All three are well done, and incorporate alchemy as a means of transformation. I’d love to hear your take on it’s effectiveness in those films.

Would that ‘Lyrical Ballads’ were as popular as ‘Deathly Hallows’!

This whole discussion is bringing me back to the English Romantics, though. How I do love some William Blake and John Keats!

I think the heart of our disagreement is about the sublime. Both the natural world and the artisan’s creation on stage and in text of a sub-creation that invites the Primary Imagination to act are proven openings to or occasions of experience of a transcendent reality within the human person. I think the best that cinema can offer us is a right ordering of the sentiments and some experience of beauty. Nothing noetic.

And, if the end of art is this experience, movies are just potentially edifying sense experience rather than art.

Harsh, but I think that is the logical conclusion of my argument. If you read Manders’ ‘Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,’ the argument is expressed from a different angle and comes to an even harsher conclusion about the value of screened images of any kind.

For here, though, I’m happy to leave it at our agreement to disagree, the difference being my positing a spiritual faculty of perception and intellect in the human person that is of the same quality or theomorphic substance as the principle or unity of existence. You don’t think there is one; I think it is the only explanation of how we know anything, most obviously, though, how we recognize the true, good, beautiful, and the sublime.

Fair?

Movies just leave too little to the imagination for an anagogical experience, right? There is nothing in the visual intake of a film, as far as I know or recall, that engages a creative quality of mind that echoes anything, not to mention that faculty in us “continuous with the unity of existence.” It’s not the sunset per se and the colors, which can be created much more vividly on screen than in our mind generated versions from text, but the internal experience of a sunset we create via the images called up in us by that text. Identification with hero/heroine and catharsis work alchemically to re-shape us, I’m suggesting, because of the activity of the imagination. Passive witness, sitting in a theatre or at home in front of the teevee, cannot be that active internal imaginative experience.

Why? What makes viewing a film more “passive” than reading a text? To try to clarify my earlier post, I am completely on board with the argument that film and text are different as forms, and radically so. But, why is the imagination of a reader all that more intense or engaged than the imagination of the viewer? Imagination is utilized differently, perhaps, but it is not totally absent. There certainly is an internalization that can take place in film-based story experiences. Getting my students to use their faculties (creative, imaginative, or critical) is just as difficult in both media. I see no definable qualitative difference between the two. And it hints at my belief that the graphic novel should be part of contemporary literature survey courses (I’ve come to always include one on my literature reading lists!).

I’d love to see it work in the movies, but it’s just not possible to bring the alchemical imaginative “magic” from “reading” the work, letting sink into the depths of the mind and the heart. That can’t be done to the same degree in the celluloid version.(david)

I will say that I’m open to the possibility, but so far, we’re only begging the question here. Why is this a limitation of film-as-form rather than conventions of modern film making?

Time limits? Only because we’ve reduced most narrative forms to 30 minute, 1 hour, or 2 hour chunks. Our lives now refuse to admit to engaging with filmic narratives that take more than a couple hours of our lives. Even “epic” films have not always been constrained by this. That’s not a limitation of form; it’s a limitation of the audience.

Problems with the visual’s ability to “sink in”? Again, this is a limitation of the audience, and due in large part to the lack of media literacy I mentioned earlier. However, John‘s formulation involves a “subconscious” penetration of meaning into the audience’s “heart.” While I fully agree with subconscious interactions with any media form, I’m sensing a mystical component implied in here that I have yet to discover and can’t stipulate to. The material explanations are more compelling to me at this point. We might just have to agree to disagree on this point…for now!

And that leads back to Grodal’s point re: narrative as a cognitive enterprise. Audience interactions, whether reader, viewer, or listener, involve an emotional experience/reaction that is difficult to predict, and rather impossible to control on the audience’s part. In this model, the alchemical drama needs to have an emotionally affecting element. Rowling embeds in alchemical drama in characters we come to love and in the events that befall them. Film can do this just as well (perhaps better…?) than text.

As to the necessity of imagination — I agree. Whether or not film does too much to subvert its use in the audience, I disagree as a function of audience literacy/participation.