Collected Data
"When a good commercial film manages to make its cuts invisible, it distills 100 years of lore into its editing practice."
What is going on here? Consider that our visual systems evolved over hundreds of millions of years, while film editing has been around only for a little more than 100 years. Despite this, new audiences appear to be able to assimilate splices on more or less the first try. I think the explanation is that, although we don’t think of our visual experience as being chopped up like a Paul Greengrass fight sequence, actually it is.
Strange Continuity
Read: "The Man Who America" by Nicholas Dawidoff
Sixty years ago, at the height of his powers, Frank left New York in a secondhand Ford and began the epic yearlong road trip that would become ‘‘The Americans,’’ a photographic survey of the inner life of the country that Peter Schjeldahl, art critic at The New Yorker, considers ‘‘one of the basic American masterpieces of any medium.’’ Frank hoped to express the emotional rhythms of the United States, to portray underlying realities and misgivings — how it felt to be wealthy, to be poor, to be in love, to be alone, to be young or old, to be black or white, to live along a country road or to walk a crowded sidewalk, to be overworked or sleeping in parks, to be a swaggering Southern couple or to be young and gay in New York, to be politicking or at prayer.
The Man Who Saw America
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