The End

[Ronkarate at aol.com]

ethan writes:

I think film, an obviously fake version of reality, desperately
needs directors who comment on their own work or medium within the medium.

-----

While I agree that American directors (or most pop-film directors) certainly
don't experiment in this way, there has been plenty of self-referential work
in independent film.

Most notable is Dali/Bunuel's famous eye-cutting scene. But others, in more
subtle ways, have equally (and more succesfully) used the visual image to
comment on the film medium and/or their characters. Jean Luc-Godard's early
works are prime examples (especially _Breathless_ and _Masculin/Feminin_),
Alain Renais (_Hiroshima, Mon Amour_ and _Last Year at Marienbad_), and, to a
lesser extent, the entire Welles canon. In fact, last night I was watching
Steven Soderbergh's overrated _Sex, Lies and Videotape_ which is almost
entirely a comment on the visual image. I would go so far as to argue that
film has been much more actively self-referential, and much more effective
about it, than literature. 

Few novelists are able to blend the self-referential style effectively into
their work, IMO. Apart from Pynchon, Borges, and perhaps Calvino, the
self-referential novelists I am familiar with, such as R.A. Wilson in _The
Illuminatus Trilogy_ and Barth in _Lost in the Funhouse_, tend to drift a bit
to close to "clever," which usually ends up making their works seem more
novel than interesting.

But perhaps I'm wrong...

-Ron