coolbeans, Lyotard

Similarly to what we discussed in class on Tuesday, Lyotard states that photography and cinematography allow things to be circulated faster and to a wide variety of audiences. It speeds up the way in which people gain access to information. In order to read a play or book we must take the time to read the pages and grasp the meaning of what the words are saying. However, when the book/play is turned into a movie we can absorb the information in a matter or 2-3 hours. The same applies for photography, in order to see a monument or historical site we must take the time to plan a trip to see the monument and learn the history of the place by visiting it, but through photography we can see what the monument/historical site looks like without taking the time to plan a visit. He states, “Industrial photography and cinema will be superior to painting and the novel whenever the objective is to stabilize the referent, to arrange it according to a point of view which endows it with a recognizable meaning, to reproduce the syntax and vocabulary which enable the addressee to decipher images and sequences quickly, and so to arrive easily at the consciousness of his own identity as well as the approval he thereby receives from others” (40). Lyotard is stating that photography and cinematography allow viewers to come to read the meaning of the work in a different manner than the original intent could have been because through the process of reproducing the original work into a film or photograph it can take on a different/new identity. For example, movies such as She’s the Man and 10 Things I Hate About You are reinterpretations of the Shakespearian plays Twelfth Night, and The Taming of the Shrew. The original plays have been reproduced and modernized into 90s teen flicks. A person who watches a performance of the Shakespearian plays will get a completely different reading of the material from a person who watches the movies. The modernized renditions of the plays have taken on a completely new identity.