The Textelcine rolls forth, lulling the viewer to blissful
joy.
It is finished.
You exit the theater. It has left its mark. Happiness
swells and bitterness lingers, a moment gained forever, a moment lost forever.
Forever.
A moment unique to you, and unique to a multiplicity of yous. Moments
unique to a multiplicity of others, similar in atmosphere, never quite the
same. The cinema is an experience, a book to be read, a message to be
addressed.
How it is
read,
viewed,
portrayed,
interpreted,
themed,
characterized,
specialized,
criticized,
epitomized,
is up to you.
The viewer.
The captive
audience. Viewed for free or charged an arm and leg by the evil corporate
overlords, it matters not. Not in the here or the now, the forevermore and no
more. Cinema has been called a cheapening of creativity, and that is fine. It
is a criticism, a unique experience of the one and the many. But to the many
and to the you it is something more.
It is an
unleashing of burdens and
expression of the soul,
a piece of the puzzle,
an escape from the harshness of
reality or the realization of it.
Textelcine isn’t merely a mush of images
thrown together with sound to couple with it. It is uniqueness exclusive to
you: this moment will be engraved forever in time, forever on the continuum that
can only be experienced by you.
Make of it what you will.
Think of it what you
will.
Do with it what you will.
That is the textelcine.
That is what it means
to be film.
That is what it means to be art.
That is what it means to be text.
What is a text?
In an attempt to express textual relationships and interrelationships, I opted to focus on a personal passion of mine as opposed to an actual life experience or life experiences of mine. However with further readings of other blogs and analysis of my own blogs, I came to the realization that these films, the cinematic world, is in fact every much a life experience as a memory of a vacation or ones wedding day. This was a rather startling discovery for me, as I had never imagined film as an extension of myself before, but rather as a visually aesthetic pleasure and critical source of output. It was my intention to interpret what a text is and how it can be expressed through multiple sources. But upon connecting to other blogs, I noticed a unifying trend of the focus of artistic expression by means of memory and moments. To capture this, I at the time believed that film would need to be broken down into its physical components, the individual frame of each picture composing the entirety of film. This was expanded unto other films, compounded onto other films until trillions of frames all unique and exclusive to each film melded and expressed themselves as an important inherent function of the film as a whole, as a whole of cinematic history indeed. These frames, too, are an extension of the human soul. Each movie is a story to be told, a theme to transcend, something that makes up the human. It is an adventure, a vacation much like the themes of multiple other blog posts. It permits the viewer to escape to something or someplace that otherwise they would be unable to achieve in reality. The cinema is a realization of human dreams, aspirations, and nightmares. It is art, in its purest essence. Yet it is merely one fraction of art, amongst the great vastness of art. Connected unbeknownst to me to the history and pasts of other blog users, the intertextual relationship amongst every blog branches and reveals even more the artistic expressions by which everything is distinct and yet so closely attached. Cinema, as art and text, is but one tale and one part of the whole, and much like a memory and story of someone else’s own life. It is very much a part of the whole human. This blog project, then, is one answer of the infinite to the ultimate question posed in this course. What is a text? As Roland Barthes would put it, “The text is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed. It would be futile to try to separate out materially works from texts,” (Barthes, 156). So my understanding, or rather my interpretation as I now understand it, is as follows: A text is art. Art is cinema. Cinema is textelcine. Textelcine is I. I am one of the many. The many are the blogs. The blogs are interconnected. Interconnectivity is human. Humanity is intertextual. Therefore, a text is an extension of what it means to BE human. What is a text?
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