Date: Mon, 10 Apr 95 09:49:34 EDT
From: ma-AT-dsd.camb.inmet.com (Malgosia Askanas)
Subject: The dual requirement


Can we discuss the discussion of film's "dual requirement" on p.27?

"In all these senses, the shot indeed has a unity.  It is a unity of
movement, and it embraces a correlative multiplicity which does not
contradict it. At the very most it can be said that this unity is
caught between two demands: of the whole whose change it expresses
through the film; of the parts whose displacements within each set and
from one set to another it determines.  Pasolini has expressed this
dual requirement very clearly.  On the one hand, the cinematographic
whole would be one single analytic sequence shot, by rights unlimited,
theoretically continuous; on the other, the parts of the film would in
fact be discontinuous, dispersed, disseminated shots, without any
assignable link.  Therefore the whole must renounce its ideality, and
become the synthetic whole of the film which is realised in the
montage of the parts; and conversely, the parts must be selected,
coordinated, enter into connections and liaisons which, through
montage, reconstitute the virtual sequence shot or the analytic whole
of the cinema."  

Where does this dual requirement come from?  Let us say that the
requirement of continuity comes from the fact that the film expresses
the changes of a whole, or that the film expresses the movements of a
single conciousness.  Then what about the discontinuity requirement, 
what is _its_ source?  I assume that it has to do with something other
than economics. 

I am also wondering about the continuity requirement itself.  Take for
example Pasolini's "Pigpen".  Now "Pigpen" relies, rhetorically, on a
parallel narrative of two otherwise disconnected threads: that of the
rich heir who gets eaten by his pigs, and that of the wild man who
devours his father.  What would it mean to make this film as one
continuous analytic sequence shot?  I imagine that it would involve,
of necessity, showing the two threads as taking place within one
geographic entity -- the earth, or some mythical single land -- an
entity which, as a whole, would be accessible to the camera.  Now would 
that be a proper expression of that whole which is the _real_ whole behind
the film -- the ideological connection between the two threads, the 
illumination of one by the other, etc.?   And if the answer is "no",
is it this "no" that is the source of the discontinuity requirement? 


- malgosia 


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