Hapax Legomena I: Nostalgia (1971)'s comments

Do you want to let us know what you think? Just login, after which you will be redirected back here and you can leave your comments.

Timec

I've always felt that statements like "anyone who likes this is an idiot" or "you'd have to be mentally ill to enjoy [film]" are very misguided. In reality, people of equal competence and sanity can (and often do) come away from the same work of art with drastically different opinions. In fact, every individual person approaches film from a slightly different angle than every other person, and ones reactions to a film are generally a result of things like personal experience and worldview and aesthetic preferences and so on. Intelligence or sanity rarely have anything to do with it.

Edited - to reduce meanness.

12 years 7 months ago

mightysparks

You say all that Timec, yet you have no problem calling people idiots for interpreting a film differently to you, or disliking a film that you like. Seems a bit hypocritical.

12 years 2 months ago

Labraxas

I don't know which edition you've watched, but I found the audio on The Criterion Collection's Blu-ray to be more than adequate. I had no problem following the narration.

11 years 8 months ago

Plastposen

Do you see what i see?
Nice

14 years 1 month ago

Emiam

5/10
Quite beautiful to watch the warmth turn all into ashes. And maybe, just maybe, form several fantasy figures in it.
From Ubu.com:
"In his 1971 short film, (nostalgia), American artist and writer Hollis Frampton oveturned the conventional narrative roles of words and images. In his account of an artists's transformation from photographer to filmmaker, Frampton burns photographs he had taken and selected from his past along with one found photograph. A calm voice tells a story about an image, but the story is about the following image, not the one shown. Confounding comprehension still further, the narration begins and ends during the photograph's combustion; smoke and ashes get in our eyes while we are trying to make sense of the image and the narration--trying to remember the story that fits the image, trying to remember the image that fits the story..."

5 years 7 months ago

LaSorciere

4 parts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voMDL1TgTh4

7 years 8 months ago

criscoJovan

Hmm! And at first I thought my brain skipped, yet continued watching anyway. By the end, I thought, "Ah, you're not so crazy after all."

12 years 2 months ago

Fergenaprido

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz0Y6jNaCp0
With hard-coded Portuguese subtitles, but they're not too intrusive/distracting. Audio is a bit crackly, but the narration was easy enough to understand.

1 year 9 months ago

mightysparks

Well, you are correct that one can't insult Kunggi enough.

I can't remember which films they were and they may have not been in those terms, but they pretty much stated 'you dislike this film and therefore you are mentally inferior'. I don't know you well enough to know the tone you're trying to convey, but that's how they come across to me. Although I don't even know george4mon but he was clearly just stating his dislike for this film with a 'jokey' statement (I assume most of these comments are just jokey, unless they are from Kunggi who is just a weirdo).

I still agree with your points though - actually I almost always agree with what you say - it's just I either read posts from you that totally contradict each other or they're so condescending and insulting I get frustrated reading them (even when I've hated the original remark to begin with and am on your side! It's quite a strange feeling).

12 years 2 months ago

Timec

Interesting. All those times that I've called people idiots for disliking what I like have finally come back to haunt me.

Wait... What?

That would be hypocritical of me, wouldn't it? If only it were something I actually did...

Well, nobody's perfect, of course - but I'm actually pretty confident that I've never called anyone an idiot for disliking a film that I like (or vise versa.) There have been cases where I've called people out for their rhetoric and for making objectively false statements (like "anyone who doesn't like this has no compassion for others" or "the only people who don't like this are those who don't get it" or interpretations that directly contradict multiple important elements of the film, among other examples of bad thinking - contrary to what some people suggest, such statements are NOT "just a matter of opinion"), but that's quite a bit different than calling someone an idiot for liking a film that I dislike or for having a different interpretation than me. And when I do get critical, I'm generally very careful to make clear the very important distinction between mocking someone for their opinion and mocking them for their demonstrably false statements and incorrect assumptions about other people's motivations. The general principle being that bad thinking should be called out and mocked, while opinions should not. Though it is possible I may have slipped up before.

But if it has happened before - if I have misspoken and blurred that line - that doesn't change the 99 other times when I go out of my way to include statements like "Don't get me wrong - there's nothing wrong with disliking the film" before lambasting them for their stupid rhetoric. So it's kind of mystifying to have someone tell me that "I have no problem," when, in reality, I really do have a problem with it.

With that said, I do admit to being far too harsh at times - I do overuse personal insults (except of kunggi - one can't insult kunggi enough,) even if not in the context you suggest. As much as I loathe george's rhetoric (it touches on a certain pet peeve of mine,) I don't actually at all think that he's stupid (I know nothing about him, in fact.) But of course, it's hard to convey the full tone of what I'm thinking in an online comment, and I've tried to tone that kind of stuff way down in recent months (and over the past two months I've edited or deleted some of the meaner / gratuitously long comments I've made - though I know that none of them involved me calling someone an idiot for disliking a film.)

But hey, everybody's just going to think that my post is hopelessly arrogant - which only reminds me that one of my New Year's resolutions was to stop reading and commenting on web comments sections, as I only end up annoying myself and everyone else.

Anyways - did you have any specific examples in mind of me calling someone an idiot for disliking a movie? If so, I didn't mean it (I simply don't think like that, as I fully realize that there are a multiplicity of reasons for liking or disliking any given work of art, most of which have nothing to do with intelligence), and I'll be sure to apologize for it and give myself forty lashes as penance.

12 years 2 months ago