We are lost to any sense of a continuous tradition.

[Paul Mackin]

Robert Mahnke wrote:
>
> I saw this last night and thought it had curious echoes of AtD:
>
> Perhaps history in this century, though Eigenvalue, is rippled with 
> gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed 
> to be, at the bottom of a fold, it’s impossible to determine warp, 
> woof or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one 
> gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous 
> cycles each of which come to assume greater importance than the weave 
> itself and destroy any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by 
> the funny-looking automobiles of the ‘30’s, the curious fashions of 
> the ‘20’s, the peculiar moral habits of our grandparents. We produce 
> and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false 
> memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly 
> lost to any sense of a continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a 
> crest, things would be different. We could at least see.
>
> V. 155-56 (1986 ed.).
>
Retired Jean-Luc Godard seems to assign some blame for the condition 
noted by Eigenvalue on the current practice of filming in digital.

Today, living in “self-imposed exile” in Switzerland, Mr. Godard told 
Mr. Brody that young filmmakers “don’t know the past” and that “with 
digital, there is no past, not even technically,” because looking at a 
previous shot “doesn’t take any time to get there. ... There’s an entire 
time that no longer exist

(book review in today's NY Times)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/23/books/23basi.html?ref=books