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So I often find I have many notes in the margins of our readings commenting on some statement or claim the author has made that I don’t agree with. But I do not get so bothered by them most of the time to feel the need to vent about them. For some reason I do feel that need with this piece (very possibly influenced by the knowledge that I have’t been on here for a while and need to post something). Sadly though I know I am not critiquing this piece in any sort of one vein, which would be good practice for class, but I just didn’t have quite that much time on my hands.
My first note (and realistically it is likely only this late because I was feeling over whelmed while reading before this) is on page 9, toward the end of the continuing paragraph from the previous page, when Davis notes as if its a second thought, something note very important at all, “right down to the very shape and bearing of the body itself.” Well of course. The way someone carries them self can nearly completely refute the feeling their clothes would give me, no matter what setting we/ I/ they are in. If I see a man in an expensive suit standing on a side walk corner, waiting for traffic to let him walk, standing aloof from the crowd around him, looking at his blackberry or snidely looking down at some begger down the block I will think a million degreee different from if I see the same man on that same corner in that same suit bending down and happily playing with/ petting some dog among the crowd while he engagingly talks to its owner. Bearing and manner speak volumes about people; as much or more than their clothes do.
The next note I have on the reading to complain about is probably very personally driven. On page 12, about in the middle of the first actual paragraph, Davis notes again as some sort of after thought (in parenthesis no less!) “some of whom truly are artisits,” refering to the people who design the fashions being discussed. Of course some of them are real artisits, really it should be said all of them are real artisits! There is no clothes designer one could sit by and watch them puzzle out some new idea or way to cut something, some new pattern to use in a novel way, that you could say is not an artist. How could you sit by someone who is sketching out idea after idea after idea (so very like any one of us) and say it is not their artistic process?
The next note is a very small one, but one that again was perhaps a particular sting because I felt it more personally; on page 15, again about half way into the first actual paragraph, Davis says that “our intuition says no,” referring to the tiny differences possible in clothing that can make it difference enough to be a fashion or not. Of course a tiny difference in a garment can make all the difference. Take a knee length skirt vs. a mini-skirt. Merely a difference in hem length, they can even be made of exactly the same fabric, same number of pleats, same colors, even standing right next to each other, even match them with the same shirt! And you will get a radically different feeling about them. The mini-skirt is flirting and suggestive, the knee length skirt is conservative and possibly strict feeling.
Maybe all these previous notes really woke me up, or just got me going, because on the last real page(s), 16nd 17 I have three complaints. I will do my best to wrap them up quickly though.
The first one is actual in the notes of pages 16 and 17, it was a complaint until I read the note on page 17 and now it has tuned into perhaps a smaller complaints about misunderstanding/ Davis being unclear. In the note on page 16 Davis notes that there was not fashion in civilizations of old, such as Egypt and China. This is either a gross point of not having done the homework/ research, for China had VERY stringent fashion rules, or else it is unclear to me how “fashion” is being used, for in the note on page 17 Davis calls a possible example of first fashion “an institutionalized fashion cycle.” So would the fashion rules of ancient China be merely an institution, or would it not have been as it is now, a communication method they would have used to note (if nothing else) how much they cared to pay attention to the fashion rules of court or the market place?
The second note on these last pages is on 17, bottom of the end of the paragraph from page 16, where Davis notes that we all “[share] a strong collective component.” The point in this paragraph seemed to be that people growing up in the same situations would end up being very similar as people. I have huge arguments with this idea. From my own life I have a perfect example: my cousin and I had nearly exactly mirroring situations in life, with very strong mothers, seemingly very loving fathers when we were young, then abrupt and violent divorces between our parents. I came out very much of the mind “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, Paul my cousin is the greatest victim of the world, it’s always out to get him. We often can’t stand each other because of this huge difference in our reactions to the same situation. So I find Davis’ point here very aggitating.
Finally, my last note on this reading in on page 17, toward the middle-end of the only complete paragraph on this page, when Davis is talking about how the designers of fashion do what they do to give us the populace a way of expressing our selves, how fashion sprouts from their minds as only their attempt to help us truly reflect and express how we really feel inside. What nonsense! Sure, I suppose some fashion may come from this vein, like the militant shoulder pad example used earlier in this piece, but I am not wearing my jeans with the holes in the knees because I feel the need to rebel against the sterility of new jeans, or that I wish to convey that I’m a rough and tumble sort and I wear my jeans out, I just think they get softer with all that wear, more comfortable, and I just think they look fun, with all the texture and roughness.
It was awesome. I haven’t seen this kind of domination since Michael Jordan went to the Olympics.
As I was not fully quenched by Kickasola, I read the user comments on IMDB, a few other critics and blog posts. Here are a few things that I found interesting.
Roger Ebert:
Roger Ebert is no Kickasola but I found a few things interesting in his critique of the movie. It starts with the sentence “Here is a film about a feeling.” Then he talks about Kieślowski’s style as below.
“He is drawn to coincidence and synchronicity. He is little interested in focusing on a character hurling from point A in the first act to Point C in the third. He is fascinated by Point B, and the unseen threads linking it to past and present. His films can be mystical experiences. He trusts us to follow him, to sense his purpose, to leave the theater having shared his openness to a moment. The last thing you want to do after a Kieślowski film is “unravel” the plot. It can’t be done.”
Slavoj Žižek:
For the few of us who cannot sleep unless we unravel the message, I found that this small snippet almost paraphrases it. It’s an excerpt from an essay titled “The Forced Choice of Freedom” written by Žižek.
“The perception of our reality as one of the possible, often even not the most probable, outcomes of an open situation, this notion that other possible outcomes are not simply canceled out but continue to haunt our reality as a specter of what might have happened, conferring on our reality the status of extreme fragility and contingency, implicitly clashes with the predominant linear narrative forms of our literature and cinema.”
Joseph G. Kickasola
I am pretty sure this guy was stalking Kieślowski. I am absolutely stunned by both by the quantity and quality of nuanced observations and interpretations he provides us. He situates his interpretation based on the author’s previous works (references to The Decalogue), life (French and Polish politics), lifeworld (Kieślowski’s attitude towards old people) and through his own judgements as well. This, we all agree, is by no means a simple task and Kickasola has done a kick-ass job. (Sorry couldn’t resist it!)
And here is where I start whining. I have one huge issue with this article. He beautifully states of what I think is the paradigmatic glasses we need to be wearing while watching Kieślowski’s movies.
“… the essence of the film hinges on the experience of watching it, not simply on an understanding of its story, characters, and use of metaphor.”
After stating this, he does exactly the opposite – explains the story and provides rationalistic explanations to the characters’ traits by contextualizing them with respect to the metaphors and motifs of religion, spirituality, politics and philosophy. It does help us understand the movie better but aren’t Kieślowski’s movies meant to evoke? Does one need to have a rational understanding to “feel” it better? If Kickasola is trying to do that, then he is essentially at logger heads with Kieślowski.
Kickasola paraphrases Kieślowski’s attitude towards this by saying
“This type of abstract, nonverbal “rhetoric” can be very persuasive…”
In other words, to me it feels like Kickasola attempts to help us understand a movie that the director did not want us to understand in the first place.
All said and done, I do not deny the fact that knowing about the director’s life, his works, his beliefs, the metaphors and motifs used in the movie and Kickasola’s interpretation of them have definitely enriched me to understand the movie. But the answer to the question whether it has helped me to feel it better is NOT a big resounding yes!
PS: I wonder how Pauline Kael would have critiqued this movie!
I immensely enjoyed and appreciated ‘The Double Life of Veronique’ on so many levels but my immediate reaction after the film finished was ‘huh?’ and that I wanted to watch it again. I understood (well thought I understood) the main story line and the nuanced dramatic devices such as the clear ball and the symbolic emphasis on sex and death used throughout the film. However, there were still so many questions I had that were unanswered, for instance, what was the deal with Veronique agreeing to lie in court for her friend and was the piece of string related to her death some how?
Reading Kickasola answered many of my queries (turns out the part about Veronique lying for her friend in court was part of a subtext that had to be cut which is why it didn’t really fit in overall). Yet at the same time Kickasola raised more questions and brought out the cynic in me as I found many of his comments suspect and unconvincing. I tend to find myself feeling slightly sceptical when academic writers start using jargon that confounds the message rather than clarifies it. Was he just reading too much into the film or were the complex layers and meanings completely intended and decided upon by the director? For instance the theme of vision and new beginning is inferred purely from Veronique removing Alexandre’s glasses from his hand in the hotel room scene at the end. Also, the comment about the anonymous phone call being interpreted by postmoderns as “a recognizance of the interstitial image and a critique of the medium” (p.252) is not discussed or elucidated at all.
Maybe I am missing the point and I should just appreciate and accept what the author interprets in the film but it keeps making me think of when I had to read ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Bronte for my English literature class at school. There are so many interpretations flying around of the book, one of which is a Freudian psychoanalytic reading which was predictably about sex and repressed desires. It just didn’t seem to make sense that people were reading Freud into Bronte’s book when he wasn’t even born when it was published so the author obviously had no intention of symbolizing the Oedipus complex in Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship.
I guess all this just comes back to the issues we have been raising in class, how much as a critic we are able to bring to the table and interpret a ‘text’ and how much we look to the author and their intention or even if that matters. Either way, I really loved the film and have been thinking about it ever since as it is a poignant and thought-provoking work of art. The director Kieslowski can include me with the fifteen-year-old girl he met in Paris (p.244) in being profoundly affected by the movie.
So I’ve been struggling with this issue in my head since the Mulhall article on Aliens. And now after reading another film critique, I have to ask myself. “When is a movie just supposed to be a movie?”. I found myself several times when reading Mulhall underlining things and saying to myself, “No, that’s just how horror films work.”
Now this is not to say the same for the Double Life of Veronique and it’s review. But why do we as critics have to always find something? I guess I see it like if you’re looking for trouble you’ll find trouble. Are we really finding things the director put in to make us think about life and philosophy? Or, and this is what I think too often, are we creating that narrative for ourselves, and ignoring the true intensions of the author.
Again, I don’t want to take anything away from the Kieslowski’s work or his intensions, because I believe some of the metaphors mentioned in the Kickasola article where in fact intentional. But where do we draw the line between someone just trying to make an entertaining horror flick and someone trying to make social commentary about feminism. I don’t know many feminists, but I don’t remember them lining up to go see Alien. I do remember a bunch of Sci-Fi geeks with half beards and pony tails outside the theatre though. Hmm…
Maybe if there was a film that was just an empty room with a clock ticking and the second hand was moving backwards. Now there’s a film with MEANING!
..jaMEs
When I was reading for today, I started to wonder, “Is understanding really that important if I find a meaning that isn’t grounded in the artist’s or designer’s intentions?” I like the idea of interpretation based on life-worlds, but the concept of understanding bothers me. If I find meaning in a painting that is personally relevant to me, what does it matter if I took the artist’s intentions into account. Sure I’m not exploring the history of the painting and, therefore, I can’t necessarily infer what the artist meant, but what if I’m not interested in what the artist meant. In some cases I can see where this is helpful, such as art history, or learning from a designer’s solution to a design problem, but that’s not always important.
Also what happens when the meaning of something changes over time based on context? Like in the fashion article, it talked about how the meaning of blue jeans have evolved over time. If I don’t know the entire history of blue jeans, does that mean that I don’t understand that blue jeans are to be interpreted as casual wear in this day in age? If I don’t know that the first person to make blue jeans intended them for rugged-wear, does that mean I am not expressing myself when I wear a pair because I ultimately don’t know what that pair of jeans means?
I also considered writing a post about traveling in a time machine and how understanding anything would be difficult because my life-world would be drastically different than the life-world of a person living in that time. Including that traveling in shorter periods of time would be easier to understand because the context is closer to the context in which my life-world developed. <– But I didn’t for times sake and there’s the gist anyway 
Two disclaimers:
- I sometimes happen to be a bit of a cultural determinist – I see most things as culturally relative.
- Perhaps I am drawing too much upon the ethnography as harmful panel from CHI 09, but here goes.
My main problems with some of the ethnomethodological theory espoused in the Smith reading mostly come in two parts.
Ethnomethodology claims to focus on the “learning how members’ actual, ordinary activities consist of methods to make practical action, practical circumstances, common sense knowledge of social structures and practical sociological reasoning analyzable and of disovering the formal properties of commonplace, practical common sense actions ‘from within’ actual settings, as ongoing accomplishments of those settings” (68). The foundation of my problems with this passage is the lack of regard for the extreme subjectiveness of the verbiage tossed about here. Words such as “common sense” and “practical” are quite value-laden. What is common sense and practical to one person is not necessarily that for another person. These notions vary within culturally similar groups, let alone between culturally different groups. For instance, a good friend of mine is a spectacular event planner. What is common sense knowledge for her regarding how to organize workers and put together an event is baffling to me.
I find the notion that one can make common sense knowledge regarding social structures bizarre because social structures are only common sense to those that agree with them. The institution of slavery might have been common sense to many people within a time when slavery was socially acceptable, but the notion of human beings as property is not common sense within American society today. However, there might be places within the world today where women are considered property. Common sense is subjective. This makes ethnomethodology very susceptible to ethnocentric analysis.
My next annoyance with ethnomethodology is the argument that it is necessary in order to examine the common place, the ordinary or the actual. (And this is the part where I acknowledge I’m thinking beyond the Smith article and back to CHI) This annoys me because it gets set against ethnography as though ethnography does not look at the everyday or the actual. Ethnography has a tradition of examining all aspects of phenomena. It is to be a thick description of everyday life. I will grant that at least within anthropology the discipline of ethnography has tended to be correlated with studying the “other” and thus it could be viewed that something different is required to study social structures from within. However, it is my belief that ethnography is a good method for studying the social and the cultural from within and many scholars now are working in such a manner.
I spent a lot of time this summer thinking through issues with online publishing. I was working for a weekly newspaper (the Idaho Mountain Express) out in Sun Valley, Idaho and when they place content on their website they allow for commenting.
Personally I had an issue (and still do) with the idea of comments for news articles. To me, news isn’t meant to be a conversation! I can understand the addition of comments to editorials or opinion pieces, but when I look around at many large newspapers, as well as the small ones in similar communities (ski resorts and other tourist market towns) it seems to have become the industry standard to allow commenting.
Blogs are a conversational medium, and I think that it allows a very unique interaction for the written word. This is why I think blogs have and need a comment space. Whether our class blog or Jeff’s blog it is used as a place to formulate ideas (sort of an interactive rough draft space), or a place to vent or rant or spread rumors about a certain subject (like a personal blog or an apple rumor blog etc) it seems to be for the most part situated in a conversational space. Where information is shared with the intent of starting a conversation. Heck, whenever I write a blog post (surprisingly even without Jeff threatening failure it does sometimes happen… rarely) I am always sad when I dont get comments and responses.
The reasoning for the commenting at the Express was to compete. It was a direct response to a new news aggregate that was started in the same town called SunValleyOnline. This new news aggregate (a site that pulls news from other sources, not a place with paid reporters etc) popped up and there was a lot of initial draw to the site which allowed commenting on the stories they displayed. To push back the Express turned on commenting on their stories, and for the most part, the readership of SVOnline seemed to drop.
The biggest concern however comes back to the idea of news. News, as I understand it, is meant to be an unbiased presentation of facts. I understand the business decision to allow commenting, since the public seemed to express a demand for it, but it still bugs me, since now the newspaper is responsible to manage and maintain the comments, when these comments only seem to allow reader opinion and bias to enter the discussion on the stories.
Thoughts? Agree? Disagree?
So last time we ended up watching something interesting from the land of France: Godard’s A Woman is a Woman. There was a comment I didn’t get a chance to talk about which is sort of interesting and I think will appeal to most people in our class, so here’s the best way I can try to articulate what I am thinking:
The combination of the camera angles and the audio Godard gives us gives me the impression that not only we are to become the main female character, but we are also to indulge in the fanservice the director is trying to entice us with – an interesting duality. For those who don’t know, fanservice is a term used in the anime and video game culture which focuses on the directors or designers giving the viewer/player what they really want – visceral action combined with well endowed and beautiful ladies (also reminds me of Jay from the View Askew universe, too!).
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