Film Comment (1972) - Aspects of cinematic consciousness
Details
- magazine article: Aspects of cinematic consciousness
- author(s): Donald Skoller
- journal: Film Comment (1972)
- issue: volume 8, issue 3, page 41
- journal ISSN: 0015-119X
- publisher: Film Society of Lincoln Center
- Sloan's Alfred Hitchcock: A Filmography and Bibliography (1995) — page 409, #402
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Art history, François Truffaut, James Stewart, Kim Novak, Motion pictures, Pierre Boileau, San Francisco, California, Thomas Narcejac, Vertigo (1958)
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Abstract
In an exploratory treatment of structural film, P. Adams Sitney referred to four characteristics: "a fixed camera position (fixed frame from the viewer's perspective), the flicker effect, loop printing (the immediate repetition of shots, exactly and without variation), and re-photography off of a screen." Crossing the eighty-foot room on a paradoxical course of progressively flattening perspective but deepening perceptual truth, vitiating one illusionistic element or dimension after another, the camera ends up on the sea-wave still, and then, with both visual and aural crescendo (an electronic sine wave that goes from 50 cycles-per-second to 12,000 cycles-per-second during forty minutes of the film, but which takes its greatest leap at the point of superimposition of extreme close-up of the seawave shot on top of itself as the zoom moves into its frame), enters the sea-wave photo, filling the entire film frame on screen, forfeiting the "truth" of its discreteness as a single frame, absorbing and assimilating its illusionistic depth as its own.
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