Quote:
Originally Posted by Cracker Funk
It has crossed my mind that maybe Freestyle was offended by my post because he/she thinks I was being ethnocentric? Obviously, I don't know, only Freestyle can say how/why I offended; I'm just taking a guess.
|
You are exactly correct, and I guess I overreacted. My bad. Ethnocentrism, xenophobia and racism hit my buttons, but it seems like this is a case of my being on a hair trigger. I'm sorry I misread your post and am convinced that you are none of those things, so I am sorry. But yeah, that was it and nothing else; I think discourse is great, and am enjoying our conversation.
Forgive me.
I will say that forms of telling stories, specifically the forms involving stage acting, have divergent histories and these have evolved into separate modes of cinema. Also I believe that the results of cultural cross-pollination, a concept I love talking about (haha), are valid in themselves as new forms. I'll give two examples here:
What we know as reggae can be partially traced to faulty Caribbean radio stations. Early rock and roll had a beat of kick-snare-kick-snare, but stations in Jamaica either couldn't transmit bass frequencies or local receivers had a hard time picking them up. The result was that Jamaicans listening to American music heard a rhythm pattern of pause-snare-pause-snare, and the music that was made to imitate American rock was heavy on the back beat because of this. Ska was this misinterpretation, and ska's influence on reggae is great. So in part we can thank/blame technology for those forms of music. Ironically I heard that on the radio.
American free-verse poetry, like the poetry of the beats, can be traced to translations of Chinese poetry that essentially stripped the poems of everything but their actual meaning. Chinese poetry is not free verse - Mandarin, Cantonese and regional Chinese dialects rhyme very easily and the structure of Chinese poetry at that time was more complicated in its rhyming than English poetry. BUT since the translation of Chinese poems resulted in lines that had no chance of rhyming, the poems were left in free verse form. It was from this that free verse poetry, ostensibly an American invention, began (I heard this from an actual beat in a poetry class).
^My point is just that the clash of cultures creates new forms of art, and that I believe the same thing has happened in cinema. IMO movies of different cultures have evolved into different beasts even as their history began in one place.
And JoshL, your points are well taken and also I am very impressed you know who Harry Partch is! Crazy.
Again, sorry for the 'offended' comment Cracker Funk. Didn't mean to ruffle feathers. Peace
Linear Mode
