Home Theater Forum - View Single Post - Sight and Sound (2002) Greatest Films Club

Adam_S · 10-06-2007, 05:38 AM

Quote:

Do you really think Schindler's List is obscure and clear in the same moment? On the contrary, it's meaning, its resonance, its aspirations or modus operandi, is very clear to nearly every viewer. Everybody has the same experience watching that film.

I don't think I was agreeing to the idea that everyone needs to have a different experience as part of the obscure/clear concept of art. I believe I disagreed with your idea about art and an inchoate mass response.

I deliberately tossed out Schindler's List because I knew you would bite, but I didn't percieve a contradiction on the clear/obscure dialectic. I don't think that the synthesis achieved/journeyed with those qualifiers define art in totality. But I think it's a particularly powerful way that art often presents itself. You can't totalize art so simply. Welles was being anything but obscure in Citizen Kane, in the atmosphere of the 1940s, the movie was a perfectly clear echo of Hearst's life, and in many ways the framing conceit of 'Rosebud' mocks the whole idea of being obscure for art's sake--it was an injoke (a dirty injoke) to the writers to use that word, the word itself is meaningless, it's the ultimate macguffin, but Citizen Kane even without the knowledge of Hearst's life is every bit as searingly clear as is Schindler's List. Accessibility doesn't disqualify works from being art. At the same time you could argue that CK has the necessarily artistic/thematic obscurity to offer a potent commentary on the American ethos and man's conflict within himself, of success destroying the man. Or you could argue its about glorifying the profane and adulturous lifestyle of the wealthy (yes I've read that critique, it's ridiculous) or you can also argue that it's condemning that same lifestyle. On the other hand, there is Schindler's List, which does present a more subdued artistic/thematic obscurity, but it is still commenting on man's conflict with himself, and in many ways of success destroying the man (only this time it's a man who's been nothing but a failure, until he's given the handicap of slavery). the specific use of foils Goeth and Stern creates a lens to focus on the common delimma of the self we see ourselves as and the self we construct for the world to percieve and this examination of one man then expands into an expression of how a man, a town, a country, a world could allow such a scale of inhumane actions to go quietly unchallenged. Shoah takes ten hours of repetition and exhaustion to achieve this, but through his artistic expresion Spielberg achieves the same result with the dramatic form without the crutch of a didactic platform, his is a more complete expression, even if it is historically flawed (Schindler cut and run) it achieves more with less, and is both obscure (in how people have, almost unconsciously come to understand the holocaust rather than possessing a few facts about trains and showers and numbers and atrocities) and clear in presenting a story of how a man found his own humanity in the atrocity of others.

I'm not watching art film. I'm not looking for art films. I'm watching film and discovering art. But I don't go around requiring it in viewing, art arises from many different forms in often surprising places.

Quote:

"The Red Wheelbarrow."
so much depends upon
a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain beside
the white chickens.

Do you find that particularly artistic? I don't, but it's revered as such, not for the content within it, but for the content not in it, and unless you belong to the club/caste that possesses that extra content (Williams was a doctor, that was the toy of a dying child he was treating), then the poem is absolutely empty and meaningless, utterly obscure.

That doesn't mean that a short story like Hills like White Elephants loses its artistic merit because the subject is never discussed clearly, likewise Virginia Woolf wrote some beautiful and powerful novels despite having nothing worthwhile occur to her utterly boring and pathetic characters.

but really, there is nothing about art that insists it 1) tends toward existentialism and opacity and 2) avoids exploring affirmative themes 3) organizes a cohesive story. and even though art may create the appreciator caste, that doesn't mean an artwork has to be appreciated by them, on only their standard to be considered art.