On the morning of Wednesday, November 23rd
I worked at OCADU. I brought along my laptop with me so I could work on my
essay, but I didn’t get a lot done. I worked for Milan Pavlovic, who was very
businesslike during class but quite personable during the break. With both his
students and me. He’s from Russia but has lived in Montreal, and like me he
never learned French. A further parallel with my life is that his mother spoke
French like mine did.
After
work I took advantage of the fact that I was already downtown and went to
professor Russell’s office to show him what I had so far for an essay. There
was only one other student ahead of me when I got there and so I stood out in
the hall for at least five minutes.
I
only had about three and a half paragraphs to show Devlin. For the most part,
the advice that he gave me jibed with criticisms that I’d already realized
about what I’d written and voiced while he was reading it. I talked about
getting an A on my previous essay and he said that he’d thought that I’d been
on my way to an A when I’d first brought it to him. That made me ask then what
he thought I was on my way to this time. He said this one was a little choppy,
so I’d have to pull it together.
Our
Aesthetics lecture that day was on the subject of photography.
He
reminded us of what Bazin said about both film and photography being imprint
and that they put us into causal contact and literally connect us to the
subject.
He
showed us two images side by side. On the left was Van Gogh’s painting of the church
at Auvers and on the right was a photograph of the same building.
Then
he showed us a painting that looks like a photograph of a glass, with another
glass container beside it containing two pencils. So even though the painting
is identical to a photograph it is not is causal contact with the subject.
Walton
calls photographs transparent because they are windows to the object. How can
he claim this? If the object were to change before the picture were taken then
it would be a different photo without the intervention of the agent. But
everything that is the same between reality and picture in a painting is the
result an agent making it that way.
I
asked about black and white but he said it would still be accurate. The image
of the church would still be the same. Indirect seeing is no less literally
seeing because there is no agent.
But
photography as photography cannot be representational because an artist did not
produce the image. A painting that looks like a photo is representational. How
can a photograph be representational? If it can represent things in more detail
it can be representational.
We
looked at two images of Batman, side by side. The one on the left was a
rendering of batman by an artist and the one on the right was a photograph of
Ben Affleck as Batman. Photographs are unable to create fictions. The drawing
represents Batman while the photograph represents Ben Affleck in a Batman
costume. In the photograph the fiction of Batman is represented but not by the
photograph. The fiction of Batman is represented by the costume that Affleck is
wearing. Photography is fictionally deficient.
I
finally watched an episode of Johnny Staccato that actually had some good
writing. Johnny is hired by a gangster to carry a suitcase full of rock samples
from New York to California. But what we knew that Johnny didn’t know was that
the suitcase was switched with another containing a bomb. Johnny was instructed
to open the case when he was over Arizona. There is a lot of suspense because
the case is almost opened several times along the way. Once by someone else who
thinks the case is his and a few times by Johnny, with interruptions each time.
On the plane he meets a beautiful woman (played by Gena Rowlands, who was John
Casavetes real life spouse). When he finds out that she is the gangster’s wife
and that he hates her guts, he finally puts two and two together and figures
out that there must be a bomb in the case.
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