In Message 11 Nov 1993 13:27:40 -0800 (PST), Chris White <[log in to unmask]> writes: >> Subject: Re: silent films and history > >Surely I can't be the only one out here who finds this entire >discussion petty and slightly ridiculous. How can somebody summarily >dismiss 60+ years of cinema with a mere wave of his/her hand? Yes, I agree that the discussion had gotten out of hand. It started, as I recall, because someone questioned the term "postmodernism" and claimed that all that is labeled postmodernist existed previously. This got everyone involved in a discussion of silent films (which, BTW, I also happen to like). Perhaps, in this case, the best response to what seems ridiculous would be a bit more of the ridiculous. In any case, as I have remained silented during this discussion, I have recalled Jorge Luis Borges' story, "Pierre Menard, Author of the _Quixote_." A ridiculous story, to be sure, about a literary scholar who sets out, some three-hundred years after the death of Cervantes, to write the novel _Don Quixote_. Says Borges, "He did not want to compose another _Quixote_--which is easy--but _the Quixote itself_." And so he wrote and produced something, but he gave up on the project when he realized he was failing. Borges says, It is a revelation to compare Menard's _Don Quixote_ with Cervantes'. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine): . . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor. Written in the seventeenth century, written by the "lay genius" Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the hand, writes: . . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor. History, the _mother_ of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. (Me again--no longer Borges.) One conclusion I reach from this is that Menard could not write the _Quixote_ because, although he wrote word-for- word the same thing Cervantes did, the words--because they were written in a different context--had a different meaning. So, I would suggest, it may be with "postmodernism." Although the postmodern may, indeed, return to the past and repeat strategies of the past, it does so in a different context--and this makes it different. I believe with many scholars that the term--though, like all labels or terms of periodization, it invites abuses when it is reified--is a meaningful one with which to examine changes occuring in contemporary cinema. When I use the term myself, I attempt to do so in the context of modern archi- tecture, an area where many scholars who otherwise object to the use of the term "postmodernism" find it meaningful. The question I would ask is whether something is happening in film (and literature and other forms of art) that parallels postmodernist architects' (the name they gave themselves) response to modernist architecture. Limiting myself to Argentine film (which is the area I write about), I would answer--have answered--yes. But then I think Borges should have the last word, and I quote again from "Pierre Menard, Author of the _Quixote_": "There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. . . . Fame is a form of incomprehension, perhaps, the worst." (Both sentences seem pertinent to any discussion of postmodernism.) Currie Thompson