A great deal has been written, and some of it circulated, on this list
recently about history, ancestorship, respect for other people's work,
and the personal experience of viewing film.  Though the discussion has
been framed, as it turns out, in terms of Ridley Scott's BLADE RUNNER, it
is pertinent to the study of film in general; and also to the study of
much else; and so I want to add a comment in very general terms about an
approach I find endemic in our society, that bothers me considerably.
 
It bothers me, I should add, on the ethical level: it speaks to the
concerns I have which lead me to proceed with analysis, which have led me
to spend my life in part doing analysis, and which have moved me to watch
and to try to write about films.
 
I'm referring to a "popular"--I don't know a better word, and the quotes
count--notion that film is something absolutely everybody, and anybody,
can make sense of just by seeing it.  The other night at dinner, long
after reading the debate on BR, I argued with a student of mine who had
spent 30 minutes watching Antonioni's BLOW-UP, decided it was "sexist
bullshit," and just switched it off; *AND THEN WANTED TO KNOW WHAT I
THOUGHT ABOUT IT AND TO ARGUE ABOUT ITS MERIT.*
 
I'm perfectly aware people can do this, but I think they shouldn't.
Whether or not I am what a friend has called me, an "unregenerate
auteurist," I believe an artist like Antonioni in making a film like
BLOW-UP was commiting an act of art; and an act of history; and an act of
social consciousness and intellect.  And to understand the film it helps
very much to consult, through their texts, with those who have read it
and studied it largely.  Some have published on it.  Others--like
me--have merely written and taught.  I have, surely, seen it 25 times or
more.  And if it is my vanity, so be it, but I want to feel I can talk
about it in some kind of depth with people *who have at least seen it
once* without predisposition against it.
 
The attempt to plug into analysis without the prerequisite experience
must be one of our most pervasive curses.  And in the discussion of BLADE
RUNNER, much more subtly, it was present as well.  The issue, plain and
simple, is whether we agree that before, before today, before our present
consciousness, before our present desire to speak, anybody else ever did
any committed work on the same material.  Whether, in short, we exist in
a vacuum.
 
And the present critical climate disturbs and confounds me, I think,
because it seems a great number of viewers and would-be critics,
*actually desire to exist in a vacuum.*  Perhaps they feel it is hermetic
to live that way, safe, uncontaminated, and that sealed away in their own
personal bliss they will live longer and prosper.  I don't know.  But I
think we have to find some way to keep alive a fresh, new spirit of
inquiry and perception which simultaneously acknowledges its debt to the
past.
 
I apologize for sermonizing, but I need to feel a chance to get this
thought out to some semblance of an audience, and I hope readers will
treat the writer of this not as though he's trying to slam anyone or any
process but as though he's trying to make sense of the visual world which
means so much to him--and in company with others who are doing the same.
 
Murray Pomerance
Toronto
 
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