Musings:

I just started reading Bobby’s Notes on the Cinematograph. I was initially planning to read it after I had finished all his joints, but then I decided that, after watching Au hasard Balthazar, he was artistically evolving too quickly for me to keep up with just by watching his joints alone. So I decided to read his notes. I laughed because my translation (from a New York Review Books edition) calls it “photographed theatre” and not filmed theatre like /film/bros say. I’m switching to photographed theatre from here on out!

I wonder about how to reconcile my evolving philosophy on film with my historical interests. Should I leave them behind? Of late I have become to consider non-diegetic music in film manipulative and hollow. And many other thoughts that seemingly disqualify me from enjoying photographed theatre films. However, as a comic book reader, and reader of Superman comics, I want to enjoy the new Superman movie. I wonder what I will think when I watch it. I wonder if I retain the tendency to enjoy photographed theatre when my own artistic interests diverge from it. (Recently I realised that I have no future in the film industry because all my student films so far have been made in the spirit of trying to make something novel and outside the proscenium arch, rather than in an attempt to reproduce what I have seen on a theatre screen and therefore assimilate into this tradition. Essentially, I have become a pretentious experimentalfag.)

I’m in an interstitial period in my life, it’s true. I hope Bobby can help illuminate the way to artistic liberation for me.