"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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