Friday, October 12, 2007

Brigitte Bardot in Le Mépris

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1 comment:

geocolors said...

what every lover wants....
Ode to a Beautiful Nude

With a chaste heart,
with pure eyes,
I celebrate your beauty
holding the leash of blood
so that it might leap out
and trace your outline
where
you lie down in my ode
as in a land of forests, or in surf:
in aromatic loam
or in sea music.


Beautiful nude:
equally beautiful
your feet
arched by primeval tap
of wind or sound
your ears
small shells
of the splendid American sea;
your breasts
of level plentitude full-
filled by living light;
your flying
eyelids of wheat
revealing
or enclosing
the two deep countries of your eyes.


The line of your shoulders
have divided
into pale regions
loses itself and blends
into the compact halves
of an apple,
continues separating
your beauty down
into two columns
of burnished gold, fine alabaster,
to sink into the two grapes of your feet,
where your twin symetrical tree
burns again and rises:
flowering fire, open chandelier,
a swelling fruit
over the pact of sea and earth.

From what materials -
agate, quartz, wheat -
did your body come together,
swelling like baking bread
to signal silvered
hills,
the cleavage of one petal,
sweet fruits of a deep velvet,
until alone remained,
astonished,
the fine and feminine form ?

It is not only light that falls
over the world,
spreading inside your body
its suffocated snow,
so much as clarity
taking its leave of you
as if you were
on fire within.


The moon lives in the lining of your skin.







...Pablo Neruda, from the movie, "The Postman"

October 12, 2007 at 6:47 PM

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The discourse of "Film Culture" requires us to conceive of cinema in its own terms.

The discourse of film research will lead us to particular descriptions, " limited" kinds of analysis determined by the categories cinema provides.

Discourse is a complex concept. It refers to the way in which something is told not just in terms of its specific language (whether verbal or visual) but also in terms of what it prioritizes. Discourses are both general and specific. Narrative "realist" cinema is a discursive form, a particular kind of human expression which represents the world in a certain way, employs a particular kind of a time-visual "language". Within narrative "realist" cinema as a whole, particular genres have their own more specific discourses. i.e. The Sci-Fi film is preoccupied with themata (idea-themes) of science and control. the romance is preoccupied with themata of sexuality, gender and often property relations. These ideas are either implicit -taken for granted within the way the story is conceived or explicit - in that the film actively promoted certain values, attitudes and beliefs.

The concept of Discourse is closely connected with another key concept HEGEMONY "taken-for-granted" a "common sense" outlook on some aspect of human reality shared by the vast majority of people within the society. Hegemony helps us to understand the illusion that commonly shared attitudes and values, ways of making sense of our world, appear to come from nowhere. Narrative "realist" cinema has this characteristic, it disguises its discursiveness by pretending to be simply "there". Discourses about law and order and sexuality, for example - are themselves seen as non-discursive, as natural, as taken for granted. These core values of society appear to come from nowhere- they simply are ! This leads to a compounding of a criticism leveled against popular cinema (and other popular media) that not only does it disguise its own discursive form, but it also "naturalizes" these profoundly significant social and political discourses. THINK CRITICALLY ABOUT THEIR "CONSTRUCTED" REALITY AND THE VALUE SYSTEMS THAT FUNDAMENTALLY INFLUENCE OUR LIVES. “being indoctrinated with a political spin.” From a commercial perspective, however, the very opposite may appear to be the case. People do not want to think critically about their "constructed" reality. They pay for their entertainment, so they can be released from the concerns of their lives. They may well want the security of hegemonic values within familiar discourses. The point is that it has less to do with questions of an active/passive audience. It has to do either with the choices we make or the level of (a)Competence - (b)Education and (c) CineNoesis we bring to cinema and the screening events we attend