10-06-2007, 03:20 PM
|
#3460 of 3711 
|
|
Adam_S
Member
Location: Marina del Rey, CA
Join Date: Feb 2001
Local Time: 04:16 AM
Local Date: 09-08-2008
Posts: 5,012
|
Re: Sight and Sound (2002) Greatest Films Club
Quote:
|
So basically you're saying Schindler's List is more thematically obscure than Citizen Kane.
|
No, but the message was convoluted, it was 330am. I don't value thematic opacity as a necessary criterion for artistic merit, if I did I probably wouldn't like Casablanca and the Godfather so much. and as Kael said, "Citizen Kane is a masterpiece, but it is a shallow masterpiece." or as Ebert puts it in his commentary, "it is a masterpiece of surfaces".
Quote:
|
On a separate note, one of the reasons Godard despises Schindler's List is because, as you mention above, people have have come to understand the Holocaust through Schindler's List.
|
Then at least it provides understanding. it gives people a grasp on almost unimaginable horror, and if people prefer an emotional understanding to being lectured at, I don't have a problem. Everyone in america learns about the holocaust early and often throughout their schooling, everyone knows the holocaust, but do they really understand it? In dialectical philosophy, the understanding is the significant aspect, thesis--antithesis--synthesis, and Spielberg provides the synthesis/comprehension quite elegantly both within the text of the film (Stern--Goeth--Schindler) and in an extra-filmic macro scale, because as you pointed out, people understand the holocaust through schindler's list. Interesting that Godard despises the one film where Spielberg exposes the filmmaking process to the audience (the ending in modern day)--perhaps he's just jealous? especially since spielberg used that particular hallmark of Godard in an effective means that served the film and storytelling process. Godard, despite doing it all the time, never used it as well as Spielberg did, he was just being an artiste.
Also since we're discussing dialectic, I was taking the obscure clear argument as a dialectic, that a synthesis--an understanding of art--arises from the argument, counter argument of obscure and clear.
Last edited by Adam_S : 10-06-2007 at 03:23 PM.
|
|
|