I've just started reading a book I bought about a month ago entitled Film as a Subversive Art by Amos Vogel or, as I like to refer to it, The Bible by Amos Vogel. I'm a little pissed off that no one has ever mentioned this book to me and I had to find it on a shelf at a bookstore all on my own, but then, I'm pretty excited that I just found it all on my own. This is one of those discoveries you make once every two years or so, where you're sure it's going to have changed your entire life the moment you finish it. That is, unless you're a hopeless curmudgeon, unable to change. It's basically a compendium of movies sectioned out by themes pertaining to modern artistic movements. The only problem is that finding these damned things is a challenge in itself.
But here's a quote from Ionesco that's in the book that makes me pump my fist like a masturbating quarterback after winning the big game:
"I have never been able to understand the difference that is made between the comic and the tragic. As the comic is the intuition of the absurd, it seems to me more conducive to despair than the tragic. The comic offers no way out. I say 'conducive to despair,' but in reality it is beyond despair or hope... Humor makes us conscious with a free lucidity of the tragic or desultory condition of man... Laughter alone does not respect any taboo; the comic alone is capable of giving us the strength to bear the tragedy of existence."
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Film as a Subversive Art
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5 comments:
I've lately been thinking that all humor is somehow derived of the juxaposition between life and death, and we laugh when things get close to death but emerge living. Maybe the other way around too... this may be why I find abortion to be absolutely hysterical. I haven't really ironed out that theory though, so I'm sure I'm being far too reductive.
As to Deleuze's Cinema, no I am not but I am piqued. Tell me more.
i can tell you that abortion is very very sad, but if you want and/or need to live okay with it, you better learn to laugh about it.
same goes for death, i think.
and just about everything else that is connected to being a human being.
I don't feel abortion is an inherently sad act and, for that matter, that birth is inherently joyous. I think both things are neutral and the feelings one associates with them are entirely relative to the individual. But then, the insistence that babies are automatically a good thing confuses me more than just about anything in the world. I can see why people feel this way, but I disagree.
Oops, my misanthropy's showing.
i certainly agree that not every birth is joyous, but i figure most circumstances that ultimately lead to an abortion are in some way un-happy (rape, illness, the lack of means to offer the unborn a good life, etc.). so i wonder if you could find a woman who does not connect her abortion to some kind of sadness.
but then, i'm aware that this doesn't proof anything...
and i don't think you should mistake realism for misanthropy.
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