Thursday, April 18, 2013

Film Analysis from Point Zero, Part 2

Jack Kerouac said that each paragraph is a poem, so maybe these entries are just attempts at poetry after all -- didn't Richard Hugo once say: poetry may not be factual, but it does convey truth.

So maybe everything in my initial post on Point Zero is not factual -- the no-forest in Dante's Inferno exists (its not zero/nothing [0]), the no-geographical location exists, the metaphorical space exists... for these abstractions, generalizations about an idea or entity exist...  or perhaps they exist as nothing (which is still something, not less than nothing).

Point Zero:

-- is poetry, because it stems from a desire to use both emotion and the intellect to their fullest potential simultaneously, shattering mundane conscious experience, leading us to consider that we never really understand reality; rather, we simplify reality to make it manageable or comprehensible:

                                   "For the way of comets
                                    is the poet's way. And the blown-apart
                                    links of causality are her links.
                                    ... she is the one that mixes up the cards
                                    and confuses arithmetic and weight,
                                    ... the one who altogether refutes Kant,
                                    the one in the stone graves of the Bastille                                  
                                    who remains like a tree in its loveliness."
                                                       --  Marina Tsvetaeva, from "The Poet"

-- is a place, like a point break. It requires preparation to get there so that one can let go.


-- can be understood in some sense as the Taoist Way, it is empty and desires nothing.


In a practical sense, there remains a fruitful possibility for the one starting from Point Zero in terms of transnational film analysis, for in a comparative framework, the idea of film analysis from Point Zero allows one, or can lead one, to compare films that come to mind without a pre-established hierarchy of expectations, high/low, north/south/east/west/, male/female. I guess I'll never be able to, or refuse to entirely start at Point Zero because I can't abandon the historical-material conditions of our age.

Yet the ideal end result would be to allow a spontaneous set of associations to emerge (ex nihilo) without necessarily looking for them -- a set of associations that are each connected to historical-material, historical-particular spaces (locations, experiences, cultures) of origin -- that flow consciously and unconsciously to the observer due to/stemming from the content of the film.

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