Noam Chomsky and the Avant Garde

[King Prendergast]

Brakhage writes in Metaphors of Vision that we should look at film with an "eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception." He goes on to say that we should, "imagine a world before the 'beginning was the world,'" in other words, we should approach film with a pre-linguistic mind. But Chomsky's work in cognitive psychology and language acquisition has shown that humans are hardwired for language, it is an inherent biological system.

Do you believe it is possible to approach/experience film in a non-linguistic mode?

[Greg Shantz]

No.

[King Prendergast]

Ever seen Ernie Gehr's Serene Velocity?

[planetjake]

Ditto La Region Centrale.

Though I think we are sort of predisposed to respond to most things with words (written or otherwise), the tendency is a highly noticeable and conscious one. I think many great avant-garde filmmakers are aware of the problem (Brakhage, Snow, Gehr, Land, Chambers, etc.) and have made works that have attempted to transcend linguistics in one way or another. Personally, there are films that I think words reduce. I refuse to talk about some structuralist films, some poetic films... Notable Brakhage's Arabics or Anything by Gehr... instead I simply repeat "Watch it." Words, in essence, become secondary to the experience of the film...

[King Prendergast]

I would try to avoid falling into the "just watch it, don't talk about it" paradigm. There's still a lot we can say about even the most "poetic," structural films, even if it centers around why it is difficult to engage with them linguistically. Even though I respond to many of Gehr's films, for example, in a purely somatic way, there's still a lot we can say about what it is about those films that create that sensation, and how they work on our minds and bodies.

[Adam]

Brakhage's hypnogogic films fall into that category - supposed to be working beyond (or before) language.

[planetjake]

I would try to avoid falling into the "just watch it, don't talk about it" paradigm. There's still a lot we can say about even the most "poetic," structural films, even if it centers around why it is difficult to engage with them linguistically. Even though I respond to many of Gehr's films, for example, in a purely somatic way, there's still a lot we can say about what it is about those films that create that sensation, and how they work on our minds and bodies.

Indeed. Though my goal in not talking about certain films has more to do with me wanting to avoid influencing an initial viewing as opposed to avoiding conversations after-the-fact. Def. was not clear on my first post. Sorry.

[MarioB]

Absolutely it's possible; man is not controlled strictly by words and the intellect. There have been occasions where films have placed words in my mouth, the definition from the ground up, instead of vice-versa.

The topic makes me recall a chapter from Understanding Media. McLuhan wrote:

"Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, lived and wrote in a tradition of thought in which it was and is considered that language is a human technology that has impaired and diminished the values of the collective unconscious. It is the extension of man in speech that enables the intellect to detach itself from the vastly wider reality. Without language, Bergson suggests, human intelligence would have remained totally involved in the objects of its attention. Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement. Language extends and amplifies man but it also divides his faculties. His collective consciousness or intuitive awareness is diminished by this technical extension of consciousness that is speech."

source

[King Prendergast]

Absolutely it's possible; man is not controlled strictly by words and the intellect. There have been occasions where films have placed words in my mouth, the definition from the ground up, instead of vice-versa.

I think that truly phenomenological experiences in film outside of the avant garde is relatively rare, or at least muted, but I vividly recall the first time I saw Malick's New World in the theater. I could not stand up for a good 10 minutes after the credits roll.

[Person]

Brakhage writes in Metaphors of Vision that we should look at film with an "eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception." He goes on to say that we should, "imagine a world before the 'beginning was the world,'" in other words, we should approach film with a pre-linguistic mind. But Chomsky's work in cognitive psychology and language acquisition has shown that humans are hardwired for language, it is an inherent biological system.

Do you believe it is possible to approach/experience film in a non-linguistic mode?

Yes. As one who feels that he understands Heidegger - yes, absolutely yes. Maybe! In a godless universe or non-teleological, universe one's perspective can only be... aesthetic. The "world can only be justified aesthetically," - that's Nietzsche's view and hard to refute.

Images are delivered to my mind daily. Familiarity breeds contempt, oh yeah. Need images of novelty. History as a succession of Novelty against Habit - that's interesting. A spiral of novelty, spun by a "strange attractor." Art as God. Ideas from nowhere. Go to work all morning and afternoon, crypto-Marxist idiot fuck-stick. Murder all money. Information holocaust. Future inversion towards antiquity while glass globes glossolalia glides towards groundlessness? Anxiety.