"if you wanna know what nick ray had to say in his movies, watch the movies

. . . and if you wanna know what he had to say in his life read about his

life, but then you're not doing cinema-studies/criticism/textual-analysis or

anything like it anymore"

writes mike frank

 

I'm not so sue about this. The interview seems to me to be a valuable

resource for scholars and other audience members. Deleuze's 2 books on

cinema would have been imposible if he hadn't used interviews and other

writings.

 

While it is perhaps a mistake to let intention controll the meaning

production of a cinematic text, it is surely involved in the process.

Without a notion of intention we could never now how the signifier drifts

from it for example.

 

Interviews, articles, and other non-cinematic tetxts are part of the

discursive formation within which cinema takes shape as an institution. In

fact they are part of thge cinematic institution itself. To ignore them is

to idealize the cinema as moving image with no context. If cinema is to be

understood, such an understanding must take into account star discourse,

the construction of authorship in the press and other media, the

philosophical assumptions that cinema-workers bring with them etc.

 

 

lgs

 

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