I think Mike Frank is quite right to point to the ways in which this discussion of language ends up being a discussion of originality or authenticity, and when I thought about that it helped me to contextualize my discomfort with some of what's going on in the "politics on screen-l" thread. It seems to me that we can acknowledge that every cultural artifact is both "foreign" and familiar to each of us. Do white academics speak the "language" of Menace II Society (whose title itself puts the question of language on the table)? Well, yeah, especially white academics who grew up watching the same noir films that the Hughes brothers did...but on the other hand, probably, no, for rather more obvious reasons. The academic's relationship to that film--and to any other films, this is just an example--is a whole network of experiences of familiarity and alienation. There isn't one language in which to read a film. I think the tendancy on the other thread has been--sometimes--to priviledge one languge (the technical language of filmmaking) over all others. Don't get me wrong--I have the deepest admiration (even envy) for people who understand the inner workings of the physical machinery that makes films--but that physical machinery is only one among others. If in the end I'm more interested in, say, ideological machinery, or in the machinery of language itself, my perspective is no less legitimate, even if I explain some particular moment in a way that can be explained differently from that technical perspective. If an art historian who knows nothing about film writes a fascinating article about the colorized version of _Night of the Living Dead_ that treats the strangeness of the color as part of the film's discourse, even if she doesn't know the film was originally B&W, she isn't wrong, she just knows differently. ******************************************************************************* Sean Desilets * "The only people who * * believe that there is Department of English * a language that is East Hall * * not theoretical are Tufts University * professors of Medford, MA 02155 * * literature." [log in to unmask] * Paul de Man ******************************************************************************* ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu