What accounts for the discrepancy between the incredible filmmaking of the Soviet Union and that of communist China? The Soviets intentionally developed their film industry in particular and pushed for serious artistic works that have been recognized even in the western world as some of the most important achievements in the medium.
I would guess that this is in large part a legacy of the importance of Russian art and literature before the revolution, but what accounts for China's relative paucity of serious art? Their film industry seems to just be trying to recreate Hollywood with socialist plots. The only Chinese author I've even heard of is Liu Cixin, who writes really interesting scifi, but nothing approaching the literary equivalent of a Tarkovsky. Am I just ignorant of the art being produced in China or is my intuition correct?
>>2202041I think Russians just might make for better storytellers. They're more psychological and wicked funny from tripping on psychedelic mushrooms picked inna woods. I dunno, it is what it is. Here's a mockumentary made by Aleksey Fedorchenko from 2005 about how the USSR sent a secret mission to the moon in the 1930s (so Russia actually beat America to the moon) and it was covered up by the Soviet government. They have a lot of great writers. In the Soviet era, writers could be treated like rock stars were treated in America.
>>2202182You're throwing a lot of big names at us. I was watching a documentary about Soviet emigres to New York in the 1980s, and this one artist was saying "yeah, there are all these writers who come over, but America only needs one or two dissident writers, not 50 of them." Then this other guy was going insane because nobody cared about his work in America while the KGB would seize his manuscripts and threaten his family back home, and he was like… I miss that honestly because that made me feel important. I mattered! But this American "freedom" … pfeh! What an abstraction to me!
>>2202041china is just giving ppl the art they like dude
like they are being democratic
sure movie buffs like Tarkovsky, but the masses in general care more about titanic and mission impossible
>>2202319>In a marvel movie, everything is happening but none of it matters. In Stalker, nothing is happening but everything matters.yes, precisely. it is a sort of meta-filmic experiment, like von trier's "dogville", where its substance is derived from the willful suspension of disbelief by the audience. the abstract narrative persists through its transparent appearance. this to me is also the general substance-of-style in editing. the french short film la jetee (1962) proves this point all the same (where "montage" alao has its french roots). in some sense, the causality of narrative precedes its phenomenal representation, like how books make us "see" what is unseen. this has its abridgement into kantian philosophy thus, where the synthetic a priori unites the worlds of possible knowledge. the middle point between this is deadpool, who is openly meta, but still marvel. you will notice however that the self-reference of meta must still "believe" in the illusion of its object to which it stands opposed. this shows how the subject can only relate to itself through the other, like the audience to the cinema screen of fantasy. to me, von trier is the true master of this meta-filmic meditation, where the divine is always obtusely foregrounded to give sense to its "true hallucination" (in the words of terence mckenna), but in this, one laughs at the absurdity, while not realising that in this, the form of the film gains self-consciousness as another true illusion for the viewer. trier is not cynical however, but sees the necessity of this perspective. kubrick attempts to do something similar in 2001, but configures this consciousness as transcendence (the "rebirth" of the god-man), but trier and tarkovsky both see transcendence as something "material", or immanent to subjectivity. the end of stalker for example shows how the "room" has now given the child magic powers. faith succeeds over doubt.
>>2202649*sniff*
*rubs nose*
*sniff*
*tugs shirt*
Interesting post. >>2202671to summarise, the true "meta" does not exit the frame to achieve some notion of transcendence, but instead invites us into the logic of the frame itself. there are vulgar examples of this in "found footage" style films, where the frame is its own self-reference, but i prefer von trier's "materialism", which openly accepts the transcendent in its direct terms, thus exposing the falseness of transcendence itself. this i relate to kant's noumena, which is a transcendence only realisable as an immanent abstraction. one already exists in the frame, but then discovers its boundaries, in phenomena. film i think has the unique theoretical standpoint of being a form of pure phenomena, and thus it is a kantian form, but one precluded with an "unconscious", which gives us artistic subjectivity. melancholia i consider one of the greatest films ever made.
>>2202761I think that's fair. I went into it with a sense of anticipation and tension based in part of its reputation and the video game. It wasn't what I was expecting, but I found the experience enjoyable, if somewhat anticlimactic.
I think for me part of the pleasure of it was that it's so different from the sort of movies which predominate now. But basically it is just a movie about some men going on a hike, talking about their views on things, and then deciding to go home after reaching their objective. Once someone turns a fog machine on.
It's a unique experience I think and has it's interesting qualities, but it's not like I think everyone could or should love it.
>>2203081in tarkovsky's "stalker", the substance of the film is its style, that is to say, its mediated narrative. this is shown by how everything in the film is entirely suggestive. we never "see" the things which are spoken of, except the end, where the child is shown to actually possess powers from the zone. here, faith in "the thing" is vindicated (like faith in God. i read stalker as being about how we either choose to believe or disbelieve in the stories we are given. this is important since tarkovsky is known as a christian filmmaker who struggles with faith).
i then compare this "meta" of the style to von trier's film "dogville" which has the setpieces of a stage play, but the form of a film. we suspend disbelief to give the film substance. this i further compare to the french short film "la jetee (1962)", which is a "montage" which gains comprehension only by narration and a certain ordering of images. only in this extreme example are we able to see then that it is not the film which possesses an objective causality, but it is the audience who watch the film who give it this substance to begin with. the comprehension of art then is a subjective act.
this transcendental subjectivity is kantian, in the same way a film is kantian, since a film is pure phenomena, but phenomena which is configured by the causality of subjectivity (or the structure of narrative that the audience gives it). the meta-film then is a film which posits the case of a "true illusion" in its narrative to give reference back to its own narrative (notice how for example, people are always mad when a film ends and "it was all a dream", since in some way, this makes the story "less" real, even though the story is fiction). thus, subjectivity is the "frame" or "gaze" of the film, included as the camera's eye.
the best examples i can find of "true illusions" are in von trier films (in "the idiots", the meta-film is in the hand-held camera, in "breaking the waves" it is the heavenly bells, in "dogville" and "manderlay" it is the stageplay set, in "dancer in the dark" it is the musical elements, in "melancholia" it is the spoiler beginning, in "antichrist" it is the personification of nature, in nymphomaniac it is the editing and swapping out actors, and in "the house that jack built" it is the depiction of hell). for this reason, von trier is a meta-filmmaker, who by this paradox, at once, makes brilliant and serious films.
this meta differs in respect to the cynicism of properties like deadpool, which are purely self-referential, but never transcendental (or including the "frame" of the film as its stylistic limit). thus, this cynicism can be seen as uncritical since it attempts to transgress itself rather than conform to its constitutive limits. an interesting example is kubrick's "2001" where the symbol of the frame is given concrete representation in the monolith (the monolith represents the cinema screen), and in the process of the narrative, the frame is transcended, by which the character is "reborn" as a god, who now squarely looks the audience in the face (breaking the frame). this is still an uncritical movement however, since to "see" the audience, one must nonetheless have a necessary separation. this meta by kubrick is a forerunner to videogame technologies then, or inter-active screening, which links audience to screen.
this differs from tarkovsky and von trier, who both see the transcendent as an immanence, in the frame of the film itself. this is why as the divine is brought down to earth, it becomes absurd, but also hyperreal, in the sense that one is *forced* to believe what he sees, which is but a reflection of himself - like in tarkovsky's solaris, where in outer space (the material transcendent), man meets his own soul.
thus, what gains true agency is the frame of the film, or mediated narrative, enveloped in style-as-substance. this does not preclude an empty solipsism however, but the "hyperreality" of things, in that we are forced to accept their absurd reality. this however is the nature of narrative as such. thus, what tarkovsky gets right is treating the absurd as seriously as possible, just like von trier. in this, we see how style predominates over the substance, and thereby becomes its substance. God dies to his own creation; the author is dead, and so on.
>>2205527>>2204589anon are you a philosophy student or just big reader or what? i understand what youre saying and i know youre not talking out your ass, but cant tell if youre trying to act smart or just cant switch modes and turn off the jargon. you really just said
>put most basically. the substance of a film is its intersubjective relationship with the audiencei know what youre saying and i agree with you, and i actually had not heard before or considered before to compare to video games in the sense that its very revealing that theyre dismissed because the standard for art is interpassive, thats genuinely very insightful. it also makes sense as to why people are strongly against considering video games art at the same time that people dont take movies, literature, visual art, etc nearly as seriously, because the illusion of the "object in itself", its "purity" delivered without mediation, is a substitution for interaction with an artwork. which may be completely inaccessible in terms of actually appreciating it due to education, personal sensibilities, emotional repression, etc., but those absences are substituted with the sense that there is a standard of judgement beyond yourself interacting with it, i.e. "its deep and respectable" or "its vain personal interest and not respectable." come to think of it the reactionary attitude to shitty idpol pandering in video games really does resemble the reactionary attitude to so called "abstract", "modern", "experimental", art, in that in the absence of finding any avenue of interaction with the work itself, the person experiencing the art demands that the work assumes a position of neutrality that allows them to consume it easier. they want to know that theres an approved standard, which means it cant have other people on the other end with mysterious, biased (perverted!) intentions. and like a lot of "abstract" etc art is genuinely just hacks, money laundering, etc (certainly not all of it), most "woke" videogames are really just incredibly cynical pandering, but in both cases the reactionary response is very telling, because even if they are on some level upset about what they see to be a decline in quality (correctly or otherwise; out of grasping to explain genuine insights as to why they are repulsed by something or out of repressive reflex), their demand is that art be more impersonal, less "political", less "sensitive", etc, that it be a more perfect commodity rather than better crafted by the human beings on the other end, which would lead to more opaque considerations about the circumstances of employment & management that lead to better art and worse art, and whether art would be better without the involvement of capital, i.e. it would lead to woke libtard commie shit when they just want their vidya to be fun again
all that said my line on "is vidya art?" has always been "yes of course but most of it is dogshit terrible art". doesnt contradict anything ive said thoinitially i was trying to just ask you if you were aware that you were not putting anything "basically" but in reading your responses i got more excited about the actual ideas. a few drinks in so not even gonna try to circle back
>>2205554>what are you, an anti-intellectual?lmfao of course i am, im a communist
>The patronizing and errant lecturing of our so-called intellectuals seems to me a far greater impediment. We are still in need of technicians, agronomists, engineers, chemists, architects, etc., it is true, but if the worst comes to the worst we can always buy them just as well as the capitalists buy them, and if a severe example is made of a few of the traders among them — for traders there are sure to be — they will find it to their own advantage to deal fairly with us. But apart from the specialists, among whom I also include schoolteachers, we can get along perfectly well without the other “intellectuals.” The present influx of literati and students into the party, for example, may be quite damaging if these gentlemen are not properly kept in check.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_08_21.htm >>2205563>of course i amyou must be one of those "technicians", agronomists, engineers, chemists, architects, etc" then i presume?
>>2205560>or just cant switch modes and turn off the jargonit is true that i have a crutch
>the person experiencing the art demands that the work assumes a position of neutrality that allows them to consume it easier.this is often the idiocy that comes with artistic criticism in any sense. a ridiculous appeal to "realism" always pops up in cultural demand, whether in film or games. this search for "objectivity" in art does mirror the ambitions of abstract art to "mean" something more than what it is. this anti-social attitude is the common thread between snobs and plebs then; that they seek immediacy with the form - they seek to relate to it directly rather than indirectly. a snob will profess that abstraction entails mediation, yet if you would ever call their preferred slop bad art, they would be upset. in the kingdom of opinions, extremes meet.
>they are on some level upset about what they see to be a decline in quality the issue is that as soon as you replace the black woman with the white man, things are fixed for the reactionary. their complaint is valid, but solutions are misdiagnosed.
>all that said my line on "is vidya art?" has always been "yes of course but most of it is dogshit terrible art". doesnt contradict anything ive said thothats a fine perspective. but where is the qualitative distinction to you? what makes super mario or pong an equal form to citizen kane or casablanca, and what also makes them different?
>you were not putting anything "basically" but in reading your responses i got more excited about the actual ideasim a good writer stuck inside of a bad writer. its common.
>>2205563are you engels? is the anon youre responding to Otto Von Boenigk? is the conversation even comparable?did engels say somewhere: "people who use obscure philosophical terminology when its not strictly necessary are a danger to the communist movement"? did he or marx say its wrong to think or talk about art? if they did (they did not) why would that be the standard for whether it was wrong? if you have a different standard for why its wrong to talk about art, explain it
i agree guy is rambling out obscure terms unnecessarily and either assuming theyre generally understood or assuming it makes him look smart, and either way you could just leave it at banter about it obviously being philosophy student garble. acting like a smug heckler quoting scripture is retarded and much more embarassing than what he's doing
>>2205560>>2205576to actually simplify, 2001 is about breaking the frame. the monolith represents the movie screen and the film is about man transcending this medium, to be "reborn" as a creature that looks into the figurative "camera". this to me is a pref-ormulation of interactive entertainment like videogames, which erase the medium and turn audiences into players. the audience now enters the screen. this inversion to me has its place, but will never be high culture for a reason (even if that reason is that "high culture" is a classist concept, since the interpassive form resembles a master overlooking his slave, or more commonly, a consumer possessing a commodity, while the interactive form resembles a worker entering a factory).
stalker is better since it limits itself to suggestion, and so has awareness of its conditions as art. it does not seek to transcend itself, but to actually situates transcendence as an immanence. one can only give reality to something by a faith in it. this is what art is about fundamentally. robots can play mario into perfection to create an "objective" state of things, while a robot cannot "watch" a movie.
>>220557me and him deserve each other. no need to intefere in our romance.
>>2205576>where is the qualitative distinction to you? what makes super mario or pong an equal form to citizen kane or casablanca, and what also makes them different?totally unqualified to answer because in video game terms i am a "casual". i understand in a general sense that there is some calibration of my own interaction with a games mechanics that is fun in a way that more fully engages me and feels rewarding, and that that is very distinct from things that draw me in but the appeal is just whats called "its addicting", as in i keep wanting to find new formulations and touching this thing again, but its a surface level experience thats more about chasing potential interaction than it is about what actually happens when i play. best concrete example i can give is that i mostly play strategy games when i play games at all, and i "like" the civilization games but in a sense never quite enjoy playing them. idk if the others are different or how those games are regarded, but i started with and have mostly played civ5, and its mostly a "meta" of a few different major combinations (civ choice/victory to pursue/map settings) and then a familiar and familiarly varied series of minor combinations (what building, what unit, what settlement, what religion, what wonder, what tile to move to, to what extent to i set up for secondary victories, etc). honestly the whole process is fairly tedious and predictable, and i have MORE fun when im at work brainstorming those combinations, and ideally talking to somebody who also likes it to talk about them together. but then i get down to it and its basically a chore, but a chore that keeps stringing me along with enougu incentive to keep going for a few hours, and then im halfway through a game im losing and dont want to see the end of. i had more fun in my imagination
and i do love tabletop games, TTRPGs but also just board games with friends and family. im a perma GM and have a sense of "mechanics" and how they interact with actually having fun, but where thats more or less 2nd nature to me for TTRPGs (assuming ik the system and am not playing with assholes), almost everything that goes into making video games is a black box for me, i cant at all competently evaluate it on the level of art.
i reserve my right to say its mostly dogshit because thats my impression and my instinct, bc i have really enjoyed video games before, and im not usually particularly prejudiced against things im unfamiliar with. the thing is that im familiar with shitty beat-by-beat genre-trop slop novels that are 'temporarily embarassed' screenplays, im familiar with tryhard 2deep4u art school projects that hit enough of the right notes to be celebrated even tho theyre very mid at best and arent really worth my time if i cant actively workshop them once i realize what they are, and im familiar with casinos. from my (admittedly distant) view, minimum 90% of video games seem to fall into one of these 3 categories.
i agree with the rest of your responses, btw. i am an average writer stuck inside of a different kind of average writer.
>>2205600never really got kubrick. didnt see all of his movies and i really liked full metal jacket, but everything else i saw of his felt weirdly "soulless"
>>2205606the tedium of games i began to feel when i was a teenager. it felt like a drain on my life and i stopped playing them. i think it is because it is labour. for example, there are people who build entire virtual worlds in games like minecraft, or the sims. like labour, some are paid money for playing games, and with speedruns, playing games is even automated. movies do the work for you as it were, which improves your 'class position'. i wonder if being a "master" of board games also applies the same difference to you? i bring up these dichotomies because as i say, there is clearly a class dimension to culture, and so at the heights and depths of art, we find this neurotic quest for objectivity. maybe i am just more feminine or whatever (while happily being a cishet male), but porn is always better when theres a good story, and so i locate the quality of something by this distance it has between form and content. the particularism of porn genres also displays this unconscious truth, where the fetish is not an objective condition, but a subjective condition of the very act. yes, people do actually watch things for "the plot" (the subjective frame/narrative). so thats just my perspective.
>kubrickjasun horsely speaks proficiently on the inhumanity of kubrick and of the general crimes of hollyweird. i think he would love my analysis of 2001, since he draws similar (albeit schizo) conclusions.
>>2205619was i misunderstanding you entirely? are you saying you like that movies are 'interpassive' and dislike that games are 'intersubjective'?
im drunk and didnt want to even respond while drunk but
>GM commentidk if you know what that means in this context, & if u googled it without having a familiarity you probably misunderstand even worse. "Game Master" is just ttrpg slang, that comes from "Dungeon Master" from d&d but made brand neutral. the "Master" part is purely a relic of the fact that "rules master" is just an old fashioned way of describing someone who hosts a board game, i.e. they manage the game and try to accomodate everyone. there have been attempts to rebrand it as "Narrator" or "Guide" but they never caught on
if youre not just recklessly psychologizing or LARPing as adorno and are actually just young & unfamiliar, basically: you play imaginary with your friends with an element of chance, usually dice, and some constants, usually the numerical constants of the abilities of the characters your friends are using for the game. you learn all the rules well enough that when your friends inevitably push the envelope and try to do something crazy, you can make something up that sounds reasonable enough that everyone keeps having fun. the key is to keep the jokes & fun running but mix in some real narrative and emotion, which you can only figure out by being surprised by how your friends react to new circumstances. considering this is all imaginary and all of the engagement happens by talking with your friends and collaborating on what you want to happen, its fairly intimate ive seen it encourage artistic interest even in people who have been otherwise totally disinterested.
its also something that is extremely easy to do if you have a couple willing friends and some way of judging random results. there are TTRPGs that use jenga blocks, or even candles and a rotating fan, as resolving mechanisms.
>>2205708>are you saying you like that movies are 'interpassive' and dislike that games are 'intersubjective'?movies are intersubjective and interpassive, since we relate ourselves to the "frame" of the film. a videogame is interactive but not intersubjective; it is objectifying, like all labour. the purpose of a movie is to have necessary separation from the screen, while a videogame is about entering into the screen (thats why virtual reality has been associated with gaming since even the early 90s, while all forms of immediacy with film fails, like so-called "4-D" events which only distract from the experience. even 3-D is mostly unpopular - this shows the difference between the immediate and mediate).
>masteryou know there's also a host of monopoly, who acts as the "banker"? you cant escape this hierarchy of the game, and film itself is based on commodification. these general conditions also make "art" an historical reaction to alienation, like religion. the state is the primary medium of society and is also the defender of class society. this is why some also see that art wont exist in communism (like how others have imagined that jokes wont exist either, since they depend on internal contradictions).
this is also why i see videogames as "progressive" historically, since they internalise the relations of labour, ironically, as the developed world enters into post-industrialisation.
>adornoyes, criticise everything, but understand at the same time that we may also be proud sinners if it permits us; such as martin luther once said, "sin, and sin boldly". art then must die (be negated) to discover itself. or as hegel also says, "the end of art shall come before the end of history". so mote it be.
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