> > Or you can compare Jaws with Poltergeist (co-written by
> Spielberg), again,
> > both commercial. Unlike Jaws, Poltergeist includes an explicit
> cue to
> > criticize unchecked real estate development that stops at nothing
> and even
> > the history of dispossession of American Indian lands (see
> > <http://www.filmsite.org/polt2.html>).
>
> Yes, I can see how a Marxist could easily interpret the film that
> way, and I like the interpretation. However, that meaning (or
> significance) is a product of interpretation; it is not literally
> "in" the film. If you're skeptical, talk to 100 random people in
> our society who've seen the film; only some will mention the
> "explicit" cues about the dispossession of Indian land.
It doesn't take a Marxist to see Poltergeist and notice that the film attributes the cause of ghostly disturbance to the desecration of Indian burial grounds, because it's explicitly discussed in the dialogue at length (rather than fleetingly hinted at by images). Some viewers may still choose to ignore inconvenient or unpleasant interpretive cues -- even if they were declared in CAPITAL LETTERS as intertitles -- but that doesn't make moot the distinction between a text that provides such cues or clues (Poltergeist) and a text that does not (Jaws).
Miles wrote:
> On Sat, 4 Feb 2006, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> > info at pulpculture.org wrote:
> >
> >> By leaving the ending ambiguous, it allows people to project on
> to the film
> >> their own interpretations.
> >
> > Is that the Hollywood way? Zizek has a riff somewhere on the
> shark in Jaws -
> > people have projected all kinds of meanings onto it. But the
> point is that
> > none of them are right. If any were "right" then it might alienate a
> > potential ticket-buyers, so best to keep it free-floating.
>
> Not to get too pomo, but the "meaning" must be free-floating,
> because what the work means is a product of the interpretations of
> viewers and interactions among those viewers.
That meaning is a product of the interpretations of viewers doesn't make it "free-floating," though. If it were, nobody can understand anything about what others say, artistically or otherwise. Actually, to create a text whose meaning is either completely "free-floating" or whose silence defies interpretation is a great challenge (or a great joke), which used to exercise modernist artists like John Cage (4'33"). Back then, many artists thought that narrative was so bourgeois or nineteenth-century or both. Post-modernism in art is therefore often discussed as a critical return to narrative.
The range of interpretations that a text makes possible maybe narrow (Potemkin, The Birth of a Nation, etc.) or wide (Moby Dick, Tristram Shandy, etc.), but seldom -- perhaps never -- completely "free- floating."
Thomas wrote:
> Works of art are always ambiguous otherwise they are propaganda.
> To really try and understand something in its complexity, an artist
> must be ambiguous, otherwise he is a moralist and pretending to
> have the certainty of God.
Ambiguity is not the same as complexity. Ambiguity may be simple or complex, and so is propaganda. Neither ambiguity, complexity, not simplicity, nor whether the work is intended to be propaganda or "art for art's sake" says anything about the quality of artistry involved in it.
Take a look at this photograph by Tina Modotti: <http://www.masters-of-photography.com/M/modotti/ modotti_bandolier.html>.
It's simple and unambiguous -- it's composed of an ear of corn, a bandolier, and a guitar, objects symbolizing the Mexican Revolution. Even if you were a rightist or didn't know anything about the iconography of the Mexican Revolution, it is still possible to appreciate the photograph's formal beauty, but your interpretation would be an impoverished one, deprived of more than half of the significance of the visual text.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>