It’s Really Hard to Watch Films Properly

McEvoy Foundation for the Arts
July 18, 2019
Source: mcevoyarts.org/

This multimedia talk appraises film’s inherent “efficiency” as an editioned art form with an eye towards directorial intent, distribution channels, and other conditions of film screenings.

Film is intended to be the most “efficient” of editioned art forms. Thousands of “identical copies” are made available across multiple platforms, all of which are meant to re-present the same experience with the artwork. Of course, the reality is more complicated. Filmmakers create their films in a deliberate way, for a particular environment, and to affect an audience in a highly-determined manner. The rise of direct-to-consumer streaming platforms and the ubiquity of mobile devices drastically varies the current experience of watching films. In this multimedia lecture with film clips, former SFFILM Executive Director Noah Cowan breezes through the history of cinema with an eye to authors’ intents and how the medium’s “editioning” process has supported and thwarted their desires.