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November 1995, Week 5

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Subject:
From:
Donald Larsson <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Wed, 29 Nov 1995 13:35:33 -0600
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lgs responds to Mike Frank:
"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."
 
 
From a purely formalist position, Mike's cautions about the use of biographical
and autobiographical sources has a fairly sound underpinning. See Wimsatt
and Beardsley on "The Intentional Fallacy" for the major statement on the
question as it applies to literature. Their point (which I think is similar
 to Mike's) is that any "intention" a work has will be revealed in its own
form, while outside sources are range from being irrelevant to misleading to
merely "nice to know."
 
On the other hand, lgs is quite right in implying that no work exists in
a vacuum. There are two questions, then, it seems to me that a holistic
critical approach should take: What is the form or structure of the work
itself? Why was that form or structure--and the whole apparatus of the
work--produced in that time, in that place?
 
Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)
 
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