Zach,

We really are talking about two different kinds of
"aesthetics" here
and I believe there is room for both of us being right because
we're
using the same words to talk about different things.

I have seen films from many of the filmmakers Bill mentioned in
response to my addition to "American Cinema" and as I wrote
to him,
I enjoyed those experiences too. Tim Burton, Martin Scorsese, Robert
Altman, Woody Allen (I will see his new film after Peter's
comments), George Lucas, Steven Soderbergh, James Cameron, Paul
Verhoeven all have their virtues either in terms of telling good
effective stories or in terms of creating challenging intellectual
or emotional experiences. And if you choose to define aesthetics so
broadly that it includes all human achievement ever accomplished by
artworks, I'm not going to argue that mine is right and yours is
wrong. I understand that this is a matter of different values people
have and how they prioritize them.

The way I use the word, "aesthetics" refers to a particular
kind of
human achievement that can only be accomplished by artworks and I
would say that its value does not falter a bit by the cultural
arguments you're making because it arises from the qualities of
the
nervous system that we all share.

I'll leave the floor to Brakhage for a few paragraphs from his
essay "In Consideration of Aesthetics" in his book
"Telling Time".
Please keep in mind that he is using the words "art"
and "aesthetics" in the way I do, so what he says does not
really
pose a challenge to your definition of aesthetics. He makes clear at
the end that all these are only rules for a particular kind of
aesthetics he is trying to analyze.


"The brain is light (wave/particle) in electric (synaptic)
movement:
the movement (electrical investments) are as infinite as the
possible neural connections, but its lightning-like activity is
specifically paced (by the ABCs of its waves and the outside limits
of its variable seizures) and thus Timed, finite!

Each brain's main job is reference (thus re-presentational) but
its
life unto itself is that of Timed light. Its electric moves react to
input: thus the senses impose wavery particulars upon the contained
free-play of illumination. Its physiology (and that of the whole
nervous system) composes, the very shapes of cells being something
of a fret pattern to contain this all-sensory storm of sparks, to
impose, for example, visual form.

Visual Forms, reinforced by the similarity of eye input (into
content), interplay with the prime cognition that "All that is is
light" (Suns Scotus Erigena). This interplay is the
balance/counter-
balance of any brain's genetic cultural individual
"dance" and this,
therefore, stance-dance would seem to be the only fully meaningful
(i.e., means-less-usage) entertainment available of cognition (as
distinct from re-cognition).

Film ought aesthetically to exist flickering electric and free of
photographic animation, free of the mechanical trickery of, the
outright fakery of the illusion of movie pictures. All interferences
with The Light (all shaped tones and formal silhouettes) ought to be
an illumination of source-as-light (or at least subservient, as
symbol, say, representatives of Time, to Light's life…as is,
to be
sure, the almost equal space of Black in the projection of every
split second of lighted frame). The light, then, would be seen to
move because of the light-signifying shapes and tones in their
signatory continuities (especially if these were tones in visual
chromatic harmony, and shapes in evolutionary form at one with
illumination). This anyway, is the aspiration of artists whose Art
aspires to Music, and "Art is art-as-art. And every thing else is
everything else" (Barnett Newman, painter, sculptor)."


As I understand it, you do agree with Brakhage that the effect he
talks about IS possible and that some films really do work in this
way. The rest is a matter of what you value in life and I'll try
to
defend why I value Brakhage's "aesthetics" over yours.

At any given moment, the brain is in the process of taking new
abstract information and categorizing it in ways that would "make
sense" to us. When we see a woman's navel, we categorize it
using
our memories of related perceptual experiences, which were also
partly abstract. It is not like we have a part of our brain that
works abstractly and a part of it that is not: they are intertwined
and IMPOSSIBLE to separate. Abstract and representational are one
and the same, because we do not have an "ideal concept" of a
woman's
navel but only an idea of it intrinsically linked to the sum of
abstract/representational memories we have.

What great artworks can do is to challenge the way we process the
abstract information and how they are categorized. It is as if the
relationships between abstract and representational are reshuffled
and that changes the way we experience anything at any given moment
because the way we make "sense" of the world is fundamentally
related to this. The reshuffling also makes a small but essential
effect on our thinking because thinking requires categories while
artworks can blur the lines between different concepts, by
establishing new relationships between abstract form and content.

The interesting part is that this whole "reshuffling" also
gives a
huge amount of biological pleasure and the viewer feels like he/she
is being taken out of himself/herself in a specific way that is not
possible for other experiences to achieve. When I realized that
films could create such experiences (although I didn't know what
was
happening at first), I began to actively seek those, as opposed to
others. I'm not saying that films that don't work abstractly
cannot
offer profound discoveries, because they do. I only claim that there
is more to us than our cultural heritage and that some artworks
offer possibilities that are based on the way our nervous system
works.

My addition to Brakhage would be that when "that" happens,
the
narrative and the conceptual content or whatever else there is that
is "interesting" also become meaningful in a different way.
How we
look at stories, or human interactions, or concepts is also changed
by each film.

Whether different civilizations in history defined art differently
or whether they had a word for "art" at all does not matter
here as
long as the particular artworks have the ability to affect us in the
way I tried to describe. If I understand you correctly, you do not
deny that those experiences exist. You only claim that they are not
more valuable than others and this is where we disagree.

Yoel