Random Catching Up: Pokler at the Movies

[LARSSON at VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU]

Andrew suggests:
"If the intervals between frames get big                       
enough then anything can be allowed to happen in the spaces.
Continuity at a conceptual level relies on continuity and regularities
at the day to day level. Franz's attempts to supplant this rule with
notions of cause and effect is a diversion (i.e. secular history) even
though, as you say, rooted in faith."


That faith, of course, will soon be sorely tested (but "soon" is an anachronism
here, since almost all of Pokler is given via flashback) when he is forced to
discover "love like the persistence of vision" in his meetings with his 
"daughter" at Zwolfkinder.

The connections to film here are obvious.  First of all, there is the 
"causal" connection of frame to frame within a single shot; then of shot
to shot within a scene; then of scene to scene within the film as a whole.

If the whole of the Hollywood style of "classical" or "invisible" editing
and camerawork tries to efface those gaps, Pokler is a willing accomplice
(even if the films aren't from Hollywood proper).  He's practiced often
enough (haven't we all?) to make the connections.

Here again, Pynchon's critique of the film apparatus uncannily parallels
the critique being made by French semiology in the late 1960s and early
1970s.

Just to be technical, it should also  be noted that "persistence of vision'
is really a meaningless term in regard to the illusion of movement in
film.  (See Bill Nichols, IDEOLOGY AND THE IMAGE, for a good overview on
the subject.)

But it still makes a nice metaphor!

Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)