Movement As Meaning: In Experimental Film (Consciousness Literature the Arts, 13)

"This book offers sweeping and cogent arguments as to why analytic philosophers should take experimental cinema seriously as a medium for illuminating mechanisms of meaning in language. Using the analogy of the movie projector, Barnett deconstructs all communication acts into functions of interval, repetition and context. He describes how Wittgenstein's concepts of family resemblance and language games provide a dynamic perspective on the analysis of acts of reference. He then develops a hyper-simplified formula of movement as meaning to discuss, with true equivalence, the process of reference as it occurs in natural language, technical language, poetic language, painting, photography, music, and of course, cinema. Barnett then applies his analytic technique to an original perspective on cine-poetics based on Paul Valerys concept of omnivalence, and to a projection of how this style of analysis, derived from analog cinema, can help us clarify our view of the digital mediasphere and its relation to consciousness." "Informed by the philosophy of Quine, Dennett, Merleau-Ponty as well as the later work of Wittgenstein, among others, he uses the film work of Stan Brakhage, Tony Conrad, A.K. Dewdney, Nathaniel Dorsky, Ken Jacobs, Owen Land, Saul Levine, Gregory Markopoulos Michael Snow, and the poetry of Basho, John Cage, John Cayley and Paul Valery to illustrate the power of his unique perspective on meaning."--Jacket Movement as Meaning 4 Table of Contents 6 Foreword: What this book is and what this book isn’t: 12 Preface: Arriving at the scene: 14 Introduction: Two pictures of a rose in the dark 16 Part I: Modes of Perception and Modes of Expression 24 1. First ideas in new media: the cinematic suspension of disbelief 24 2. Describing how the mind moves toward understandings: 26 3. New paradigms for viewing experience and new ways of creating meaning: 27 4. Theories of meaning – media, messages and how the mind moves: 27 5. The relevance of the mechanism – lessons to carry forward from an already ancient medium: 28 6. Frames vs. shots, surface vs. window: 31 7. What the surface of the screen can tell us about language: 32 8. Language integrates our perceptions as surely as the nervous system integrates our sense data: – Hallucination or Metadata? 33 9. Letting the mind surround an idea: an introduction to Wittgenstein: 35 10. Ascertaining understanding: What one language must evoke, another may stipulate (and vice versa). 39 11. Dynamic and static theories of meaning: 42 12. Color, types of reference and the inveterate narrative: 43 13. The polyvalence of the picture: 47 14. Meaning and mutual experience – kinds of reference redefined: 49 15. What has art got to do with it? 51 16. A whole new way of reading – the surface of the screen and the modulation of self-consciousness: 52 17. The anteroom of meaning and our conception of space: 56 18. Meaning and mental habits: 58 19. Assumed and earned meaning: 59 20. The spectrum of shared reference: 61 21. The story sequence and the montage – prologue: 62 22. When the editor learns about meaning: 63 23. Montage and metaphor: 64 24. The imitation of perception: 67 Part II: Dynamic And Syntactic Universals 70 25. Non-Verbal Universals: 70 26. The polyvalence of the picture and the omnivalence of the movie: 73 27. The description of omnivalence as a floating target: 75 28. Dynamic universals: beginning, middle and end – a prologue: 77 29. Language and the momentum of the body: 79 30. Syntactic universals: interval, context and repetition: 81 31. The synergy of symmetry: 87 32. Sidebar – another parallel model and another speculative future: 88 33. Formal references in music and cinema: 91 34. The developmental leap – keeping the referent a mystery: 92 35. Resemblance and resonance: 94 36. The subliminal pull of the flicker: 96 37. Aural and visual cadence: 98 38. The frame of the experience: 100 39. Resonance among frames: 104 40. Ancient history – the medium as the model: 110 41. Illustration, induction and repetition: 116 42. The material and the medium: 124 43. Sonics and seamlessness: 127 44. The private language machine and the evolution of a medium: 129 45. Illusions and ontological linchpins: 133 46. Delimiting an audience: 140 47. Summarizing the singular window en route to the panoramic view: 145 Part III: The Moving Target 148 48. Digital ubiquity – the memosphere & the mediasphere: 148 49. Compression and consciousness: 155 50. Indeterminacy of translation revisited and context reconsidered: 163 51. The reconfigured attention span: 169 52. The synergy of the mediasphere: 172 53. The search engine and the editor-in-chief: 174 54. A sidebar on consciousness: 181 55. So, where is the screen? 182 56. Definitions and boundaries: 186 57. The meaning is the metaphor (or not): 188 58. The raw and the cooked. 191 59. A final reflection on method: 195 60. From the grain to the pixel: 199 APPENDIX A: 206 Acknowledgements: 210 Bibliography 212 Filmography 216 Index 232 Content: Foreword: What this book is, what this book isn't... Preface: Arriving at the scene... Introduction: Two pictures of a rose in the dark... Part I: Modes of Perception and Modes of Expression Part II: Dynamic And Syntactic Universals Part III: The Moving Target Appendix A: The Paillard Bolex Movie Camera And the J-K Optical Printer Acknowledgements Bibliography