stop." Wollen's introduction to the semantics of time (and how narrative and time could be combined and created at different levels) is worth considering, especially when creating works around memory, fictional memory.

	~~===>> Constance Penley: The Imaginary of the Photograph in Film Theory, 1984 ===~~

	=== Christian Metz: Photography and Fetish, 1985 ===		=== Christian Metz: Photography and Fetish, 1985 ===

Jujube: /* >>W.Eugene Smith: Notes to help Documentary Film-maker Kirk Morris Make a Film about Smith */

2020-02-19T17:56:32Z

>>W.Eugene Smith: Notes to help Documentary Film-maker Kirk Morris Make a Film about Smith

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	He aptly points out the "failed" pictures. "Sometimes the people being photographed were aware of her being there with her camera, they trusted her completely and so they appealed for recognition. In a flash they imagind how: ''Take Us Now = We'll See How We Were at This Moment.'' We see the photographed in all their intimacy and they are not ''there''; they are ''elsewhere'' with their neighbours: the dead, the unborn, the absent." (109)		He aptly points out the "failed" pictures. "Sometimes the people being photographed were aware of her being there with her camera, they trusted her completely and so they appealed for recognition. In a flash they imagind how: ''Take Us Now = We'll See How We Were at This Moment.'' We see the photographed in all their intimacy and they are not ''there''; they are ''elsewhere'' with their neighbours: the dead, the unborn, the absent." (109)

	===>>W.Eugene Smith: Notes to help Documentary Film-maker Kirk Morris Make a Film about Smith ===		=== W.Eugene Smith: Notes to help Documentary Film-maker Kirk Morris Make a Film about Smith ===

			Berger gives filmmaker Kirk Morris notes on making a biographical documentary of W.Eugene Smith. He understands the photographer as a person — his talent and foibles. He offers the advice:

	== Memory, DoCA==		== Memory, DoCA==

Jujube: /* >>Christ of the Peasants: Markéta Luskačová: Pilgrims */

2020-02-19T17:41:30Z

>>Christ of the Peasants: Markéta Luskačová: Pilgrims

← Older revision		Revision as of 19:41, 19 February 2020
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	"[I]t is worth remembering for a moment the childhood experience of being told a story. Were not the excitement and assurance of that experience precisely the result of the mystery of such a fusion [of being the teller, listener and protagonists]? You were listening. You were in the story. You were in the words of the storyteller. You were no longer your single self; you were, thanks to the story, everyone it concerned.[...] A story is not simply an exercise in empathy. Nor is it merely a meeting-place for the protagonists, the listener and the teller. A story being told is a unique process which fuses these three categories into one. And ultimately what fuses them, within the process, are the discontinuities, the silent connections, agreed upon in common." (103)		"[I]t is worth remembering for a moment the childhood experience of being told a story. Were not the excitement and assurance of that experience precisely the result of the mystery of such a fusion [of being the teller, listener and protagonists]? You were listening. You were in the story. You were in the words of the storyteller. You were no longer your single self; you were, thanks to the story, everyone it concerned.[...] A story is not simply an exercise in empathy. Nor is it merely a meeting-place for the protagonists, the listener and the teller. A story being told is a unique process which fuses these three categories into one. And ultimately what fuses them, within the process, are the discontinuities, the silent connections, agreed upon in common." (103)

	===>>Christ of the Peasants: Markéta Luskačová: Pilgrims ===		===Christ of the Peasants: Markéta Luskačová: Pilgrims ===

			In reviewing a series of pilgrim photos by Markéta Luskačová, Berger comments on her ability to capture intimacy. "The people she was photographing trusted her; more than that, they allowed her to become intimate. The was a precondition for her assignment, for she could not photograph the presence of the Dead in the lives of the living from afar: a telescopic lens in this case would have been useless. Nor could she be in a hurry. Intimacy implies having time on one's hands, even a kind of boredom. And further, she could not be in a hurry because the project demanded isolating an instant filled with the timeless, and isolating a set of appearances containing the invisible." (109)

			He aptly points out the "failed" pictures. "Sometimes the people being photographed were aware of her being there with her camera, they trusted her completely and so they appealed for recognition. In a flash they imagind how: ''Take Us Now = We'll See How We Were at This Moment.'' We see the photographed in all their intimacy and they are not ''there''; they are ''elsewhere'' with their neighbours: the dead, the unborn, the absent." (109)

	===>>W.Eugene Smith: Notes to help Documentary Film-maker Kirk Morris Make a Film about Smith ===		===>>W.Eugene Smith: Notes to help Documentary Film-maker Kirk Morris Make a Film about Smith ===

Jujube: /* >>Stories */

2020-02-19T17:22:31Z

>>Stories

← Older revision		Revision as of 19:22, 19 February 2020
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	Public photography can lead to ambiguity and mis-interpretation (mids-understanding, propaganda, etc.) Expressive photographs is an "extension of meaning" even though "the narration is broken." The discontinuity amplifies rather than subtracts — it "instigates" ideas, rather than narrating. The reader of appearance is able to "read across" the photography. When the camera "completes the half-language of appearances and articulates an unmistakable meaning," that is when we are moved and feel at home. (97-98)		Public photography can lead to ambiguity and mis-interpretation (mids-understanding, propaganda, etc.) Expressive photographs is an "extension of meaning" even though "the narration is broken." The discontinuity amplifies rather than subtracts — it "instigates" ideas, rather than narrating. The reader of appearance is able to "read across" the photography. When the camera "completes the half-language of appearances and articulates an unmistakable meaning," that is when we are moved and feel at home. (97-98)

	===>>Stories===		=== Stories ===

			The reportage photo-story "narrate descriptively from the outsider's point of view." "[S]ubjective experience always connects" but it breaks the journalistic convention. These reportage photo-story are "eye-witness accounts rahter than stories". Ambiguity is inevitable in stories, but unacceptable in reportage. (99)

			Films are anticipatory while photos are retrospective. "All film narratives are, in this sense, adventure: they advance, they arrive." The film moves forward. '''Memory is a field where different times coexist. The field is continuous in terms of the subjectivity which creates and extends it...''' (100)

			"Every narrative proposes an agreement about the unstated but assumed connection existing between events." (101)

			"[T]he story invests with authority and its characters, its listener's past experience and its teller's words. And it is the authority of all these together that makes the action of the story — what happens in it — worthy of the action of its being told, and vice versa." (102)

			"[I]t is worth remembering for a moment the childhood experience of being told a story. Were not the excitement and assurance of that experience precisely the result of the mystery of such a fusion [of being the teller, listener and protagonists]? You were listening. You were in the story. You were in the words of the storyteller. You were no longer your single self; you were, thanks to the story, everyone it concerned.[...] A story is not simply an exercise in empathy. Nor is it merely a meeting-place for the protagonists, the listener and the teller. A story being told is a unique process which fuses these three categories into one. And ultimately what fuses them, within the process, are the discontinuities, the silent connections, agreed upon in common." (103)

	===>>Christ of the Peasants: Markéta Luskačová: Pilgrims ===		===>>Christ of the Peasants: Markéta Luskačová: Pilgrims ===

Jujube: /* Narrative Emotions: Beckett’s Genealogy of Love */

2020-01-07T15:17:59Z

Narrative Emotions: Beckett’s Genealogy of Love

← Older revision		Revision as of 17:17, 7 January 2020
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	Part eight: Beckett's insufficiency		Part eight: Beckett's insufficiency

	"Beckett is a member of this therapeutic company." (249)		In this part Nussbaum analyzes why Beckett's effort to unwriting the stories from the past was not sufficient. "Beckett is a member of this therapeutic company. But his pessimism (or that of his voices) denies a possibility that they hold open." (249) Beckett's voice was only a single one, "not the conversation of diverse human voices with diverse structures of feeling." This voice is solipsistic, and lacks commonality/humanity that others can relate to. How can one voice be representative of a counter-narrative and change deeply engrained emotions? Nussbaum's conclusion about Beckett's attempt: no. These attempts — limited in "human diversity" and "human activity" — are "foreign to our experience of emotional development."(250)


			TBC

	Part nine: learnings from Beckett and the act of writing		Part nine: learnings from Beckett and the act of writing

Jujube: /* Narrative Emotions: Beckett’s Genealogy of Love */

2020-01-07T12:31:17Z

Narrative Emotions: Beckett’s Genealogy of Love

← Older revision		Revision as of 14:31, 7 January 2020
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	The fifth part is a detailed literary/ethical/psychoanalytical analysis of Beckett's stories, which Nussbaum concludes as "a view of love...taught by a certain concrete society at a certain point in history, [a view that] forms seamless unity with the society's other views or sotries of emotion, with its cosmology, its shared forms of life." While stories are structures of feeling, which "act themselves out in forms of life." "The story is an expressive structure and, at the same time, a source or paradigm for emotions. And it shows us how our most loved story patterns, prominently including the detective story, express and further nourish the emotions in the world, teaching us to imagine ourselves as hunters after guilt and to long for a final judgement." (240)		The fifth part is a detailed literary/ethical/psychoanalytical analysis of Beckett's stories, which Nussbaum concludes as "a view of love...taught by a certain concrete society at a certain point in history, [a view that] forms seamless unity with the society's other views or sotries of emotion, with its cosmology, its shared forms of life." While stories are structures of feeling, which "act themselves out in forms of life." "The story is an expressive structure and, at the same time, a source or paradigm for emotions. And it shows us how our most loved story patterns, prominently including the detective story, express and further nourish the emotions in the world, teaching us to imagine ourselves as hunters after guilt and to long for a final judgement." (240)

	Part six: Detailed synopsis of Beckett's stories and conflicted sides of them. Nussbaum uses the framework of Epicurus, Lucretius and Voltaire to analyze the ending of Moran's story. "[Stories] of antireligious salvation; and these allusions strengthen our conviction that the constraints of religious emotion really have been transcended." ^^^^^ Epicurus's pupils learned through "a patient therapeutic criticism of the emotions that society had taught them," which describes the process of unwriting.(245) However, Beckett's "antinarrative is too many-sided, too ironic, to leave us with any simple comfort." The narrative: sin, seeking for redemption, but the ending is denial of redemption, thus not fulfilling "our readerly longing." (246) "We go on telling stories in the only way we known; and on the other side, if anything, is only a silence." (247)^^^^^^		Part six: Detailed synopsis of Beckett's stories and conflicted sides of them. Nussbaum uses the framework of Epicurus, Lucretius and Voltaire to analyze the ending of Moran's story. "[Stories] of antireligious salvation; and these allusions strengthen our conviction that the constraints of religious emotion really have been transcended." ^^^^^ Epicurus's pupils learned through "a patient therapeutic criticism of the emotions that society had taught them," which describes the process of unwriting.(245) However, Beckett's "antinarrative is too many-sided, too ironic, to leave us with any simple comfort." The narrative: sin, seeking for redemption, but the ending is denial of redemption, thus not fulfilling "our readerly longing." (246) "We go on telling stories in the only way we known; and on the other side, if anything, is only a silence." (247)^^^^^^

			Part seven: how Lucretious and Nietzsche rejected the religious teachings

	~~TBC~~		To Lucretious, "a great part of human desire and emtion is 'empty'" because the teachings were generated by the religious elite to gain power. Fear of death and longing for immortal life are among these teachings, "perpetuated in poetry." (248)

	~~Part seven: how Lucretious~~ and ~~Nietzsche rejected~~ the religious ~~teachings~~		To Nietzsche, nine hundred years of Christianity alienated the human from their "bodily humanity" and instead promoted life in heaven. He believed his task as a writer was to "the creation of that hope," first "dismantling religious beliefs and teleological desires" and reunion body and spirit. (249)

	Part eight: Beckett's insufficiency		Part eight: Beckett's insufficiency

			"Beckett is a member of this therapeutic company." (249)

	Part nine: learnings from Beckett and the act of writing		Part nine: learnings from Beckett and the act of writing

Jujube: /* Appearances */

2020-01-04T14:16:56Z

Appearances

← Older revision		Revision as of 16:16, 4 January 2020
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	Berger itemizes what one might perceive in the Red Hussar photo. "The men waiting with a certain heaviness...Her scowl, which will not give way to weeping..." What "touches the heart" they do so "through the eye." For example, the hand of the woman in the photograph tells how she uses them to cook. What's paradigmatic about this photo is "it shows a moment which is explicitly about what is implicit in all photographs that are not simply enjoyed but loved." (81)		Berger itemizes what one might perceive in the Red Hussar photo. "The men waiting with a certain heaviness...Her scowl, which will not give way to weeping..." What "touches the heart" they do so "through the eye." For example, the hand of the woman in the photograph tells how she uses them to cook. What's paradigmatic about this photo is "it shows a moment which is explicitly about what is implicit in all photographs that are not simply enjoyed but loved." (81)

			====The enigma of appearances ====

			In the third part of the essay, Berger theorizes appearances as a language.
			Painting is an art of translation whereas photography is an art of quotation, as Berger puts it. Painting and photography might resemble each other formally, but they differ functionally. Yet how do photographies of unknown subjects move us? (82)

			Berger quotes Barthes's openness towards systems and doubts the structuralists' preference of closed systems such as one of the semiological. Photography is not solely semiological references. Appearances constitute a language in that they "cohere." First out of visually recognizing nature (or as Berger calls it "the common laws of structures and growth," such as), second out of visually imitating it and third "within the mind as perceptions." To recognize one appearance require the memories of others. Appearances from memories become expectations. (83-4)

			"Appearances in their unmediated state — ... before they have been interpreted or perceived — lend themselves to reference systems (so that they may be stored at a certain level in the memory) which are comparable to those used for words." In older cultures, appearances are "legends"/references "read" by the eye. In modernity, the visible becomes merely aesthetics. "Appearances were reduced to contingency..." (85)

			'''In every act of looking there is an expectation of meaning. This expectation should be distinguished from a desire for an explanation. The one who looks may explain afterwards; but, prior to any explanation, there is the expectation of what appearances themselves maybe about to reveal.''' (88)

			Going back to appearances as quotation. In appearances, "everything depends on the quality of the quotation." Quality can be brevity, depth, length. Length is not the temporal length or other literal interpretation. In Kertész's photograph, "we can trace a story backwards for years and forwards for at least a few hours." (90) ** --> This "narrative range" evokes the term André Bazin uses for frames with "spatial density."

			"The photography cuts across time and discloses a cross-section of the event or events which were developing at that instant... The exceptional photograph which quotes at length increases the diameter of the circle [of the cross-section]...The appearances of the events implicate other events." (91)

			Berger theorizes, the coherence of appearances articulates correspondences which provoke previous experiences of the viewer. That is how appearances lead to ideas. (92)

			He uses another photograph by Kertész to demonstrate. (Young man sleeping on a piece of newspaper at a cafe.) Kertész did not construct anything, but was highly "receptive to the coherence of appearances." (93) ** --> Receptivity is what a developed eye is, what intuition is.

			Another photograph: lamb,boy,country. "The idea within the event [of which the photographer is receptive to] concerns the sense of touch... The photograph is lucid because it speaks, through an idea, to our fingertips, or to our memory of what our fingertips felt." (95) ** --> haptic, hands, touch

			====to summarize====

			Public photography can lead to ambiguity and mis-interpretation (mids-understanding, propaganda, etc.) Expressive photographs is an "extension of meaning" even though "the narration is broken." The discontinuity amplifies rather than subtracts — it "instigates" ideas, rather than narrating. The reader of appearance is able to "read across" the photography. When the camera "completes the half-language of appearances and articulates an unmistakable meaning," that is when we are moved and feel at home. (97-98)

	===>>Stories===		===>>Stories===

Jujube: /* Narrative Emotions: Beckett’s Genealogy of Love */

2019-12-18T13:42:52Z

Narrative Emotions: Beckett’s Genealogy of Love

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 Stories are powerful ways of learning values. "Stories first construct and then evoke (and strengthen) the experience of feeling... So a criticism of emotion must be... an unwriting of stories." The common ground is the major cognitive theories of emotion, from ancient Greek thinkers to philosophy of psychology, cognitive psychology and social anthropology. "The cognitive conception makes change a logical possibility...change depends on further beliefs about how structures of this sort can be challenged." ^^^ (234)
-Nussbaum observes that parents "embody and teach the social conception of which they are apart" from the psychoanalytic thought. Though families resemble one another in different societies, the ways emotions relate and signify differ. If stories are vehicles of emotional teaching, then an emotion is the acceptance of a story. Reading Beckett's stories requires understanding of the life of the emotions in those stories (e.g. how love comes with guilt, sinfulness, fear of judgement and impossible hope). The criticism of these stories is the criticism of our own patterns of love, for example, based on the reading experience. The social constructionist theory of emotion does not lead to loss of agency. ''' "The depth at which these stories dwell in us is sufficiently great that change is going to be a matter of prolonged therapy, not of one-shot argument. But I see no reason to suppose that we cannot devise therapies capable of altering us, even at the unconscious level." We do not need to be critical about the stories in order to read them, and our change does not depend on the critical premise.''' (235) ^^^^
+Nussbaum observes that parents "embody and teach the social conception of which they are apart" from the psychoanalytic thought. Though families resemble one another in different societies, the ways emotions relate and signify differ. If stories are vehicles of emotional teaching, then an emotion is the acceptance of a story. Reading Beckett's stories requires understanding of the life of the emotions in those stories (e.g. how love comes with guilt, sinfulness, fear of judgement and impossible hope). The criticism of these stories is the criticism of our own patterns of love, for example, based on the reading experience. The social constructionist theory of emotion does not lead to loss of agency. ''' Nussbaum refers to stories as therapy. "The depth at which these stories dwell in us is sufficiently great that change is going to be a matter of prolonged therapy, not of one-shot argument. But I see no reason to suppose that we cannot devise therapies capable of altering us, even at the unconscious level." We do not need to be critical about the stories in order to read them, and our change does not depend on the critical premise.''' (235) ^^^^ Individuals are at the same time critical, active, passive in social construction. (236)
 ^ The same can be said about narrative film.
@@ Line 44: / Line 65: @@
 ^^^^ Do we read stories for catharsis, or for feeling (aka. acceptance of our emotions...)?
 == Image ==