Interesting Quotes

From Walter Murch, "Womb Tone / Dense Clarity - Clear Density" at transom.org (suggested by Nat Bennett)

• "This metaphoric use of sound is one of the most flexible and productive means of opening up a conceptual gap into which the fertile imagination of the audience will reflexively rush, eager (even if unconsciously so) to complete circles that are only suggested, to answer questions that are only half-posed. What each person perceives on screen, then, will have entangled within it fragments of their own personal history, creating that paradoxical state of mass intimacy where—though the audience is being addressed as a whole—each individual feels the film is addressing things known only to him or her.

  So the weakness of present-day cinema is paradoxically its strength of representation: it doesn't automatically possess the built-in escape valves of ambiguity that painting, music, literature, black-and-white silent film, and radio have simply by virtue of their sensory incompleteness —an incompleteness that automatically engages the imagination of the viewer/listener as compensation for what can only be suggested by the artist. In film, therefore, we go to considerable lengths to achieve what comes naturally to radio and the other arts: the space to evoke and inspire, rather than to overwhelm and crush, the imagination of the audience."

• [Note to self: Murch's concepts of harmonic superimposure and The Law of Two-and-a-Half.]

From Richard Foreman, "Film Is Evil: Radio Is Good" (introduction in "Unbalancing Acts") (suggested by Clay Shirky)

• "There are people who would take the philosophical position that the truth of being is to be found on surfaces and their extensions, but I disagree. I believe the truth is hidden. It is encoded in material in a way that obsures it from both our perceptual mechanisms and our formal mental categories. But visual ways of translating the world give you the illusiuon that the truth is scannable, controllable, and categorizable." (p. 148)

• "Film works to subliminally persuade you that the material world portrayed on-screen is the only possible world in which human consciousness can function. I think that's evil, because I don't believe our world has to be constituted as it is at this moment. There are other realms of possible experience, other modalities of consciousness, which you may not be able to immediately picture or articulate; yet if you maintain the dream that they're possible, something slowly changes in your consciousness, which then changes the way consciousness registers the environment, which means that, in fact, the environment changes. Film, by its very nature, works in our consciousness to limit our options." (p. 150)

• "Good films allow that man can still dream, but imply that the launching pad of the imagination must be within our real, material world." (p. 151)

• "Painting is less 'evil' than film, because the lie of painting isn't as convincing a representation of real life. It contains a great deal of ambiguity, it shows the painter's hand." (p. 152)

• "A painting leaves gaps that the viewer's vibrating consciousness must fill -- more gaps than film does." (p. 152)

• "Language is able to allude to reality in a much more suggestive fashion ... The ambiguity of [William Carlos Williams'] pared-down language invites all kinds of energies, whiffs of the universes of your own private associations, to flesh our his abstract written reference ... In both language and film, you may relate to [his] wheelbarrow as a symbol, but in language the symbol is made your own by your creative projection." (p. 152-153)

• "... it's impossible not to be hypnotized by the film image, though it may be interesting to try. Perhaps God didn't imagine that man would ever invent motion pictures, and so left us sadly vulnerable to a form of art that most closely apes a world we would do better to transcend than to worship." (p. 153)

• "I started with a text and a space, and I tried to make something that pleased me." (p. 153)