--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper <f@f...> wrote:

"Most of my analysis of the film talks about framing and editing and
(gulp!) acting in terms that, while not precisely Bazinian, certainly
depend on implicit comparisons of those elements to more "realistic"
films and to what we know of people from daily life...Anyway,
this is my attempt to get at what's in common about the greatness of
a wide range of films, for me, from Borzage to Bresson to Brakhage.
Thus it must exclude what's particular to sync sound commercial
narrative films featuring actors walking around and talking. Even
then, my Bach argument doesn't get at what I often like about home
movies, instructional films, industrial films, some documentaries,
films by Maurice Lemaitre, and so on."

Somewhere I have a long paper you wrote in the mid-70s spelling this
out in detail. Those of us who saw it then called it "Fred Camper's
Unified Theory of Film." I was really convinced by the aesthetic you
articulated there but I kept liking movies that fell outside its
parameters, so I fell back on the "two truths" of classical Indian
philosophy and concluded that you were an adherent of "pure vision,"
and only the most sublime works of art can be viewed with pure
vision. Other works gave varying degrees of emotional or
intellectual pleasure (as described in your reaction to ONCE UPON A
TIME IN AMERICA) but only in terms of "conventional truth."

And then there are non-artistic considerations that are also of
interest to some cinephiles, ideology for example or racial or sexual
portrayals. These issues are of interest to me for personal reasons
(such as my cross-cultural background, my gay brother, my non-white
significant other)and come into play when I see movies. But I do
believe that the greatest artworks transcend these issues which exist
as subsidiary elements in the larger work.

Richard