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the fact that the final human < superhuman evolution in "2001" comes through an act of transubstantiation, guided by a higher power, always blows my mind. It requires seeing on a very big screen and being very stoned...
― Dan S, Friday, 25 September 2009 04:54 (fourteen years ago) link
eight years pass...
Adrian Martin on a Star Wars canon, the old canon, the new canon
Canons favour an *organic* aesthetics – they valorise whole, entire films as perfect objects. This leaves no room for imperfect films, or brilliant bits or fragments of films. And we all know there are many films that are great for just ten minutes, maybe just for one scene.
Canons valorise singular masterpieces over bodies or corpuses of work. But there is no single great masterpiece to be plucked from the careers of many important and influential directors, including Fassbinder, Pasolini and Preston Sturges.
… In short, canons simply ignore too many good, important, significant and pleasurable movies. But what, realistically, is the alternative? I recall a story by Jorge Luis Borges in which fanatical mapmakers create a map of their territory so precise, true and big that it covers the whole territory. And I sometimes think that this is what the best canon of cinema would be: the cinema itself, whole and entire.
But, of course, nobody’s grasp of cinema could ever actually happen in that kind of impossibly holistic, total way. We can’t just go out and see everything, alas! What any of us understands of cinema depends, at every moment, on material, social and political factors: what films are available, or lost; what films are in circulation and in which format (celluloid, video, DVD, etc); what decisions are being made by those in power concerning which available films audiences will actually get to see, where and for how long.
http://www.filmcritic.com.au/essays/canons.html
― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Sunday, 10 December 2017 19:26 (six years ago) link