>I am likely to resent or be perplexed by praise heaped on a >the other hand, I got caught up in a film significantly as I viewed > it, if it touched my heart, I'm naturally going to be incredulous when > some critic or reviewer dismisses the film as fluff or attacks the > screenplay as tripe. > Or praises some film that I regard as absolute detritus. But why > should I fret about the fact that a film that didn't move me proved > highly popular? these are, i suppose, all reasonable questions, but they are based on the premise that the PURPOSE of movies [and presumably of art] is simply to touch our hearts . . . that a movie may hae a point or a point of view, that it may carry ideological weight, that it may represent or misrepresent, that it may play a part in constructing a culture and hence, in the final analysis, play some part in constructing us . . . all of these possibilities are ignored by this premise as are any notions of skill, craft, artistic language, form, control that went into the work . . . an examination of the prosody of donne or the brushstrokes of monet are not in themselves going to make a poem or painting touch my heart . . . and indeed we're all aware of works that touch us by their facile pressing of all too exposed buttons . . . this view is the one that was discredited as 'the affective fallacy' by the new critics [themselves admittedly now discredited but who still have some worthwhile things to say to us] so to the apparently reasonable question: > But why should I fret about the fact that a film that didn't move me > proved highly popular? perhaps the best answer is that we may care about films strongly enough to feel that pleasure alone is not what we want our films to provide . . . and that we may object to certain merely 'entertaining' films the same way we object to certain good tasting foods . . . and surelyu we can all think of other activities that provide some people with pleasure that we ourselves would be in principle against mike frank ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.tcf.ua.edu/screensite