[lbo-talk] "Ambiguities"

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At 04:24 PM 2/4/2006, Thomas Seay wrote:
><<
> > Really, works of art don't have to be ambiguous to
> > be excellent.
> > Potemkin is a good example of that.
>
>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.

The question Y and B ar asking is:

Would the film have been ideology had it ended with the two of them 
sheepherding off into the sunset?

Would it have been propaganda had it ended with them still engaged in 
ordeals of deomstic 'bliss'

Would it have been propaganda had it ended with the two men telling 
everyone and then realized they'd fallen out of love anyway

Would it have been propaganda if you knew for certain it was a gay murder?

Would it have been propaganda if it was a gay beating but he survived and 
everyone was brought together, crying around the hospital bed, evoking the 
ending of It's a Wonderful Life only everyone's one big family brought 
together over queer love?

There's always ambiguity, but in filmmaking today -- and precisely with 
knowledge of film criticism under their belt (see Douglas Kellner) because 
these people take courses in lit and film criticism in prep to be directors 
-- they draw on these theories of the slid sliding play of language and 
representation and exploit it even more -- and purposefully -- in order to 
get the widest audience possible.

Douglas Kellner covers this in one book, the title of which escapes me and 
I think I sold it anyway.


At 04:09 PM 2/4/2006, Miles Jackson wrote:


>On Sat, 4 Feb 2006, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>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.  You're granting too much power to the artist here:
>even if an artist want to say X, and even if you think
>your interpretation is
>based on explicit cues about X, the significance of the art is socially
>produced.  It is not and cannot be the individual product of an
>artistic genius.

I'm not sure Yoshie was saying that the ordinary viewer would read the film 
that way. And I'm not even sure if she's saying that there's a singular 
interpretation. She's criticizing the choices made by the film maker and, 
as such, the way a film maker worker is a clue -- it's a footprint in the 
sand -- a marker -- that can tell us something aobut society.

I'm pretty sure that, while not everyone would agree with a Marxist 
interpretation of Poltergeist, I'll bet 90 % of them remember that part of 
the plot was that it was built on an old burial ground.

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