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November 1996, Week 2

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From:
"Do not read this line." <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Thu, 7 Nov 1996 11:29:09 -0400
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FORWARDED MESSAGE
 
> mike frank asks why one should assume that the video rather than the audio
> tells the truth.
>
> mike refers to an example I gave, specifically:
>
> In Heavenly Creatures, the narrator says: My New Year's Resolution is to be
> kinder to others.... while the film shows the speaker agressively expelling
> a young man from a party.
>
> In the example I am unsure how one could have the video "lie" and the
> "audio" be truthful. But the idea of a reversal has great appeal.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Peter Latham
 
END OF FORWARDED MESSAGE
 
 
peter's final paragraph is provocative . . . yes, it would really be neat if
that reversal were possible, but peter is unsure of how it might work, and i
myself find that i can't even imagine it . . . i suspect the reason is--and
perhaps this is of some importance--the "convention" that the sound track MAY
represent a particular subjective "view," view here understood in the sense
of attitude or ideological position or conception about something--that is, a
patent distortion of the "truth" . . .
 
. . . on the other hand, by common cinematic "convention" the image track
can represent a subjective "view" ONLY in the sense of giving us a character's
physical p-o-v (or a representation of the character's physical p-o-v) (as in
the eyeline match) but that WHAT the character sees--as opposed
to HOW the characters sees it--is "really there" . . . {think, e.g. of
bogart's unfocused view when he's drugged in MALTESE FALCON} . . . and that
therefore a "view" that is completely private/subjective, as opposed to an
"objective" one mediated by some very limited set of subjective
characrteristics, is not available in conventional cinematic discourse
 
in other words, by convention the sound track can represent a total distortion
or fabrication by a character (i.e., a "lie"), while the image track can
represent only a character's intervention in a representation that still
retains a certain degree of objective validity . . .
 
in retrospect i'm a little uneasy about 2 things: one is the assumption in the
above that all of this is merely a matter of convention . . . is it only
a convention or is it grounded in something else? . . and if it is only a
convention, does it apply only within cinema or are there other
representation systems in which it--or an analogous convention--apply?
 
the other is the nagging sense that i've just devoted some fancy verbal
footwork to belaboring the obvious . . . if so i do apologize, and i
apologize as well for the virtually adolescent resort to typographical
emphasizing in the above paragraphs . . . it just seemed briefer and somewhat
clearer to do it this way
 
mike frank
 
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