"The very nature of film is musical,"

version

Well-known member
Shaka posted Pennebaker's short, Daybreak Express, the other day and the above was posted in the comments below as part of a longer quote of Pennebaker's discussing his debt to Ellington and musicians as a whole.

"I feel in debt to Ellington and instinctively to all musicians,” Pennebaker would later tell Stop Smiling magazine. “They taught me my art. The very nature of film is musical, because it uses time as a basis for its energy. It needs to go from here to there, whereas pictures and paintings are just there. With movies, you’re putting something together that’s not going to be totally comprehensible until the end. It’s the concept of the novel and the sonnet — you need to get to the end, to see if you like it and decide what it’s about. With stills, there’s always the same instant, frozen and beguiling, but lifeless. A single note. With film, the moment doesn’t hold — it rushes by, and you must deal with it like you do music and real life.”

 

entertainment

Well-known member
I have always thought the essence of film lies in the cut. I think it is in the juxtaposition of two disparate elements that meaning is filled out by the viewer.

Obviously films are different and this is not the only way they can work on you. But I don't think of them as continuous or whole structures as I do with music.
 

luka

Well-known member
i did a really good thread on the cut but no one understood it it was amazing
 

version

Well-known member
I have always thought the essence of film lies in the cut. I think it is in the juxtaposition of two disparate elements that meaning is filled out by the viewer.

Obviously films are different and this is not the only way they can work on you. But I don't think of them as continuous or whole structures as I do with music.

There's an Abel Ferrara interview where he mulls over the importance of the space between frames.

We’re going from actual film, the shadow of silver—because at the end of the day, man, you don’t know if you’re getting the same “whammy” watching a digital image as you do when you watch 35mm. Pick some kind of movie that tons of people have seen—something like Treasure of the Sierra Madre, just for argument’s sake. Everybody has some lock in that movie and it’s deep in some people, and maybe you can’t get that in digital. When you watch a 35mm print in the movie theatre, it’s stopping for 1/24th of a second. It’s not going smooth. It’s stopping and its going “click, click, click.” That’s why it’s making that sound. But at the end of the day, the space between those images, when you watch a 35mm movie in a dark cinema, the audience in a 90-minute or 2-hour film, the audience is actually only sitting in the dark for maybe ten minutes of that. Because of the space in-between those frames. That’s not happening in a digital movie. You’re being assaulted by a constant stream of zeroes and ones—that’s where the title for the new one came from.

So maybe in that dark is where the movie is really playing, when you get back to the dream state. You get what I mean? And you’ve got a group of people accepting that. So can you ever get that if you’ve got, like, Treasure of the Sierra Madre sitting in a 300-seat house in 1935 or whenever the fuck? That negative is loaded with silver—you’re seeing the shadow of precious metal. You’re going to get that now? Who knows? I hope so.


 

version

Well-known member
i did a really good thread on the cut but no one understood it it was amazing
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I have always thought the essence of film lies in the cut. I think it is in the juxtaposition of two disparate elements that meaning is filled out by the viewer.

Obviously films are different and this is not the only way they can work on you. But I don't think of them as continuous or whole structures as I do with music.
Yeah viewer's subjective association between discrete images is fundamental to film, but also the effective glitch in our sensory cognition where discrete frames shifting at a fast enough frequency is indistinguishable from "actual" motion.
 
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