Film Criticism vs Music Criticism

it's ok for everyone to have an opinion about music, because music is the property of the masses. it's convenient, accessable and disposable. films are big long bulky complicated animals, so there;s a perceived need for people (often sporting novelty facial hair) to tell us whether they're any cop ot not.

I don't know shit about cultural crit. so bear with me. But it seems to me that the biggest difference between film and rock crit. has to do with the nature of the mediums. Films, 99% of which are tied to a story, are much more structured. There is a setup, tension builds, and then there is some kind of a payoff. With such apparent structure, film crit. usually centers around how "successful" the film is in delivering on the formula. Music crit. doesn't have the narrative to dissect, so it becomes much more subjective. I think the kind of film that one could write about in the manner of subjective music crit. would be the plotless collage like "Baraka" or "Koyaanisqatsi." You look at these films and the only real question is "How did it make me feel?"

I would like to ask why films are any different than novels when it comes to criticism, but perhaps they aren't.

I'm with you there Josh, but that's why I bought up the idea of theatre criticism (as a form of literary criticism) Oddly the criticism of plays often completely neglects the importance of staging. Film theory really is little more than this, which is why it was relatively simple to develop. There was merely the additional extras of production design and cinematography. Unlike literary criticism, in film theory the staging is as important as the script.

Pop music criticism could be developed in this way out of poetry criticism. Whilst some of us would probably suggest that an awful lot of pop would be held as pretty poor poetry, there is the additional aspects of the performance and the music, all which work with the lyrics to create an overall effect.

Possibly an interesting way to go - though I could certainly see why in general we would not want to go down that particular road. After all, my piece was having a bit of a go at the received wisdom of film criticism.

This subject interests me though. May write more....

Mark, Peter Greenaway once said that cinema is too rich a medium to leave to the storytellers. He also said that to fully appreciate his films you have to be prepared to study them like a painting (which really involves repeated viewings). I can sympathise with this in principle, but frankly, I like a story. Without one, a visually experimental film has to be pretty stunning, or a 'intellectual puzzle' partially understandable to me on first viewing (as, I think Greenaway manages with 'A Draughtsman's Contract') for me to like it. Non-narrative cinema makes me think of stultifyingly dull short films in galleries. Should that sort of stuff be reviewed by cinema critics? Or should Greenaway films be left to art critics?

Josh, there should definitely be more "across the board" criticism (i.e. comparing novels to films or films to albums), but one shouldn't expect to measure one medium against the other- -for instance, to expect a film to "do" everything a novel can, or vice-versa. One shouldn't forget what the original context is and what the auteur's intentions seem to have been. That said, it's about time people started seeing the influence of recorded music in films and books, the way novels have been scrutinized through a cinematic lens, as it were, ever since film directors started influencing authors (and of course the reverse).

I'm sad that this thread doesn't have more responses, and that Mark Sinker isn't on it. That's all I have time to say right now - just posting to keep this thing high on the board.

OK, then: is the record producer really analogous to the film director? Compare and contrast.

Partial ans to xyz's first bit: no.
Partial ans to overall thread q: film studies = something you can do at college. Record studies = not.

I think (?) what I meant by my post above was, aren't the critical tools available (and used) for film and literary criticism mostly the same? I don't know much about the state of film criticism, on the theoretical side, but I assume there's some analogue to New Criticism (close-"reading" a film, though probably not with all the pro-agrarian bullshit), psychoanalytic criticism (especially given psychoanalysis's vogue ca. 50s and 60s. when film was expanding rapidly), deconstruction (witness, even, cod deconstructions offered up by filmmakers themselves, "Deconstructing Harry"), etc. etc. etc. The two forms share the emphasis on narrative, and usually some kind of representation of reality (the former not integral to music, I think, and the latter arguably only part of music in much less important ways).

Idea (not sure what I think of it): what if music criticism has (historically) bended more toward accepting subjective responses because music has, at a mainstream enough level, and for whatever (legion, I suppose) reasons, been more radical? Mainstream enough, because literature and film have had radical innovations, I'm sure, but lots of the radical ones aren't accepted so readily. The idea being that this radicalness (radicality?) is damaging to or threatens somehow critical objectivity (a notion that I think is backed up by the critical revisions or development of new "objective" critical responses that have followed a lot of the developments in all the arts since, oh, Mozart's time). This might have something to do with the radical elements in music being a lot easier to "get". Not sure.

I've always thought that lit crit. could learn a great deal from music criticism. Even brent's ott review of radiohead would be a breath of fresh air in the ivory halls of academia. Meanwhile, music crit could learn from film crit. I mean, most music crit. is crap and actually very similar to the film review industry in terms of blanket assessment. On the other hand, auteur and genre theory, both from the film crit. side, are marvelous critical tools which could give pop music its proper place in the pantheon. "Subjective" music crit. is sometimes ok, and occasionally brilliant, but too often transforms into would be Greil Marcus figures waiting for the world to invert.

I think the word "subjective" is not at all self-explanatory (in fact I think it's flat-out wrong, by which I mean misleading and close to useless in practically any discourse - but that's not a subject worth going into). I suggest you all scotch it and replace with words that have more meaning to you.

The original Aramaic versions of the Bible contain the following passage: "And Moses and Aaron did so, as the Lord commanded; and he lifted up the rod, and smote the waters that were in the river, in the sight of Pharoah, and in the sight of his servants; and all the waters that were in the river were turned to film theory. And the fish that were in the river died; and the river stank, and the Egyptians could not drink of the water of the river; and there was film theory throughout all the land of Egypt." For some reason, almost all English translations get this wrong.

Agreed on "subjective". That word was giving me trouble even as I was posting my last post. I take it to mean criticism which examines emotional responses of the critic. The other problem is that film crit/music crit/lit crit each cover such a large spectrum. I find much film theory to be impenitrable crap (a friend of mine is doing a thesis on Deluze on film, and he's an obvious offender). At the same time, there seems to be in some cases (genre and auteur theory, primarily) a willingness to treat "pop" objects with some respect and to go beyond simply personal responses into more "scientific" avenues of inquiry (largely by holding a work up against an established body and examining the social conditions of the audience). Dellio's review of Blink struck me as not simply a "subjective" review for this reason, as it actually sought THROUGH his personal response, to find a connection to the target demo of 13 yr. old boys, and thus to enable broader communication of both the content of the music, as well as its social significance. What I meant above is that lit. crit needs to get shaken up by some fannish appreciation of the good stuff, which is admittedly difficult in a field where I find so much to be undistinguished and interchangable, even the "experimental" stuff feeling experimental in a way that hasn't changed since '71 or so. I mean... where are the lit. crit. examinations of Danielle Steel? And why do the examinations that DO exist of Le Carre put me to sleep? Music crit, on the other hand, seems to have far too unserious a "hackwork" quality often, feeling phoned in and unadventerous, granted featuring personal respones, but responses which feel dictated by career considerations to the extent that they're either lukewarm or generic. The Wire, meanwhile, all too often feels simply irrelavent.

Personally, I was aware of what I meant when I wrote "subjective" - and also was aware that it wouldn't be clear. Yet I FORGED ON.

Well, for that, Sterl, go back to mark's post. Lit crit = done academically, more or less (the other places often being to-whatever-degree intellectual outlets that are mostly distinguished from academia by their lack of scholarship). Popular music crit = barely done academically at all, done journalistically. Academic writing = stultifying deadening suffocating.

Yes. Well aware. But journalistic writing also often = stultifying, done at beck and call of marketing machines and soforth. I think that there's something to be learned bothways, although the good stuff tends to pop up mainly in the margins anyway, on the internet, in fanzines, in the music pages of ladmags like Gear.

Well, no disagreement here. What was the question again? :)

I think Mark S's abbreviation-as-humility = classic.

Politics of vision and seeing = much theorized. Theories of sound, even in film—not so much. Not only Lacan/psychiatry but Foucault and so much else is about looking! Cuts, edits - film cottons to it. In a simplistic kind of we're-just-now-trying-to-learn-this simile. Nevertheless, accusations (kinda rightly) of "subjectivity" in music criticism, or no rational texts to which to refer. And the criticism which has found a place in our (by "our in mean "my"!) hearts = shamelessly subjective, and often willfuly naive.

check: "Audio/Vision" by Michel Chion, about audio's alliances/willed iconic accomplices in relation to an image or frame. The book's about film and not "music" (as a sound on some thing you buy, or a group of instrumentalists) but very interesting stuff having to do with the "secondary" nature of audio itself. When you watch a film, for example, even if there's a blank screen, and sounds, perhaps narrative ones (as in Derek Jarman's "Blue") the sounds still appear in relation to that visual frame, even if it's empty.

It occurs to me that my superstitious search for a "Ruling Idea" in my attitude towards music is like a longing for a visual referent for the sounds I hear, unseen, creeping up on me like on Neitszche - "behind my back"!!

All right, everybody step into the screening room, please, for one more showing of Godard's "1 + 1" ("Sympathy For The Devil").

After the showing, there will be coffee and laptops in the reception room. Question Number One: What means this dialectical juxtaposition of Situationist ranting and Mick/Keith hashing it out in the studio? Could Godard be more obvious? Would you rather sit home alone with your copy of "Beggars' Banquet" or go out and change the world?

Replace Beggars' Banquet with Rodan's Rusty, and then we have a real question.

If you keep plugging that album one day I'm going to try and actually like it.

The type of film theory that I hate: the sort that claims to describe the "nature" of the film "medium" and claims to be the theoretical foundation for making movies and for criticizing them. Even worse are claims that there's a theory of meaning (or of signification or of language) which provides the foundation for a critical method.

The auteurists are my favorite film critics: I swipe from Sarris and Farber all the time, and Otis Ferguson is as big an inspiration for me as Bangs and Meltzer and Dylan and Jagger and Johansen are, with a similar intellectual impact. But as far as auteurism having anything to do with theory - well, as someone once said about Sarris, "He doesn't have a theoretical bone in his body." And Bazin's theoretical bones were wobbly and laughable, like horrorhouse skeletons you'd find in an old Buster Keaton two-reeler. That said, Bazin's theoretical ideas may have helped as well as hindered him; that is, I think he's being silly in thinking that Welles's deep focus and Rossellini's long takes were inherently "realistic," but nonetheless in using Welles and Rossellini to illustrate his theories he also looked very hard at how those guys actually made movies, looked way beyond just plot and dialogue to show how the particular choices - cameras, setups, lighting, editing - told stories and expressed attitudes. Here's an example:

"In the admirable final episode [in *Paisan*] of the partisans surrounded in the marshlands, the muddy waters of the Po Delta, the reeds stretching away to the horizon, just sufficiently tall to hide the men crouching down in the little flat-bottomed boat, the lapping of the waves against the wood, all occupy a place of equal importance with the men. This dramatic role played by the marsh is due in great measure to deliberately intended qualities in the photography. This is why the horizon is always at the same height. Maintaining the same proportions between water and sky in every shot brings out one of the basic characteristics of this landscape. It is the exact equivalent, under conditions imposed by the screen, of the inner feeling men experience who are living between the sky and the water and whose lives are at the mercy of an infinitesimal shift of angle in relation to the horizon." [from "An Aesthetic of Reality" in *What Is Cinema* Vol. 2]

Anyway, the various theoretical questions that used to bedevil me - Is Rossellini showing something about the world, or is he asserting something about the world? Is this world THE world or a world that he's created (and wouldn't that be part of the world too, albeit a part that's only on celluloid?). He's showing not only a world but an attitude towards it, but what is Rossellini DOING in relation to the audience? What's the audience's role in constructing this image? Etc. etc. - these aren't stupid questions, but the only answers they lead to are vague platitudes (Yes, Rossellini is making something as well as showing something, and he's not only showing something to an audience, he's doing something to the audience, etc.), and they don't give you any guidance on how to actually understand what Rossellini shows/does or how an audience sees and uses what they've seen. Whereas the actual passage I quoted - which was not theoretical - can be a model for how to look at other movies (even very different ones), and maybe by extension how to listen to what guitar players and record producers do [say, if the musicimakers hadn't put this beat here, would the effect have been different? What is the relation between this musician and that, and the music's relation to me] and so forth. The point is, you've got to be specific. In a sense, Bazin used his generally useless theories as racks on which to hang good criticism. For all I know, Deleuze and Zizek and all those guys I avoid do the same; it's just been my experience of the "discourse" that the buzz words and the platitudes have choked off the good stuff.

Relatively few attempts by academics/critics to construct a sociology of listening in comparison to the large amount of attention paid to the sociology of watching by film/cultural theorists. Music theory/criticism seems to be much more grounded in textual analysis - what/how does this signify - than audience based - who is being addressed/'constituted' by the text, how is the text 'decoded'/'used' by its audience. Partial exception, the Hebdige school of overreaching subcultural theorising (punk as system of resistance etc.) Too often music critics assume that a) they know exactly WHO is listening to S Club 7 etc., and b) that a study of the 'text' can BY ITSELF tell us all we need to know about the listener. Suspect that a much more in-depth study of music audiences would challenge a great many of our 'taken-for-granted' assumptions abt the 'use value' of pop.

Well, I think that Bangs and Meltzer and Eddy and me and Frith (of course) ______ are always doing a sociology of listening (among other things). So's a lot of ILM. We just don't call it that.

SINKER SUPERSEDES SONG: New Photoplay Technology Relegates Composer To Second Fiddle

OK, Mark, you're writing the book on technology, so I'm going to come at you with some provocative statements.

For music (and the movies, obviously), the most important technological developments in the last 100 years are the invention of the motion pictures, sound recording, and the microphone. (I know, technically they go back more than 100 years, but their practical application doesn't.) These inventions are far more important than synths or samplers or electric guitars.

The actual result of this technology: an increased emphasis on PERSONALITY - this could be the guitarist's or sax player's or producer's or director's or cinematographer's, but most important is the actor's or singer's. And if you're an even-more-important behind- the-scenes auteur, like a Spector or a Ford, the singers and the actors are your medium, to a big extent anyway. Personality is your business.

(1) Film and records capture aspects of performance (and therefore performers' styles and idiosyncrasies) that were already important but had previously been lost to history.

(2) Film and records vastly increase the capacity to visually and aurally create personality.

(3) The microphone allows an Astaire to beat a Caruso, a Diana Ross to defeat an Aretha Franklin, an Eminem to beat a Cassandra Wilson.

(4) Singing styles, like acting styles, have evolved towards more naturalism. (I think so, anyway. And I don't mean that the styles *are* more natural, just that they appear that way.)

(5) That the technology was used in this way, that it's had this result - personality! personality! personality! - isn't written into the technology.

(6) Myself, I'm more interested in the consumers' personalities than the performers' (you know, interested in the dancer, the listener, the T-shirt wearer, the social interaction they engage in to create their personalities), but consumers' personalities don't make their way into the historical record, usually, unless the consumers write down their personalities, or someone films them.

Thoughts — not to say 30,000 word chapters — on all of these, but bedtime comes first.

Frank, it almost feels as if you're TAUNTING us somehow by throwing out so many good ideas.

Obvious other aspect of these technologies: simultaneous decreased emphasis on performance (increased emphasis on sonic artifacts). I suspect there's a great tension there.

Which is sorta your (1) but I think it's interesting to think of the personality/artifact things as two majorly opposed factors.

Artifacts = key way to interface with listeners, because it pulls them out of that lost-to-history moment.

Yeah. Benjamin was wrong -- mechanical reproduction ENHANCES aura, rather than distances. This is arguably a bad thing, as Benjamin hoped the reverse effect would be radically democratizing. But actually, I'd argue that the increase of aura, personality, et cet. to the point where a group we SAW THEM MAKE (aka O-Town) can nonetheless cause fans to scream 'till faint... anyway there's a different democritization going on -- aura is not inaccesibility, but rather accessability, and thus cultural-obsessions can be a stage in personal development rather than a roadblock. Further, the less creative work ppl have time to do these days, the more convienient it is for personality, et cet. to be prepackaged for us, eh?

So glad to see you people turning in amazing theses. Wish I were half so clever. Such refreshing ideas, I hope you'll collaborate on a book.

This is cribbed from my college thesis about early radio, which in turn was largely cribbed from "Discourse Networks" by Friedrich Kittler. Excuse the tone.

'A phonograph was a "record," and its early imaginings focused not on keeping a dance hall moving (there were live bands for that), but on its ability to halt the transience of sound into a frozen blueprint. The phonograph was a binding of both negative and positive functions of the body into a fetish-like object--the particularities of a certain speaker's voice or the full reverberation of an orchestra were transcribed graphically with a stylus. This document was then mass-producable, and portable between times and places; as such it was a public document.

'The kinds of things recorded on phonographs reflected this publicity. Music considered to be the height of culture (Bach, etc.), as well as voice records of writers like Robert Browning, were captured and written onto disc. From its very inception the phonograph was an cultural artifact, whose public import was such that it was treated as a museum piece, a little chunk of authenticity. Some even predicted "voice museums," where alongside portraits of public personae a phonograph would play their personal legacy, their instructions to peoples of the future. The phonograph enabled a national memory whose contours could be repeated and replayed again and again. The nation's dead could speak with this machine.'

At the time, film was purely visual, like seeing thru the eyes of a child - just impressions of light and shadow. A record, on the other hand, was WORDS, MUSIC, the substance of the rational sphere. My point in the above para. is that the rational sphere gets complicated by this sonic exposure: purportedly free from quirks, irregularities, accents, colors, in short, free from BODIES, composed entirely of TEXTS (like this bulletin board), suddenly there's a whole new kind of text that is MADE of bodies and their particularities, and unnervingly free from the seer/seen power dynamic of the moving image. Um, more to say, specially in re: Frank's right-on dismissal of tech-as-autonomous-actor but I must go look at storage spaces.

Josh – Why would increasing the emphasis on artifacts decrease the emphasis on performance? What it does is enshrine the "performance" on the artifact as the defining performance. E.g., suppose Charley Patton's "Mississippi Boll Weevil Blues" is an atypical performance – which it might well be, since he never did a song the same way twice, and sometimes made them up on the spot (though not that one). As far as history is concerned, the version on record IS the performance, and the personality on record is the personality (combined with whatever the perceiver brings to the interaction, of course). Modern technology, though, increases the opportunity for people who are not the (official) performer to modify the performance, often way after the fact – to create the performer's performance, to create the performer's public personality, sometimes long after the fact. There are too many p's in this paragraph. Peter Piper perceived a peck of pickled paragraphs. All this can cause tension between the performer and the artifact, but not between the performance and the artifact. The artifact is the performance. So there's tension between the performer and the performance, the performer and her personality. But the audience doesn't get to see this tension, since the performer they see is the one that the performance shows. (Just as you can't see the tension between me and what I write. You think that everything is hunky-dory.)

I'm not sure what (if any) implication this has for criticism, except that movie and music criticism can have a lot in common. Ongoing question: What can music criticism and movie criticism learn from each other? I'll think about this and about the other posts on here later. Need to take a nap now. (Further INFLUENCE of Sinker: We start copying his excuses.)

Something I am always a little baffled by is the idea that Greil Marcus was inspired to start writing the way he did by the example of Pauline Kael. To me, Kael is one of the great enigmas of supposedly classic criticism: I've tried (and tried) but I just don't see it. I find her writing prolix, tendentious and a little supercilious. Yet lots of people I like worship her. Can anyone explain?

I wish there were someone writing about music the way David Thomson writes about film. (I've banged on about Thomson elsewhere round these parts, I know). The archival knowledge, the flights of fancy, the cultural phenomenology, the stylistic poise. I'm not sure what you could *learn* from him, thought, apart from his subtlety and his example. I'd love to read a book about a pop record that is as rich in its analysis as Thomson on The Big Sleep or The Alien Quartet.

I think everything is Young Americans, Frank. Must go SLEEP now.

Frank: I phrased that badly (I knew what I meant though!). Recordings have acted against "performance" of a certain kind, the idea for music-dissemination. It's the time- and space-shifting properties of recordings which allow that to happen; I guess I'm not really sure if I want to say that those things are due to recordings' being artifacts. But the way people engage with recordings-as-artifacts reinforces/bolsters the effect recordings (due to advances in production/musicmaking/etc made easy by recording tech) have on the music-is-performance notion.

Related issue: advent of production tools as shifting focus away from "chops" to craft. Peckenpah's Wild Bunch was considered spectacular for the NUMBER of cuts at the time, now anyone can do that, and must be considered spectacular for EFFECT of cuts. Similarly with ProTools -- what makes a diva great if not her chops, we are now compelled to focus on more complex issues because chops have been EQUALIZED. Response = Inverse Harrison Bergeson fear?
Conversely, we might argue that the advent of recording tech led to a GREATER emphasis on chops, b/c now there was an ability to place ppl. from all over against one another -- world's greatest guitarist, most beautiful person, et cet. would have been rubbish terms prior to mass reproduction.
Thus the effects of mass media and the ability to alter media tend to run counter to one another.
Another example -- photograph/film became the "Definitave" truth, and now with alteration technology, are called into question as BEGGING to be faked.

I wouldn't say chops have been equalized. But technology has made it more tenable/exciting/interesting to ignore chops.

Okay really quick because it really is getting on, old boy. Foolishly broad hypothesis: technology doesn't "make" anything. Doesn't make revolutions in music, it doesn't make certain things easier or harder. WE make things. Technology. WE make things easier, or more layered, or whatever. 4-tracks don't do demographic polling, or demand respect, PEOPLE do. It's tempting to speak of technology - protools, etc. - as this homunculus born an actor on the cultural stage, standing in people's light, changing the script. But we write the script. So if we want to "ignore chops" for the sake of something else, it's us doing that, not the technology leading us that way. Where technology has a direct effect on peoples' thinking at large is when it's directly integrated into their daily lives, like the telephone or record player. The telephone got people accustomed to interruptions, private conversations in public, a disjointed sense of time and space. The phonograph allowed people to own a method of replaying specific instances of a body's symptoms - the noise you might make when you speak or sing, the sore throat Robert Browning had that morning, captured forever, like a photograph. What I hear youse guys saying is that recording technology evolved to complicate this simple unfettered authenticity, producing noises and songs that no person or instrument could make, which I think Josh is saying re- valorizes live performance -- the gritty, unadorned nature of it. Sooo what started as the ultimate expression of naked reality, a sound recording, has come to represent the manufactured/mediated end of the spectrum. But its other attributes have not been lost. It's still a bridge, a link to another time and place; often, as with hip hop, a link to a world of people, fashions, and lifestyle that can't be matched any other way. (except by going to the CLUB yer damn self) -- I am not sure I know what I am talking abt any longer so good NIGHT

I didn't think I was saying that but I rather like that too.

So what's "the way people engage with recordings-as-artifacts reinforces/bolsters the effect recordings... have on the music-is- performance notion" mean?

A technological development: the pencil, an eraser attached. With the pencil, I can put my words on page. With the help of the eraser, I can revise those words before you ever see them. Would this fact make you value my conversation over my writing? (I don't see why it would.) I think this would vary from individual: whether or not his conversation was more interesting than his writing. There are no generalizations to make.

In some circumstances, other people have the technical means to change what I write, even without my permission. Again, whether the result is more interesting or less depends on the circumstances, the magazine, the editor, the readers as various people imagine them. (In conversation I can be inhibited or inspired by the people in the room, and what I know or imagine about them. And I may have rehearsed what to say; or I may be following instructions. Perhaps I am under the control of aliens.)

Film criticism versus rock criticism: Are they produced in different circumstances? If so, what are the differences? Do they have different goals? Different conventions? If so, why?

Technical advances in plastic surgery have increased the importance of surgeons' chops in the presentation of self.

Surgeon statement = true. Also, the phrase "surgeon's chops" is top!

Erm, I'm way behind on this: I spent this evening cooking not thinking, cut myself TWICE, and got chili up my nose, which has only just stopped HURTING. Sterling is wrong about aura, but only because he means something difft than Benjamin did.

The invention we should all be considering is the MICROSCOPE.

The first wave of recorded performances were dominated by minstrelsy and cultural mimicry ("Cohen on the Phone" = second or third million-seller). Recording tec coincided with a surge in mediumism, and a parallel surge in ventriloquism.

Personality is the ectoplasm of the documentary arts. I have been fighting Doomintroll all evening and am unlikely to make sense for some while.

Microscope. Explain please. Tracer's prognostication: the realization that world is more than what our eyes can confirm for us. Re: ventriloquism - this is from a PR brochure for an AT&T exhibit at the 1927 "Century of Progress" exhibition in Chicago:

Those who heard the demonstration took special seats around a balcony rail and faced a small glass-enclosed stage... For each ear there was provided a telephone receiver, about the size of a thick English muffin and in shape adapted to a cupped palm... On the stage, facing away from the audience, was a tailor's dummy—Oscar III, The Dummy with the Microphonic Ears. In his plaster head, where his ears should have been, were two unusual telephone transmitters. The one corresponding to his right ear connected to the right hand receiver of each observer... Similarly, the transmitter on his left side connected by a different telephone line to all the left hand receivers. Each member of the audience heard, therefore, exactly what Oscar should have heard; each was acoustically in Oscar's place on the sound-proof stage. An actor entered and addressed a monologue to Oscar; but if you were an observer it was around you that he walked and to you that he spoke. After explaining the connection of the transmitters and receivers he drew the curtain. Then, without your eyes to undeceive you, you were actually in Oscar's place... A little rambling patter by the actor to throw you off your guard, a pause, and then right at your feet someone picked up a jingling bunch of keys and inquired, "Are these yours?"

Eyes are confirmers of rationality, the ears a doorway to magic. And let's face it, a muffin that relays sounds over a distance = supernatural!!

"Consumers' personalties don't make their way onto the public record": yes they do. Shape of careers of Armstrong, Elvis, the Beatles, Bowie [insert a hundred others here] = arguing out of received technics of performance with what they absorbed as consumers, how they behaved as consumers. "Being artists" and "being entertainers" always kept in tension with thmselves as (a) walking libraries of their fandom (b) jiving jukeboxes of their own fandom (c) enabled critics of their own fandom (latter less common, explicitly: of four named above, only Armstrong properly achieved it: tho of course HIS fandom was undertaken before record technology created-invented jazz or blues, so he had something much less intense to pull against).

Microscopes: any ordinary buffoon with a CD player can hear a Beethoven piano sonata hundreds if not thousands of time more than Beethoven himself ever heard it. Depth immersion even in music you MAY NOT LIKE is unimaginable compared to 100 years back.

Re: more than our eyes hitherto grasped. Brecht (big wonky infulence of Benamin) liked one particular thing abt movies; that they were a great big source-book of how we ACTUALLY move, not how we THINK we move (ie until Meuybridge, all thought horses' hooves left ground when they galloped: after him, world say that even at top speed horse, like man, always keeps one hoof on ground — except obviously when hurdling jumping etc...)

Anyway, for Brecht, this would be a great DEMYSTIFICATION of technique: of acting as spell-binding. Benjamin sort of concurs (he talks abt bike messengers picking over the movie they saw the night before), but is MUCH more conflicted. Cuz the actuality is conflicted: bikeboys adopt the technique, mimic it, add to it, play with it, same feeds back [x] years later (sometimes via bikeboy- turned-heart-throb [y]) into movie actor language. Our icons are allowed to be icons for being NO BETTER THAN US.

Second "microscope/magnification" effect: The *speed* of the play, the mutation, is also intensified (I *know* Frank doesn't hear this claim, but rap english is now very very far from — say — BBC Received Pronunc'n as understood in say 1966, ie within my or Kogan's lifetime: further, *I* think, than textbook Spanish is say from textbook Italian).

Sinker is right about Benjamin, I realized this yesterday and slapped myself. His sort of aura was destroyed, but it's hard to imagine what that aura was ever like. The new aura which replaced it is just as strong if not stronger, and different in character precisely because of democratizing potential. Sinker is also right about dialectic between icon/fan -- This is clearly a result of massization, where influence can spread quickly, masses can mutate it quickly, and (notably) somehow it takes a bit before it gets picked up again, prolly because distillation is harder than dilution, entropywise.

Different circumstances in film and music production NARROWING as music becomes a collective act -- producers are now more often teams than individuals (even Timba works in close collab with chosen recording engineer, & often with Missy) and albums tend towards collective rather than individual products. Difference between solo & group acts now more like films as star vehicles or ensamble cast. Precisely then, it is auteur theory which aids us in comprehending a governing idea over an album with input of 30+ foax. Mise en Scene equiv. these days to job of executive producer, often. This is less evident in rock as bands like lifehouse, et cet. can recreate their albums roughly in a live context. Also, there are some albums whose governing idea is simply the market and what it desires. Get it? Money binds pop-culture to the masses. Thus the most direct choice the masses exert is with their dollars -- not a fully unconstrained choice, granted, but nonetheless an ability if not to chose what is produced, then at least what is popular. This is not to say that QUALITY is selected for, but rather ETHOS must REFLECT.

Also, production trix in music = much LESS of a selling point than Special F/X in films. Explosions sell better than Korgs. Film also has screenwriter as seperate dept.

Also, hip-hop and r&b videos are at the leading edge of the creation of a new cinematic form. Has anyone seen the Tank video? See it! Plot starts as get it on r&b thing, then transforms into kung-fu action item, complete with motorbike and explosion. This is nonsensical outside of the "cinematic sampling" taking place not through direct sampling but skillful visual reference. Simultaneously emergent are rap concept albums that are beginning to work (prince paul's Prince Among Thieves) and now we are presented with the dilemma -- should we begin to treat music more like cinema? Or have we been remiss in not treating cinema more like music?

Also, I disagree with Sinker's point about Brecht and Demystification. Why? Well try to demystify through repetition the opening chords to California Girls. Impossible! Repetition creates the NEW aura, as we are not only Brian Wilson, but we are all the movies who have used that song and all the commercials who have used that song and that time we played that song and had great sex and that time that et cet. Thus it transforms from pop culture into FOLK culture. Enduring disposability as a trait all pop works aspire to. And thus while we are increasingly able to analyze those opening bars of California Girls, we are stymied by trying to explain the resonance which now extends much further than any innate musical characteristics. I hear powerhouse and think bugs bunny = causal reversal. The softer I hear powerhouse, or in the fainter snatch I hear it, the MORE I think bugs bunny = paradoxical phase.

Not that I said this at all clearly, but my pt abt Brecht & demystification was meant to be that he was kinda wrong. (Plus — to be fair to Brecht — I think he meant that the demystification would happen on-stage, not on film: so repetition not in the equation). Benjamin saw something else going on also, so his versh is in tension (but not fully worked out).

FX on as selling points records: mightn't these be music stuff we just don't any longer THINK of as "fx" (eg "explosions" = elec.guitar distortion?). Matt Black of Coldcut used to talk abt the core of a dance record being "a stupid noize to grab your head". Which would be a "hook" (tho prob. not a melodic/verbal one). Isn't 'Acid Trax', for example, perhaps *all* "explosion" and no "plot" or "character"?

Brecht argues for demystification as conscious act, not technological byproduct. Which makes the relationship to this discussion complicated. As for "explosions" in pop -- compare Hong Kong martial arts flix where the entirety of the character is captured in their method of fighting, with US flix where a gunshot is just a gunshot, an explosion interchangable with any other explosion. Which do musical noises more resemble?

I kind of think it's really easy to get ourselves confused (me, anyway): FX as selling point; are explosions even "FX" any more? (CGI dinosaurs are FX too...) And "explosions" = "noise", but an explosion ON a recording wouldn't necessarily be an "FX"? Matt's "stupid noise" needn't be an Attali- type noise: just some fuzzy-type synth setting. ("Wipe out!" on 'Wipe Out' is an FX, and a selling point, tho its FX-ness was not necessarily stressed at point of sale the way martial arts wd be...)

What is the equiv on a song of a film's story?

It is two minutes past two and I am old and have yoga tomorrow. That pillow looks very wickedly tempting.

What I mean, I guess, is that production fx on albums aren't selling points the same way visual fx are in films. And the more I think about it, the more I think that I'm wrong and that fx on albums DO = fx on films as a selling point. Also, the equiv of a film's "story" is an album's "concept"/artist's "personality".

So I think "FX" the way mark s. is using it = a noticeable intervention. Film uses special effects all the damn time but in the most unimaginative way possible: trying to push the envelope of professional seamlessness and realizm (jurassic park, etc.) - maybe the same way a Sade album does. Film has left unstarted an enormous project to blend photorealism and "noticeable interventions"; it's not within spitting distance of popular music in this dept. We have been remiss in making film not more like music. I loved the end of Irma Vep for its FX (new-style definition). Stan Brakhage. The part in Pulp Fiction when Uma draws a square with her fingers and it appears on screen, the Ikea scene in Fight Club. Still I feel that these instances are akin to my old complaint abt Stereolab, that they only use the really weird noises as intros and outros (like the opening credits of movies, where "anything is possible" and then we gots to get down to business..!)

Re: demystification -- "Technological byproduct" EQUALS a conscious act. Or that is my hypothesis (ibid). I vaguely remember Ren and Stimpy's creator ranting about terrible cartoons that made no effort to exploit the malleable reality made possible by the medium they were in. I think that has bearing on this conversation somehow. Basically that demystifying an organic whole is a result of the will to do so. Muybridge did have to go out there and set up all his little cameras. Tiny Toons still sucks even though it's in the same medium as the Simpsons. I feel that I am doing terrible violence to the essence of your arguments and mine so I'll stop now. Though I am quite awake.

Final Fantasy the Movie: as if someone released "Deep Forest", re- recorded with the most powerful Kurzweils on the market at a cost of millions -- and it comes out sounding stiff and awkward.

Hey! I grew up on tiny toons, among other things. Uh. I think we're all doing violence right now with the strained analogies I started. Not that there might not be something interesting to dig for.

So, new related question -- "naturalism" in film vs. music: the most important thing to learn about images is that the camera pretends to tell the "truth" but is as manipulable as anything. Hence, demystification of film undertaken as conscious act by french new wave, not byproduct of film. So the camera urges naturalism but does the recording studio? I think we expect noise to be purely synthetic these days, that the origins of music in the speech act made rhythmic are already fractured in perception, perhaps even that we are better equipped to handle a variety of sonics than a variety of visual stimuli. Perhaps our visual recognition system becomes set earlier in life and has a slower learning curve.

Also, unrelated, on the film vs. music thing, music can accompany life, while the concept of an "ambient" film has not been truly explored. (Ambience, on the other hand, is the WHOLE POINT of 57.3% of TV.) Thus music massizes through repition as much as quantity of audience, wheras film for the most part relies on its wide cultural reach. Also, folk-culture aspects stronger in music than film, also due to pervasiveness of ACTUAL MUSIC as opposed to pervasiveness of DISCOURSE W/R/T FILM.

If I had something to do it on I would leave movies running in the background. Predictably, arty-type stuff though. I have done this a few times in the past when I had a TV available and found it very interesting.

[Tracer: I meant the effect to be negative. Listeners engaging with recordings as solely such, not trying or needing to connect them to live performances, strengthens the effect that anti-performance production developments have on the "music is performance" mode. Admittedly this may not make sense despite any of my efforts to rephrase.]

Reviving thread.

I think this "how does nu-aura differ from old-aura" question is still interesting.

Tracer Hand's point about salient FX (artisans flaunting their ingenuity) being deemed appropriate for certain parts of movies and in certain fashions, but deemed taboo for others. "Auterist" movies in Hollywood create tension here, since a PT Anderson or Tarantino movie will flaunt its "virtuosity" (in quotes simply because this notion of virtuosity is bound by a certain understanding of art and craft) almost throughout and the audiences will recognize this an applaud. This would not be unthinkable in "Old Hollywood" but it was rare--Hitchcock got away with it, Ford too (in a v. different way), but few others. I've often wondered what this means for the future of Hollywood cinema. In a recent article David Bordwell says that the basic building blocks of Hollywood cinema haven't really become scattered/fractured as some critics say (in approval or remonstration)--that the classical codes are still in place but are "intensified"--i.e. stylistic moves that would be reserved for pivotal emotional moments in older movies (for example the subtle push-in when Joel McCrea is trapped in the cliffs in Colorado Territory, dir. Raoul Walsh) are used constantly in new Hollywood movies. Bordwell does agree this is ultimately somewhat limiting and may in fact suggest that the general lamenting about Hollywood has some basis in fact and isn't just intellectuals vs. the people. But he also warns against claiming that movies are less intelligible, or less fluent, than before.

Frank: way upthread you write,

The type of film theory that I hate: the sort that claims to describe the "nature" of the film "medium" and claims to be the theoretical foundation for making movies and for criticizing them. Even worse are claims that there's a theory of meaning (or of signification or of language) which provides the foundation for a critical method.

Who did you have in mind here? I'm curious.

Loathe as I am to zoom off on a tangent, as I did on the Kuhn thread on ILM, and despite my timidity to step into a thread of this intellectual quality (because I lack the artistic education and reading and intellect of the major participants here - I've loved reading it, I must emphasise)(and I wish Josh would come back here), but this touches on a major old area of interest of mine. I started a mag about comics back in 1981, and throughout the '80s I frequently talked about what I saw as the lamentable state of comic book criticism, especially in the UK.

Partly I was talking about low standards, but much of it was that comics criticism hadn't developed at all as a distinct form - the best writing was by people adapting slightly from reviewing books or films or something. Cinematic terminology was particularly levered in all over the place, to the point of cliche. The only place that seemed to be getting anywhere, in the English language, was the Comics Journal, and while I always admired that mag and aspired to its high standards (and I do think I did something to improve the craft of comic criticism in Britain, probably as an editor more than as a critic myself) I was uneasy with its old-fashioned high cultural assumptions. I would argue against that stance in lit or art crit, but it seemed especially inapt in a popular art form like comics. I explicitly referred to music writing a number of times back in those days. A blend of people writing serious academic critiques with a real understanding of critical methods and people ranting about political ideologies and others excited about the vigour and silliness of superheroes seemed far more desirable to me, and it's what I strived towards, I think with some success - but here I'm talking much more about attitude than about the critical toolkit.

There were a lot of things that were unique to the way comics worked that weren't covered by approaches transplanted from books and movies, much as those sources were valuable. The passage Frank quotes way upthread about Rossellini is a rewarding way to look at some comics, but of course there are other things to look at simultaneously that are unique to that form - where is the panel placed, how big, how does it realte to others, and on and on. I guess I'm saying that it worries me when people try to force parallels between the way of examining and talking about two differing artforms (except maybe in the earliest stages of developing a way of talking), because I think they are most often sources of error and misunderstanding, and they clutter the path to comprehending a form for what it is. Movies and music, despite certain similarities (I think demographics is a more important one than most that have been raised here), are such different forms that hardly any parallels sytike me as remotely useful. Cinema and comics and novels are storytelling forms, and therefore have substantial similarities, but music, like painting say, is not inherently (or is far less inherently) a storytelling form - and I say that as a big country (lowercase first letter on both words!) fan. Story is far more of an optional bolt-on in music (or painting) than it is in cinema, so I think the way we think about structure and pacing and meaning needs to be very different.

I think the purpose of music and the way it is consumed covers a very wide range of things. Much music has no narrative or meaning. I love some records for their stories and messages and ideas and the emotional content of their lyrics, but the absence or lack of appeal of these factors by no means makes a record uninteresting. A record can have appeal for a pretty tune and nice sound, or a driving, exciting beat or whatever. Nearly everyone values music to some degree, and they all have different relationships to it, and they use it in different ways and it does different things to their mood and feelings and it is involved in the way they relate to others in a variety of ways. I think all this is far less true of movies, which are consumed in two main ways (and both mainly involve sitting quietly facing the screen) and involve little or no interaction with others and don't accompany us on journeys or have the ambient role music does.

In conclusion my point seems to be that this is one of the best threads I've read in a while, and I think it's a pointless comparison because everything about the fields is too different to be worth the thought that everyone has put in, so apart from making a great thread we've all wasted our time...