Expanded Cinema - Part Two: Synaesthetic Cinema: The End of Drama

Part Two: Synaesthetic Cinema: The End of Drama

Youngblood describes television as the software of the planet. It acts as a superego and shows us global reality. This renders cinema obsolete as a communicator of objective reality, and so frees it. (pp78–80). He embraces a synaesthetic synthesis of opposites which are simultaneously perceived. He then goes on to draw a distinction between the syncretic montage of Pudovkin and the Eisenstein's montage of collision (pp84–86). He prefers metamorphosis to cuts (p86). Film-makers that Youngblood think embody this synaesthetic syncretism include: Stan Brakhage (p87), Will Hindle, Patrick O'Neill, John Schofill and Ronald Nameth. Film-makers that present ideas of polymorphous eroticism, the blurring of sexual boundaries, include Andy Warhol and Carolee Schneemann (pp112–121). Michael Snow's Wavelength is also an example of synaesthetic cinema's extra-objective reality (pp122–127). At the end of the second part of the book Youngblood writes about the rebirth of the cottage industry in the post-mass-audience age. Video tapes can be exchanged freely, films are becoming more personal, specialisations are ending (p128-134).