Notes on Blogging Aesthetics III




The strongest image is the one that has the greatest degree of arbitrariness.
--Andre Breton

Comments

Anonymous said…
Interesting Breton quote, C'phile. Do you make any particular connections between it and form of the anecdote?
Brian Doan said…
Interesting question. I think in the sense that the anecdote offers (or can offer, if you choose the right one) the kind of density of information and ambiguity of meaning that the photograph does-- to paraphrase and play with Walter Benjamin's line about Atget's photographs, that their mystery means "captions are necessary", the anecdote is the mysterious photograph to the 'rational' captions of film and cultural studies--then yes, there's a correlation. I also think anecdotes have an aribitrary relationship to analysis, in that they can take it to unpredictable, "unstoryboarded" places that other forms of analysis can't reach as easily.

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