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But he goes on to talk about the centrality of actors who often are the ones whose celebrity attracts cinemagoers and hence the financing of the film. It’s called ‘Trusting the Image’ and it begins by pointing out that there are heaps of people like me who pay no attention whatsoever to the directors of films. His exception is the music, which does produce new forms of film language but how does it advance his argument to say that there’s that one exception, and then contradict himself by saying there are many? Well, there are many more than one, but let’s stay with the single case for the sake of argument. There is one exception to this chain of completion. (p.23)Īnd then, just to confuse me, he goes on to say: No? What about sound and colour? Computer-generated imagery? The whole digital revolution? We’ll come to the revolution later in this book, but I’m suggesting that sound and colour have not altered the basic idioms of film in any serious way, however much they have altered its reach and looks and increased its affective power. I mention them for the record and also more tendentiously to suggest that once these elements are available to a director, and easily readable to an audience, film has reached its maturity as a medium and an art-form. Having discussed the devices available to the film-maker Wood then raises an interesting issue: (But none of this answered my question: is what the moviegoer gets out of it as worthwhile as what the reader gets? Does the viewer of The Grapes of Wrath become as sensitised to the issues raised by John Steinbeck’s book? And just exactly how does watching Terminator II (which I haven’t seen) or 42nd Street (which I have) count as anything other than ephemeral entertainment?) But she also works harder in another sense, since she has a whole surrounding world to create, and all the syntax is in her head rather than on the screen. The moviegoer works less hard than the reader of books, in one sense, since so much is shown to her, pictured as complete. I came across some new vocabulary: ‘montage’, ‘shot transition’, ‘shot-countershot’, and its opposite – ‘parallel editing’ a.k.a. In ‘Moving Pictures’ there’s stuff about the invention of film, and yes, I did hunt out some of them on You Tube: Lumière’s La Sortie de l’usine Lumiere à Lyon ( Leaving the Factory), and L’arroseur arose (The Waterer Watered) and then there’s stuff about film techniques and editing so I watched the *yawn* six-and-a-half minute introduction to Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. It took a while for Wood to get to what I wanted: some explanation of why film matters, what’s good about it, and why I should watch it. Around the world in 80 films (I’ve seen four of them: La Dolce Vita from Italy, Wild Strawberries from Sweden, and Brief Encounter and The Third Man from the UK. Before the titles – a brief introduction. Perhaps Film, a Very Short Introduction might persuade me that I should invest more time in watching film? I have a subscription to Quikflix, and I get foreign films from them once or twice a month but I often forget to watch them until Quikflix nags me about them. I have a copy of The A List: The National Society of Film Critics’ 100 Essential Films and 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die both of which are dispiritingly full of films that I do not want to watch. But from time to time cinematic style impinges on the books I read, so occasionally I have felt the need to find out more about this art form. I tend to go along when friends invite me, and I quite enjoy it, and I buy the occasional DVD that’s been recommended to me, but films have never had an impact on me in the way that books do. I have never really taken much interest in going to the cinema.
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