enframed wrote:

that damned fly wrote:metaphors: i can't tell you what i really mean, so allow me to make a weird comparison.

i dated some weird hippie girl once who spoke in metaphors/allegories. i finally asked her why she couldn't just say what she meant in those terms. she got really mad. she smelled funny anyway.

Chaka, when the walls fell!

Metaphors: try speaking without them and you'll be little more than a dry, boring cunt.

Now if we made a metaphor for this thread, then that'd be "meta", and you might ask me what's a meta for?

Perhaps I meant allegory. Or perhaps there's another word for a certain kind of metaphor.

This thread came about because I was thinking of the scene in Nosferatu where the sky gets darker and the shot lasts for about five minutes (but seems like an eternity). I was thinking how it was great how a shot like that was used to alter the tone of the film leading into the second act and create a sense of impending doom. It struck me that people may read it as a metaphor for something or other. A mans soul in turmoil or some other such bulljive.

I can't be fucked with that kind of metaphor. I'm entering what I'll probably refer to in years to come as my "Herzog phase" and while I'm fucking floored by the awesome power of nature that he presents in many of his films I never consider that it's meant to represent anything other than what it is. I think he's too anti-academic for that.

Rotten Tanx wrote:I can't be fucked with that kind of metaphor. I'm entering what I'll probably refer to in years to come as my "Herzog phase" and while I'm fucking floored by the awesome power of nature that he presents in many of his films I never consider that it's meant to represent anything other than what it is. I think he's too anti-academic for that.

Herzog's a good example of an artist that isn't reliant on metaphor as crutch. He is merely describing naked life back to you. But that's not to say that there isn't meta-narrative strands that are accessible to the viewer. It' s just done in an adult manner.

Heart of Glass is something about German history. Stroszek is roughly about capitalism. Aguirre is deals with imperialism; colonial and fascistic. Yet, they aren't reliant on being pure metaphor. They operate in several registers and you can oscillate between the story as it's presented, or the wider allusion it creates. Often it's about, as you say, big things like the wretchedness of man and the awesome power of nature. Moby Dick shares many of these storytelling traits. It's a story about a whale and so much more.

It's important to remember he is also a documentary maker, here the distinctions of the real and fictive are blurred. Reality and dream are indescernible...and usually characterised by madness....the hallucinatory.

The Japanese film, Woman of the Dunes is also great in this way, dealing with a particular, distinct story, but making much wider claims about existence.

Cranius wrote:Heart of Glass is something about German history. Stroszek is roughly about capitalism. Aguirre is deals with imperialism; colonial and fascistic. Yet, they aren't reliant on being pure metaphor. They operate in several registers and you can oscillate between the story as it's presented, or the wider allusion it creates. Often it's about, as you say, big things like the wretchedness of man and the awesome power of nature.

Are those really metaphors though? Wouldn't the correct word be microcosm or something else?

The Japanese film, Woman of the Dunes is also great in this way, dealing with a particular, distinct story, but making much wider claims about existence.

This film is great but I'm quite sure I don't fully understand it.

Rotten Tanx wrote:Are those really metaphors though? Wouldn't the correct word be microcosm or something else?

I'll try and be clearer.

Not metaphors.

It's like in Fitzcarraldo. It's a story about a man transporting a steamboat over a mountain. But in reality, Herzog is carrying a steamboat over a mountain.

Dream and reality are so tightly bound together, through the sheer intensity of the situation, that you are almost strobing between the two; the film is like a short-circuit. This kind of obviates the need for a sublime metaphorical narrative that rides above the film. It just is.

I think thats why madness figures a lot, because it's the intersection of delirious dream and material reality.

Rotten Tanx wrote:

Cranius wrote:The Japanese film, Woman of the Dunes is also great in this way, dealing with a particular, distinct story, but making much wider claims about existence.

This film is great but I'm quite sure I don't fully understand it.

Sand...it's about sand. Your life, grains of sand.

It's kind of like Camus' Myth of Sisyphus. The entomologist complains about the mountain of paperwork he has to fill out in Tokyo, permits and such to work. They validate his existence in the inhuman modern world he inhabits. But in the pit, he accomodates living with the perpetual onslaught of sand, and is able to produce his own real life there. He is liberated through his labour, isolation and incarceration. Through love as well.

Cranius wrote:Dream and reality are so tightly bound together...
I think thats why madness figures a lot, because it's the intersection of delirious dream and material reality.

Where in the brain do these 'dreams' come from?

Cranius wrote:Subconscious?

Is there any such thing?

Without metaphors, there would be a lot missing from the work of Kafka, Burroughs, Vonnegut, Gogol, Hemingway, Conrad, and so on. Gotta have metaphors.

Bob, Cranius' questioning of the validity of the sub-conscious is not such a rare thing - there's many a psychologist who will dispute it's existence. Their rejection doesn't typically claim that we don't store information about the world and our experiences in parts of our memory that aren't always as "accessible" as established short term and long term memory are, but rather that the influence of such information on our present and future thoughts and behaviour is of far lesser significance than has been claimed by Freud/post-Freudian psychology. Such arguments typically a) question the scope of the sub-conscious and the idea that it may have some real behavioural/motivational effect; b) question whether "subconscious" in an appropriate name for, or accurate characterisation of, the nature of this stored memory information. One key qualm of the anti-Freudian is the idea that the sub-conscious in some way has its own agency, that it could adequately bridges the gap between stored memory information on one hand and an agent's behaviour on the other. A statement such as "He did this because of a sub-conscious desire" suggests that the subconscious at the very least is able to have desires separate to those of the conscious. How would an arbitrary bank of information drawn from memory and experience come to have its own desires, without a crucial intervention from or interaction with the conscious? If this is the case, can we meaningfully talk about a subconscious controlling or dominating desire?

This is just the tip of a messy iceberg, and I don't pretend to be an expert on the matter - but trust me, the subconscious is not without its high profile detractors in the academic and scientific world.

Technically the Freudian "subconscious" mirrored the Freudian "superego", not so much its own agent but rather evident at points in which other parts of the mind met each other. I'm sure the original diagram has been posted before.





The superego and the subconscious are "between" the more concrete, measurable parts of the mind. You could talk all night on whether or not they actually exist inside the mind or whether they are more cultural/ideology based.