Posted by Donald Officer (Moderator) on November 2, 2008, 12:38 am
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At the end of the 75 minutes or so of the Moving Stories short shorts you sensed a huge sea change has already overwhelmed us all. How strangely powerful is the way that media continue to intermingle.
Billed as a celebration of the written word on screen, at the end of this particular screening of those 15 synopses? commercials? codas? reflections? last October 22 the audience knew not what to say. There was respectful silence, but silence nonetheless. Do you applaud films even if the executive director and several other directors and authors are there? When they talk they sort of point to their mini productions - after all they aren't actually performing them all over. So nobody claps.
Books: that's what the Festival is about. But bigger than the books are the ideas and the little films we saw are about the ideas(some of them very big and all of them worthy of a conversation) and that gives the books as well as their readers a bigger life.
That's not how we used to think it's supposed to be. Some bibliophiles still look supiciously at films and a few shun television as many did a generation ago. Books are solitary in the writing and in the reading. Movies require a production crew, major investment, mass appeal. These are the cliches because they are so reduntantly obvious.
Really! If you're reading this you know the world has been stood on its head. Writers today literally have the world at their fingertips and as Judith Keenan more or less told the Festival in an onstage conversation the following day, savvy filmmakers can tap technology that amounts to having a crew in a box.
Poets know that the heft or pedigree of the work is not always what gives it leverage. The same physics applies to the impudent little film makers of the world. So when I see Plato effectively summarized by 3 minutes of claymation figures or find myself exposed to the range of conventional absurdities that greet the transgendered in less than 10, I find I get it - fast.
Starting with minidocs, the ruthless university of the TV commercial, eventually advancing to You Tube, Facebook etc. most of us are learning a vast new quick time audiovisual vocabulary. Does this sophisticated psychosynthetic syntax threaten books or enhance the literary world beyond imagining?
Please, let me know what you think. I'll have more on the Moving Stories later.
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