Favorites Of 1993

[oscar jubis]

Every frame of a film contains an excess of information. Every frame is the result of so many decisions involving staging, performance, use of the camera, editing, sound mixing, etc. that in order to truly grasp how all the elements work jointly for what purposes, one has to look at a film or a sequence or scene over and over. Some films elicit that level of interest in me. I appreciate your description of how you "consumed" or processed that film from Norway.

You are applying a theory every time you try to say one thing about 2 films or more.

[Chris Knipp]

Very well, if you say so. You're applying a theory every time you say it might rain. But you're mainly just making a savvy observation, or expressing an opinion. I don't call my opinions theories. I call them taste.

I agree though that watching a sequence over and over enables one to make keen observations. They may be less natural observations, but they are keen.

[oscar jubis]

Very well, if you say so. You're applying a theory every time you say it might rain. But you're mainly just making a savvy observation, or expressing an opinion. I don't call my opinions theories. I call them taste.

I'm being clear and specific. I wrote that a theory is involved, consciously or not, whenever one says "one thing about 2 films or more. Anytime you say something that applies to more than one film,you are associating those 2 or more things and whenever one does that, there is a theoretical underpinning for the relationship you claim the 2 or more things have and the significance and repercussion of that association.

[Chris Knipp]

Maybe. But I prefer to say I'm expressing my taste, and that my approach is untheoretical. Maybe this is just because I haven't studied "film theory." So if I follow any theories, I don't know what they are. I'd be surprised to find out, like Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme who was astonished to learn that all along he had been speaking in "prose."