Bickering about light SPOILER ALERT

[Sebastian Dangerfield]

rj opines:

>The members of 24fps in their ideological obsession with and bickering
>about "light" seem a rather motley crew of self-indulgent and
pretentious avant-gardists >to me. 

And Paul notes that this characterization puts them squarely in line with
many leftist groups of that era and others.  

I think that the observations are spot-on, even with the harsh judgments
with which they are freighted.  

Though the 24fps'ers are somewhat sympathetically drawn, this reader
can;t help but find their view that by filming the revolution--with
either available or artificial light--they are actively engaged.  This is
not to say of course that cinee' engagee' (I curse the inability to place
proper accents in emails) is not a potnetially puissant weapon in any
struggle.  But the fps'ers are plainly misguided in their belief that
capturing the Godardian 24-frame-per-second 'Truth' they are making a
significant intervention.  Apart from enabling Prairie to uncover her
rather dark legacy, the work product of the collective seems to have an
audience no bigger than the collective itself.  

I am also reminded of Haskell Wexler's _Medium Cool_, which deals not, of
course with self-styled geurilla film-makers, but with more traditional
newsgatherers, but I think the critique implicit in that film applies
with equal force to 24fps.  

The bickering about available or artificial light seems to revolve around
a deeper question of to what extent they are simply recording some
nuomenal 'Truth' versus shaping it.  The debate is sterile because, of
course, either way their act of obbservation and representation is an
interpretive act, and their presence as observers affects the observed. 
There is of course a whole raging debate in ethnography and documentary
film theory about this. (But then again, by making this observation, are
we faulting 24 fps for not reading Bourdieu and de Certeau and others who
hadn't been disseminated while they were out with their Bolexes and
Eclairs?)

But the preceding is all filler to take space to buffer this spoiler. 
The bickering about the light foreshadows Hubble's plaintive cry that all
of his working life, up to and including his 'sell-out' to IATSE,  was
"chasing shadows" or something very like that.  I find the persistent
recurrence of film lighting--from early references to gaffers
moonlighting by setting up the lights for the White SLave Show early in
the novel to these much later--to be intriguing.  There is, as I observed
earlier, an important "light-motif" operative here, and as soon as I
actually get some time to devote some thought to it, I will post some
musings.  But in the mean time, has this caught anyone else's fancy?
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