Word: visualizing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Charles Eames, avant garde designer and filmmaker, has been appointed the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry for next year. Eames will deliver a series of multi-media lecture demonstrations relating to visual communications and the visual environment...
EXPLORATION looks like an exhibit of fifteen works by artists who use modern technology instead of brushes and canvas. But when Gyorgy Kepes, director of the M. I. T. Center for Advanced Visual Studies (the show's sponsor) discusses it, Exploration becomes a set of diagrams describing ways artists might use technology to control and improve the environment. For artists improving giant cityscapes, technological media are necessary, not just innovative. When applied science increases the scale of ugliness, the attack on ugliness must also be enlarged...
Scriptwriters aren't the only guilty parties; visual and dramatic direction usually is worse. There's this aesthetic, if you want to dignify it with that name, going around, American audiences accept it because it has a vague respectability-by-association with Neo-Realist methods. This "aesthetic" says that instead of enlivening a slow script with some action and character development, the director should exploit its opportunities for pointless camera essays. Bullitt is an apt example. All scenes last unbearably long because Peter Yates, its "director," didn't know what to do with a slick script except stretch its banality...
Hollywood's new wonder boys have no guts either. Far from being seriously involved in the material they shoot, they don't even take the trouble to punch a little action and detail into it. In visual direction this means the old Neo-Realist aesthetic, that looking at events in the exterior world has a certain necessary validity, is misapplied in a fiction-film context-so that it becomes sufficient to let the camera run in the barren studio set. This discourages work on the images themselves. The structure of a frame composition used to have some meaning in Hollywood...
...theoretically insufficient, though, to argue that Visconti's extravagance is justified by its strong and constant significance. That argument would end by calling for greater economy of means than Visconti used. As a means to intended significances, Visconti's pacing and visual style are slow and luxurious, his dialogue and acting excessively explicit. Fortunately, cost-benefit analyses do not apply to works of art, which justify their means by appealing to our sense of internal order and formal beauty...