tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post8340814076642097444..comments2024-03-18T19:05:39.072-07:00Comments on Morphosis: Desultory Thoughts on EntertainmentAdam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-89952892066235646042018-10-01T11:10:51.640-07:002018-10-01T11:10:51.640-07:00The world is so big right? The fun never ends beac...The world is so big right? The fun never ends beacuse we have so many people that give us<br />entretenimiento.Entretenimientohttp://blog.utp.edu.co/mentes0ruidosas/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-11291984458986666782018-09-24T13:29:36.343-07:002018-09-24T13:29:36.343-07:00Your article are so good and so well redacted that...Your article are so good and so well redacted that reading it was actually fun. <br />¡Please write more about entertainment!Entertainmenthttp://blog.utp.edu.co/mentes0ruidosas/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-35601465808505293002018-05-24T23:55:06.912-07:002018-05-24T23:55:06.912-07:00Get the latest updates, tickets fares and offers o...Get the latest updates, tickets fares and offers on <a href="http://wildwaters.in/" rel="nofollow"> best amusement park </a> in Hyderabad. Stay tuned our social media channels for the wild waters latest offers.<br />For details: http://wildwaters.in/contact.html<br />Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17087513398501593798noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-20504352602462576202016-02-12T01:28:13.005-08:002016-02-12T01:28:13.005-08:00"But Art does work the way Science does"..."But Art does work the way Science does" --> "But Art does <b>not</b> work the way Science does ..." GrrrAdam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-39846114036319634352016-02-12T01:27:23.853-08:002016-02-12T01:27:23.853-08:00I very much take your point, by the way, on Pinker...I very much take your point, by the way, on Pinker and will dig out a copy of Blank Slate. Reading Better Angels was a real case of challenging and then completely upending my preconceptions.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-73339777604405994162016-02-12T01:26:25.901-08:002016-02-12T01:26:25.901-08:00Richard: I think we're closer than I first rea...Richard: I think we're closer than I first realised over much of this. You're right, Jessie's Song is a cheat; although like you my heart was racing during the waste disposal furnace scene at the end of Toy Story 3. And I still resist the idea that there is a 'science'-like progression in the arts (indeed, I wonder if thinking that there has been is in part the cultural bleed through of science as a value in society more broadly). There clearly <em>is</em> an elevator of progress in science, such that millions of schoolchildren today simply know more about physics, chemistry and so on than did Aristotle, Galileo and Newton. But I don't see that the same applies in the arts. Homer and Horace are better poets than Don Paterson and Jo Shapcott; Shakespeare is a better playwright than Harold Pinter; Laurel and Hardy are funnier than Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson; Jane Austen is a better novelist than Zadie Smith. Not that the latter partners in these comparisons are bad at what they do: in every case I'd say they're very good. But Art does work the way Science does, with practitioners building upon the groundwork of predecessors in the same way.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-54363551953383362722016-02-10T12:54:46.010-08:002016-02-10T12:54:46.010-08:00ps - if you liked Better Angels, but don't hav...ps - if you liked Better Angels, but don't have much time for Pinker himself, you really owe it to yourself to read The Blank Slate. As with Better Angels, you're going to find that a lot of what he has to say has been wilfully misrepresented by pundits with political agenda issues. He's had a thoroughly undeserved bad press, especially in left-liberal circles where people really should know better how to behave.Richard Morganhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06362854587900716888noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-12812513759067983332016-02-10T12:46:46.817-08:002016-02-10T12:46:46.817-08:00Not so much that Mortensen is *better* than Brando...Not so much that Mortensen is *better* than Brando et al, just that the norms and expectations of the acting craft have intensified so much over time, and in the direction of more naturalistic impact. I remember seeing Paul Newman interviewed around the time of Road To Perdition (2002) or maybe Twilight (1998); he was asked which of his heyday movie performances he was most proud of and he said, more or less, that with the benefit of hindsight they *all* looked pretty hammy compared to what was being done these days. It's this constant upping of the ante that I mean when I say that the craft of cinema has come on so far and so fast that it's hard for people to go back - especially as far back as a 1927 German expressionist silent movie!<br /><br />As regards Jessie's Song, I think you're cheating a bit there - it is a song and a set piece, and not really typical of the substance of Toy Story 2 as a whole. Similarly, I have been known to tear up during various arias in the handful of operas I've sat through, but found myself bored rigid at a lot of other points in the performance. Music and song are, I think, an art apart. Interestingly, by contrast, I also teared up in the garbage fire finale of Toy Story 3 - and I'd argue that what moved me there was the awful sense of realism graven into that scene. <br /><br />It's true that most of the examples I've reached for above have had to do with portrayals of violence (my tastes mean that they are often the most convenient examples to hand), but this issue of waxing naturalism/realism in cinema is certainly not confined these areas - think, for example, of Tom Cruise's electrifying bedside breakdown scene in Magnolia or Brenda Blethyn weeping and trying to hold up her sagging breasts in the mirror in Secrets and Lies. Both performances hammer home a reacquaintance with our own desperation and humanity at levels of intimacy and intensity I find it impossible to find a match for in any pre-70s cinema I've seen. I'm no film historian, so I can't be sure, but I think that's because such intense and intimate realism simply wasn't on the menu back then - it's simply evolved along with all the other technique and like a series of locking ratchets, stops us from going back to more stylised (I'd say wooden) iterations.<br /><br />On Pinker, you'll get no argument from me - I rate Better Angels very highly indeed; but I think the levels of (honest) engagement with violence in our contemporary entertainment are a significant and symbiotic part of the evolving path away from violent social norms that Pinker's book charts. We have this kind of art because our societies are changing, and our societies are changing, at least in part, because we put out this kind of art. Richard Morganhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06362854587900716888noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-62183480886103859602016-02-10T12:16:25.423-08:002016-02-10T12:16:25.423-08:00Gareth: thanks for the globalresearch link -- an i...Gareth: thanks for the globalresearch link -- an interesting, but not a wholly convincing, piece. I'd read a number of hostile accounts of Pinker's book before I read it (and, I suspect like you, I've little time for Pinker himself, and his various views); but actually reading his book was something of an eye-opener. His thesis violates our gut instinct, and its possible to do what that linked critique does and mention lots of fundmanetally anecdata by way of counterexample, 'he says we're more peaceful, but what about the Vietnam War, eh?' and so on. The strength of the book is the statistical solidity with which he demonstrates not that there is no violence nowadays, since obviously there's still loads, but that there was so <em>very</em> much more in all the centuries that have gone before. Maybe this is of only glancing relevance to this post, except I would suggest that the most violent areas in the world, (places suffering the long fallout from older and more recent colonialisation and decolonialisation mostly) are not the places where there is the greatest appetite for hardcore ultraviolent fantasy entertainment like GoT, Tarantino Westerns, Saw, Hostel and the like. Those sorts of texts, surely, are aimed at safe and comfortable Western audience, who want on some level to compensate for the placidity of their lives with a bit of the old ultraviolence.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-62428827432475020982016-02-10T10:21:01.250-08:002016-02-10T10:21:01.250-08:00This comment has been removed by the author.Dancing on Glasshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17053503237265583015noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-52402937105855354182016-02-10T10:20:23.014-08:002016-02-10T10:20:23.014-08:00Enjoyed this exchange and I'd never read your ...Enjoyed this exchange and I'd never read your post on Pinker, though I suspected you'd read it when I was listening to the discussion on dystopias in Derby. There are lots of blasts at Pinker on this (I'm not a fan obvs - old, if disillusioned, Trot that I am, and I've only read parts of this book) - on his methodology and his obvious ideological propensities. Offhand I remember this: http://www.globalresearch.ca/reality-denial-apologetics-for-western-imperial-violence/32066. Deep into Sarah Helm's If This is a Woman, which is taking up all my mental and emotional capacity. More thoughts when I'm done with that.Dancing on Glasshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17053503237265583015noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-14628143882531786172016-02-10T07:12:05.267-08:002016-02-10T07:12:05.267-08:00Also, since I mention it, here's my take on Pi...Also, since I mention it, here's my take on Pinker's book:<br /><br />http://amechanicalart.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/steve-pinker-better-angels-of-our.html<br /><br />Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-21467689094477163072016-02-10T07:11:03.415-08:002016-02-10T07:11:03.415-08:00We may be reaching agree to disagree territory, ol...We may be reaching agree to disagree territory, old friend.<br /><br />Much as I like Mortensen (and I really do), the idea that he's a better film actor than Brando, or Henry Fonda, or James Stewart, baffles me. Otherwise I'm afraid I'm not articulating my point very well: getting at 'human truth' is, I agree with you, precisely the point: but more stylised and formally artificial modes of art are very often better than 'realistic' modes when it comes to getting at this. 'Jessie's Song' in Toy Story 2 moves me very much, and that whole movie is intensely, and hilariously, anti-naturalistic. <br /><br />I don't think I'm making an iconoclastic point. Your examples 'Saving Private Ryan is a better and more honest war movie than A Walk In the Sun ... The revisionist westerns of the seventies are better human approximations than the Waynesque horse operas of the fifties' suggest that one thing you value, unsurprising perhaps give the powerful and eloquent ways you use violence in your own fiction, is that the later texts are more explicit about representing violence than the earlier ones. That has a variety of dramatic advantages, I think, but I don’t think it’s, you know, <em>true</em>, according to the criteria of ‘human truth’. If we want to say that art which has a duty to truth needs to stress that war is hell, rather than being a romantic idealisation of noble combat, then I wouldn’t disagree; but I think a film like Kubrick’s unexplicit <em>Paths of Glory</em> does a better job of that than the romantic quest and fairy tale ending of <em>Private Ryan</em>, however garlanded the latter is with blood-bag-bursting and grime. I don’t have a problem with 21st-centry art being more brutal and more violent, by and large, than 20th-century art: as I say, some interesting and some powerful (and many more crude and exploitative) things can be achieved by artists working with violence. But in the larger sense, it is mendacious. It’s mendacious because, as Steven Pinker’s <em>Better Angels</em> book argues so compellingly, life today is orders of magnitude less violent than it has ever been before, in the whole run of human history. Which means whilst I think we can justify violence in art, I don’t think we can justify it on the grounds that it is more true to life. I was going to type out a thing here about the difference between Roger Moore’s Bond and Daniel Craig’s, but then it occurred to me that I was just retyping the opening paragraphs to <a href="http://anthonyburgessblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/the-names-burge-tone-burge-tremor-of.html" rel="nofollow">this old blogpost about Burgess’s 1965 spy-thriller <em>Tremor of Intent</em></a>:<br /><br />http://anthonyburgessblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/the-names-burge-tone-burge-tremor-of.html<br />Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-34281966930309027252016-02-10T04:04:25.655-08:002016-02-10T04:04:25.655-08:00That's a bit too harshly iconoclastic for me -...That's a bit too harshly iconoclastic for me - sure, all fiction is, by definition artificial, and the big bucks Hollywood crowd-pleasers you're referencing here come from a place so template-ridden that it can sometimes seem utterly stylised. But I think that misses closer-focus issues of texture and technique. However artificial the Lord of the Rings movies might be, there is no question that the level of acting intensity delivered by - for example - Viggo Mortensen embeds us in the human drama to a far greater extent than anything available to movie audiences fifty years ago. Better acting technique, better special effects, better make-up, better cameras - all these improve the extent to which we can get closer to an approximation of, for want of a better phrase, human truth; and more importantly, those things feed into a virtuous circle where we are better able to consider those human truths and how we portray them. Saving Private Ryan is a better and more honest war movie than A Walk In the Sun, Fury is better and more honest still. The revisionist westerns of the seventies are - on average - better human approximations than the Waynesque horse operas of the fifties; something like Unforgiven is better still. You *can* argue against the use of "naturalistic" or "realistic" as terms to describe what's going on here, but if you do you're going to need to invent a whole new term to cover your phrase "conventional markers of 'realism"", and that strikes me as trying to re-invent the wheel.<br /><br />You'll notice I've stayed away from actual superhero movies so far, because yes, I do feel they are monstrously artificial - how could any form concerned principally with heroes who wear masks and costumes ever come close to any human truths? And it's safe to say the core audience for this stuff either couldn't care less about how "naturalistic" their entertainment is, or have simply confused facile conceptions of "gritty" and "dark" with the more complicated "realistic". But interestingly enough, I'd say that these movies are actually the direct inheritors of the tradition to which "Metropolis" belongs - it too was super stylised in both its assumptions and its exposition. Perhaps if Lang was working today, that's what he'd be doing - making the next Batman movie..... Richard Morganhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06362854587900716888noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-49891726535782019952016-02-09T10:48:10.177-08:002016-02-09T10:48:10.177-08:00Superhero films is too narrow a category: but taki...Superhero films is too narrow a category: but taking all the top twenty grossing films of all time, from <em>Force Awakens</em> <em>Avatar</em> and <em>Jurassic Park</em> down past <em>Avengers</em> movies and <em>Harry Potter</em> movies and Tolkien movies and Batman movies -- every single one -- there's not a naturalistic form' amongst them. Our culture is not interested in naturalism: it is interested in particular modes of artificiality and stylisation that are so deeply embedded and so ubiquitous that many people have lost sight of the fact that they are conventions. <em>Game of Thrones</em> is not more naturalistic than <em>Lord of the Rings</em>, <em>Mad Max Fury Road</em> is not more naturalistic than <em>Cars 2</em>; all these films are stylised according to the logic of different artifices. Nature doesn't enter into it. We don't want realism; although, for some odd reason, we do seem to want escapist Fantasy (either bright or dark) that foregrounds conventional markers of 'realism' like shaky-cam, lens flare, bloodspatters and so on. None of these things are real, though; and not just because they are 'in a movie'. Sam Peckinpah's exploding blood bags is a cinematic convention, in the same way that John Wayne's victims clutching their bloodless chests and falling over is a cinematic convention.<br /><br />For myself, I do think there's some merit in being up-front about one's investments in generic and modal conventions; so that for me picking up boxes marked with a red-cross and seeing my health bar increase has an honesty to it, where drinking a bottle and refilling it (and seeing one's health-bar increase) falls into the uncanny valley between playing a game and actual life. But of course that taste of mine is also at bottom an arbitrary preference. <br /><br />As for the idea that Lang would have used sound; I'm really not convinced. It's like saying Hitchcock would have made <em>Psycho</em> in colour, with 3-D and surroundsound, if he'd been making it today. Except that he wouldn't (indeed when Gus van Sant remade <em>Psycho</em> shot for shot, in colour, it was lame and pointless). The original <em>Psycho</em> could have been made as a colour film in the 1960s; but Hitchcock uses he limitations of his deliberately retro styling to great effect in that picture.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-16538581171278058802016-02-09T08:54:01.686-08:002016-02-09T08:54:01.686-08:00ps - not sure that superhero movies are the "...ps - not sure that superhero movies are the "dominant cinema" of the 21st century; at least, not unless West End musicals are the dominant form of 21st (and late 20th) century drama........Richard Morganhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06362854587900716888noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-14198637148691898722016-02-09T08:40:59.978-08:002016-02-09T08:40:59.978-08:00Well, as usual my caveat is that "it's a ...Well, as usual my caveat is that "it's a bit more complicated than that". I'm not averse to a certain amount of po-mo chin stroking myself; but in the end I'm with Kafka and his ice axe - I do think that art succeeds best to the extent it manages to make us *feel* something. And more naturalistic forms - generally speaking - seem to me to aid this, and more artificial, stylised ones to impede it. In this connection, I think it's also important to differentiate between stylisation that arises because of limitations and stylisation for its own artistic sake. The comment on video game health packs is an interesting one, because in itself it refers to a fairly primitive dynamic originating in a fairly primitive developmental stage in gaming; I've been playing a much more modern game recently - Mad Max - and here the health pack *concept* survives, but in a far more sophisticated and naturalistic/immersive form - health is replenished by the act of drinking from a water canteen which in turn you have to replenish as it empties, from water sources which are scarce and often difficult to find. These things root you in the experiential world of the game - as health packs in older games also tried to do, of course, but much less well. But the - relative - artificiality is a function of the limits on previous software, not a choice based on the philosophical acknowledgement of artifice in art. Similarly, if Lang were making Metropolis today, he'd avail himself of current technology (like sound!) and doubtless produce a far more naturalistic movie as a result, one your students would be a lot less resistant to digesting. None of that invalidates the original movie, but I do think it argues convincingly that an increasing ability to mimic reality for artistic purposes is an advance rather than just a change. Richard Morganhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06362854587900716888noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-14160650857521750452016-02-09T05:17:46.888-08:002016-02-09T05:17:46.888-08:00I do see what you're arguing. I suppose my sen...I do see what you're arguing. I suppose my sense is that few works of art are less 'naturalistic' than the dominant cinema of the 21st-century: the conventions of superhero movies are exactly as arbitrary and artificial as the conventions of German expressionist cinema of the 1920s, or for that matter as the conventions of ancient Greek Drama. John Lanchester says somewhere that all artistic conventions, taken for themselves, are insane: that the notion that a character in a video game can stop from time to time to pick up a little glowing box that contains a top-up to his/her health is exactly as absurd as the convention in opera that people will sing loudly at one another to communicate their feelings. None of this strikes me as entailing an ascending evolutionary slope from worse to better. So the key thing in your comment is ' ... whether we see this as advance or change ...' I think you see the change as an advance. I don't think I do.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-46790580373094369932016-02-09T05:09:08.920-08:002016-02-09T05:09:08.920-08:00sorry - edit "the idea *of art* as naturalist...sorry - edit "the idea *of art* as naturalistic/visceral etc etcRichard Morganhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06362854587900716888noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-2587061142088989102016-02-09T05:07:07.102-08:002016-02-09T05:07:07.102-08:00I wouldn't accuse Lang of incompetence, far fr...I wouldn't accuse Lang of incompetence, far from it. Metropolis IS an amazing piece of work *by the standards of the time*. But we've come a very long way since then, and it's hard for non-schooled/non-acclimatised audiences to go back. Conversely, drama *hasn't* come very far since Shakespeare and the Jacobeans, so it's a much easier reach. And while poetry has come a long way, it's been a weird spiralling path that leaves it not so very far from where it started. As to whether you see all this as "advance" or simply "change", I guess depends on how much your aesthetic sense aligns with the idea of naturalistic/visceral experience; I can see some of the same people who cream their knickers at po-mo deconstruction in literature also being very at home stroking their chins over an ultra faithful (re)production of the Oresteia in all its ancient Greek glory and clunky stagecraft - tho' personally, that shit sends me to sleep...... Richard Morganhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06362854587900716888noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-38407411965994850652016-02-09T04:18:44.786-08:002016-02-09T04:18:44.786-08:00I wonder if that is right, though. In many ways Me...I wonder if that is right, though. In many ways Metropolis is a very sophisticated piece of work, especially in terms of design, sets, costumes and framing. If the acting seems over-telegraphed and stiff and the pace slow, do we want to put that down to Lang's incompetence, or maybe ascribe it to his adherence to a different, more operatic and theatrical aesthetic? I can swallow that the sciences, and even the social sciences, 'advance', so that a 2016 sixth-former understands more physics than did Newton or Galileo' but I'm not convinced that the arts 'advance' like this. Shakespeare is a better playwright than anyone who came after him. The Lascaux cave paintings are amazing, complex works of art.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-68474245161662124682016-02-09T04:08:52.155-08:002016-02-09T04:08:52.155-08:00Hmm - might also be that there's an expectatio...Hmm - might also be that there's an expectation of *craft* from cinema that differs from that expected of other media - Metropolis is, after all, a pretty primitive example of the cinematic form; much of the syntax of cinema had yet to emerge when it was made. Comparing it to contemporary film (and that's what, perforce, most of your students would be doing unless they were also taking a course specialising in the history of cinema) is like comparing a cave painting to the photography of Herb Ritts or Robert Maplethorpe, and finding it wanting in impact. There's an easy temptation to abandon any historical context, and rather than admiring what was done with the tools to hand, denigrate by comparison to now. Eighteenth century poetry, by contrast, isn't going to have this problem because poetry continues to this day to be complex and difficult to parse - if anything I'd say that someone like Blake or Keats is actually a bit easier to decode and grasp than, say, Heaney or Hughes or, god help us, Eliot or Yeats. Technique and form have changed enormously, but accessibility remains a challenge and anyone reading poetry accepts that as part of the ground rules. Jacobean tragedy is something very different and an interesting case, because I'd say it's actually an example of a very highly evolved form of the dramatic craft. Compared to, say, Greek tragedy it's practically the punk rock of drama - and again, while modern drama has come on a bit since then in terms of *content*, I think a lot of the dramatic craft remains very similar. Time-travelling Jacobeans exposed to Tom Stoppard or Caryl Churchill might bridle at the subject matter and dramatis personae, but I suspect they'd be pretty much at home with the stagecraft and narrative technique. Richard Morganhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06362854587900716888noreply@blogger.com