Beardsley Professor of the Philosophy of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and President of the American Society for Aesthetics. In the process we get some biographical background that traces Carroll’s evolution from Catholic school bad boy to avant-garde film guru and editor of Millennium Film Journal to his current life as the web-surfing Monroe C. In the interview that follows, Carroll discusses a wide range of his work, some of the controversy around it, and the relation between criticism and theory. Yet in them, Carroll draws on an enormous range of philosophical literature. Essays in the latter, on the other hand, examine in depth specific works, movements, and moments in film history, including many current at the moment of writing. Yet in them Carroll draws on an enormous range of examples from the history of “moving images” – a term meant to include works from video and new media as relevant to his theorizing – including the conditions of reception he has encountered in avant-garde film circles. Essays in the former tend to answer the sort of “pure theory” questions posed in the previous paragraph. This can be seen in even a brief skimming of the twin collections Theorizing the Moving Image and Interpreting the Moving Image. For like film theorists of a bygone era – including figures canonized in the Anglo-American film world such as André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Hans Richter, as well as contemporaries such as Walter Murch, and numerous overlooked Latin Americans such as Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Getino, and Fernando Solanas – Carroll has worked in such film world positions as newspaper critic, magazine editor, and documentary screenwriter, and his theorizing closely intertwines with issues he has faced in those positions. The relevance of Carroll’s writing for film world activity comes in part from his own experience. For not only has he spent much of his professional life openly warring with the reigning movements in film theory – as in his treatise Mystifying Movies and the co-edited volume Post-Theory – he himself has spent a lot of time hanging out at the movies and thinking about things like: Is it justifiable for a critic to evaluate a film based on a “directorial personality” she constructs? Can a documentary be objective? Can a documentary be true? Are political discussions of films justifiable? What do horror films have in common? Why do people respond emotionally to films that they know are fictional? Is there a way of making films that is inherently “cinematic?” What is the difference between avant-garde film and “movies?” In his wide-range of writing, Noël Carroll addresses many of the most basic issues anyone involved in film culture confronts. For any association with theory may evoke memories of film theory classes and conferences that didn’t make any sense to those of us who, well, like hanging out at the movie theatre, then talking about what we saw there, about how and why what we saw there affected us, and about how that relates to other things, in the artworld and beyond.īut Carroll is a film theorist with a difference. As someone who writes books like Theorizing the Moving Image and Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction, he may strike many readers of Senses of Cinema as a figure whose work would be of no importance, and even a hindrance, to any sort of interesting film culture. Noël Carroll may require something of an introduction. An annotated bibliography of work by Carroll discussed in this interview is below.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |