Significant Cinema: The Scene of the Crime
Lecture by Murray Pomerance
Tuesday, February 26
4:30 pm
409 Tier
Surely there are things and events that are not significant (at least for those of us who are not paranoid). As readers and interpreters of our surround, although like Hamlet we may be so ravenously hungry as to “eat the air, promise-crammed,” we sometimes exhibit the capacity to experience without finding or creating meaning. Tasting the flavour of an apple, for example, can be pleasurable without calling for interpretation; looking at some of Cézanne’s apples can affect us the same way. While it is always mechanically possible to discover and point out a pattern, we sometimes forebear to do so in the name of discovering and pointing out a still greater or more pressing pattern instead, or in the name of establishing a balance with the universe that gives momentary release from the pressure of understanding, momentary delight. When we do set ourselves to discovering and reading signs every sign, as we call it, is taken to be the product of a signification and also the object of a “signing,” that is, a more or less intentional interpretive act that bounds and selects certain demonstrative possibilities in the context of prevailing norms and intentions. Since it is in our perceptually immediate surround, our Umwelt, that we “sign,” it is worth mentioning what Erving Goffman points out in Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order, that this territory is the home of not only meaning but also danger. Every dedication of interest to an occupation of reading and decoding, then, every scanning of our environment, opens us in ways we cannot at the same time carefully estimate–as the tiger sequence in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) pointedly shows.
excerpt from: http://sensesofcinema.com/2011/feature-articles/significant-cinema-the-scene-of-the-crime/
