Scope, February 2004.

Advertising has never invented anything except what artists have invented… It appropriated the Beautiful which the cinema of the New Wave had rejected, which makes certain ignorant critics say that beautiful equals advertising. It kidnapped colour, which the cinema no longer violated, so preoccupied was it with being true to life, which makes certain cretinous critics say that colour equals advertising.

That's Jean-Jacques Beineix, as quoted by Phil Powrie and quoted again by Patricia Allmer for her essay in the new issue of Scope. The argument: Cinéma du Look, so often derided for "celebrating and propagating consumer fetishism and commodity capitalism" - Allmer, for example, quotes Ferdinand Cuel on Diva: "You think you are watching a film; you are just window-shopping" - actually fights the spectacle, as defined by the Situationists, "with its own weapons... Cinéma du Look turns back capitalist ideology onto itself, and re-turns aesthetics, co-opted by capitalism for advertising purposes, to the realm of art."

Also in this issue:

Martin Barker on ways to consider ancillary materials in our overall understanding and reception of a film.

Lori Hitchcock watches Shunji Iwai's Swallowtail Butterfly with Mikhail Bakhtin... so to speak.

Phil Hubbard on how Brits watch movies.

And actually my own favorite section of any issue of Scope, the book reviews. There are 26 this time around.

13 films are reviewed.

And news and views are passed along from five conferences.

Good thing it's the weekend.

Posted by dwhudson at January 31, 2004 5:10 AM