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William Gibson on Movies, Music, Media
automatic_jack writes "William Gibson gave a talk at the Directors' Guild of America's Digital Day last week. The text of it is up in his 'blog, and in it he says some intriguing things about the nature of the entertainment and media industries. There's a bit of a surprise conclusion at the end!"
I think the item that took my interest was this. Ever get the feeling that nothing ever actually gets done in the House of Lords?
ednesday, May 21, 2003
posted 8:52 AM
SEEMS LIKE IT'S ALWAYS SOMETHING, THESE DAYS
Now Billy Prion's shown up in Alberta. O well. Pass the, uh, I forget, like the red stuff? To put on this hamburner? Yummy.
UP THE LINE
A talk given at the Directors Guild of America's Digital Day, Los Angeles, May 17, 2003
The story of film begins around a fire, in darkness. Gathered around this fire are primates of a certain species, our ancestors, an animal distinguished by a peculiar ability to recognize patterns.
There is movement in the fire: embers glow and crawl on charcoal. Fire looks like nothing else. It generates light in darkness. It moves. It is alive.
The surrounding forest is dark. Is it the same forest our ancestors know by day? They can't be sure. At night it is another place, perhaps no place at all. The abode of the dead, of gods and demons and that which walks without a face. It is the self turned inside out. Without form, it is that on which our ancestors project the patterns their interestingly mutated brains generate.
This patterning-reading mutation is crucial to the survival of a species that must ceaselessly hunt, ceaselessly gather. One plant is good to eat; it grows in summer in these lowlands. But if you eat its seedpods, you sicken and die. The big, slow-moving river-animal can be surprised and killed, here in these shallows, but will escape in deeper water.
This function is already so central, in our ancestors, that they discover the outlines of the water-animal in clouds. They see the faces of wolves and of their own dead in the flames. They are already capable of symbolic thought. Spoken language is long since a fact for them but written language has not yet evolved. They scribe crisscross patterns on approximately rectangular bits of ocher, currently the world's oldest known human art.
They crouch, watching the fire, watching its constant, unpredictable movements, and someone is telling a story. In the watching of the fire and the telling of the tale lie the beginning of what we still call film.
Later, on some other night, uncounted generations up the timeline, their descendants squat deep in caves, places of eternal night -- painting. They paint by the less restless light of reeds and tallow. They paint the wolves and the water-animal, the gods and their dead. They have found ways to take control of certain aspects of the cooking-fire universe. Darkness lives here, in the caves; you needn't wait for dusk. The reeds and tallow throw a steadier light. Something is being turned inside out, here, for the first time: the pictures in the patterning brain are being projected, rendered. Our more recent ancestors will discover these stone screens, their images still expressing life and movement, and marvel at them, and not so long before the first moving images are projected.
What we call "media" were originally called "mass media". technologies allowing the replication of passive experience. As a novelist, I work in the oldest mass medium, the printed word. The book has been largely unchanged for centuries. Working in language expressed as a system of marks on a surface, I can induce extremely complex experiences, but only in an audience elaborately educated to experience this. This platform still possesses certain inherent advantages. I can, for instance, render interiority of character with an ease and specificity denied to a screenwriter. But my audience must be literate, must know what prose fiction is and understand how one accesses it. This requires a complexly cultural education, and a certain socio-economic basis. Not everyone is afforded the luxury of such an education.
But I remember being taken to my first film, either a Disney animation or a Disney nature documentary (I can't recall which I saw first) and being overwhelmed by the steep yet almost instantaneous learning curve: in that hour, I learned to watch film. Was taught, in effect, by the film itself. I was years away from being able to read my
yes.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on