FILM ESSAY/REVIEW Towards a Perverse Neo-Broque Cinematic Aesthetic: Raúl Ruiz’s Poetics of Cinema

Towards a Perverse Neo-Baroque Cinematic Aesthetic: Raúl Ruiz’s Poetics of Cinema


by


Michael Goddard, Senses of Cinema, Issue 30

John Berger’s BBC Programme Ways of Seeing is on YouTube

Mark Thwaite points this out.


Start here and good luck in finding all 12 part:


Ways of Seeing part 1/4


From the wiki: John Berger ( “Is he still alive?”) : Ways of seeing was based on Benjamin’s wiki: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical reproduction.


Here, for your convenience, Benjamin’s essay translated into English.

The YouTube presentation of the individual Berger clips can end up with a viewing in the wrong order, which is a shame. At first glance, it seems as if there are four clips, but it is actually three sets of four, and it is not easy to see which is which and where they are: they do not pop up one after the other as is usual with YouTube. They really need to do some work on that site: it looks dated and far too basic in feel. Please God can they get rid of the comments, which are often the most inane and ignorant offerings one would ever not wish to imagine: frequently a pedant arguing the toss about some recording, or the type of musical insturment used. Pur-le-e-e-e-se, as they probably say in the Bronx.

Walter Benjamin revisited

Via the most wonderful Wood s Lot the November 2007 edition of Transformations has a few on Benjamin, such as this :

From Flâneur to Web Surfer: Videoblogging, Photo Sharing and Walter Benjamin @ the Web 2.0

by Simon Lindgren

“(T)he flâneur . . . was never really a friend of the great outdoors. What mattered to him was . . . communication with, observations about, the simple sight of human beings” (Benjamin Arcades M4a,2). To both the flâneur and the web surfer the interest in other people has become an end in itself. They both have voyeuristic tendencies: “The phantasmagoria of the flâneur: to read from faces the profession, the ancestry, the character. . . . The masses . . . stretch before the flâneur as a veil: they are the newest drug for the solitary” (Arcades M6,6; M16,3).

Walter Benjamin – The Storyteller

There aren’t that many Benjamin texts out there on the interweb. This one

The Storyteller : Reflections on the work of Nicolai Leskov

came my way via Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog , which in its turn arrived through looking for more on the quote in my previous post

Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli.

There is a tantalising Italian wiki on the saying {1} and a link to an English Wiki:Terentianus on its author, which doesn’t give a lot away.

When the quote wiki is automatically translated it comes out as:

Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli
Depending on the apprehension of the reader, the book their fates

which is the sort of garbled translation I am fond of because it reminds me of the sort of English in the instruction sheet in flat-pack furniture.

For a second I misread it as some sort of fear of the reader……perhaps it could just as well be the other meaning or both at the same time: as in ‘I haven’t a clue what this book is about.’ [Chucks it in the waste paper basket]; or, ‘This book scares the hell out of me.’ [chucks it in the waste paper basket]

Would be grateful for a quick lesson on where to put the full stop in a quote: is it .’ or ‘.