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March 15, 2007
A Goal Has Been Achieved
Categories: Personal, Pictures
In the process of writing my film paper, I have achieved a major personal and professional milestone:
I have managed to use Ferris Bueler's Day Off in an academic paper.
After the stuff I posted on Tuesday, I have a section of the paper that attempts to develop a pragmatist view on film. In doing so, I address three vital pragmatist concepts that need to be explained in order for that view to be understood -- educational experience, aesthetic experience, and culture. I don't discuss any one of them enough, but it's a good start to bring to the panel.
Ferris Bueler comes in when I discuss culture. One of the things I argue for is that film needs to be understood in two ways. One, is as a work of art. As a work, it does all those things we expect art to do, including provide new categories and vocabularies for understanding and interpreting our experience. This isn't terribly new or insightful, although seeing art as a function rather than a quality of an object is a different way of seeing art. Two is as a part of our cultural experience; we live in a culture where movies are part of a shared body of experiences. We all see movies. Many of us see the same moveis and talk about them. Many of us have seen the same sets of movies over and over, to the point where they become part of the way we communicate. I use Ferris Bueler's Day Off as an example of a film I've seen over and over, can recite almost by memory, and can reference casually in a way that others can pick up on and recite back. I think a failure of film theory and aesthetics that talk about film is the fact that it does not address the way in which films, as popular art, becomes and inescapable part of our cultural experience.
Posted by Nakia at March 15, 2007 12:09 PM