[Air-l] not wishing to start a war

[William Bain]

Hi. I'd just like to note something here in regard to the conversation Denise N. Rall began and Bob Rehak's recent comment that "The medium of the movies surely includes more than the optical apparatus that captures light, inscribes it chemically or optically onto film, and reconstructs it at the other end in a darkened theater. 
For me at least, it includes the lovely grain of the image, the shock of the jump cut, and the dreamy no-time of the closeup."
   
  First of all I'm speaking from a different and kind of nontechnical field, literary theory, for the most part. I'm about to present an MA thesis on Virginia Woolf's *Mrs. Dalloway* and since lit crit works with messages I've been very interested in the discussion as it's developed here. What struck me about Bob Rehak's comment was the way so much is involved in the process of "doing film". And it isn't only that, but also the fact that it's humans using tools. So within the usual analyses of message sending (and I'm not as up on this as I'd like to be), I wonder whether the concepts of hardware and software don't fit somewhere. There is also the philosophical concept of incorporeals, which I suppose in the end constitutes any message that gets sent in its "soft" form. The hard form or hardware would then be the celluloid or the page of the book involved.
   
  I offer these comments as, well, I've already noted my nonexpertise......... I'd be very interested in hearing what the group thinks.
   
  William Bain
  Grad Student
  Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona


		
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