Fear and Desire: On Stanley Kubrick’s first film(metrograph.com)
metrograph.com
Fear and Desire: On Stanley Kubrick’s first film
https://metrograph.com/fearanddesire/
8 comments
AI cannot by itself create anyting unguided by non AI agents, it’s just a fools errand to go in that direction. Now if AI is guided by human counterparts it becomes just another tool, a very complex and able tool but nonetheless a tool. An autheur would be in charge and in control of this tool.
Are you talking about current AI, or as a general principal? Is not clear to me that some future AI couldn’t do everything a human does.
To what end? To explore and it's express it's grief? To atone for or analyze suffering? To share joy and passion or simply show us how prettily the light dapples through the trees and shivers in time to a soft musical accompaniment? What could an AI possibly create for itself that might also interest us?
> [the thing] . . . what he went on to do
That is exactly the kind of A->B narrative current AI should do very well.
Retconning in all of the connective tissue of a creative life seems ideal, in fact.
That is exactly the kind of A->B narrative current AI should do very well.
Retconning in all of the connective tissue of a creative life seems ideal, in fact.
> A 60 or 70 year career as one long project of psychoanalysis, with the seeds in earlier works getting ever better formed and expressed later.
Two different counter-examples:
1. Mozart. Once he was a late teen, the masterworks just popped out semi-randomly. And not just moments of melodic beauty. There are constant, strange innovations in form which come and go. Like filling a contrasting section of a rondeau form with a fully self-contained non-sequitur in a different time signature and key[1], followed by a operatic finale, which is then followed by the remainder of the rondeau form (all in a single violin concerto!).[2]
He'd go on to make other, unrelated innovations in the piano concertos, yet different innovations in the string quartets, and sprinkle nearly everything with operatic pizazz. His ascetic, masterful Bach-like counterpoint in late keyboard pieces wasn't the culmination of a career, but rather a passing interest of two-part writing after a friend showed him a copy of Bach's two- and three-part inventions.
I once turned to a random page of his string quartet collection. It was a finale where he purposely leaves out the main melody, builds the ensuing sections around that lack of melody, and then has the 1st violin play the main melody only once, right before the end. He also purposefully fucks up pacing at the point when the players take the repeats. Consequently, he goes on to write in awkwardly-paced transitions between the rest of the sections of the movement. Most of those transitions serve to highlight the lack of a main melody. Yet if you aren't paying close attention, you could easily miss that any of this is happening because the counterpoint, harmony, and form are otherwise working exactly as they should.
The point is-- the likelihood of finding something masterful and innovative like this remains the same for Mozart, no matter which (post-teen) period you're in. It's such a bizarre phenomenon that Glenn Gould leveraged it to make a tongue-and-cheek argument that Mozart became a bad composer toward the end of his life. :)
2. Beethoven's counterpoint. It was clunky when he was young, and it got even clunkier when he was old. It's just that he found a really clever and effective use for clunky counterpoint in the late piano sonatas and the grosse fuga. That, coupled with Bach's Art of Fugue at the end of his life, probably convinced later composers that old age means it's time to get serious about counterpoint. So in a way he helped lead to a pattern of better form and expression in old age, as you speak of, even though he himself didn't follow that pattern wrt counterpoint. :)
1: And even that non-sequitur musical joke is so well-written it stands in for an Irish folk song 250 years later in a whiskey commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEFk7JRdcUY
2: https://youtu.be/Z__wnalazuQ?t=1274
Two different counter-examples:
1. Mozart. Once he was a late teen, the masterworks just popped out semi-randomly. And not just moments of melodic beauty. There are constant, strange innovations in form which come and go. Like filling a contrasting section of a rondeau form with a fully self-contained non-sequitur in a different time signature and key[1], followed by a operatic finale, which is then followed by the remainder of the rondeau form (all in a single violin concerto!).[2]
He'd go on to make other, unrelated innovations in the piano concertos, yet different innovations in the string quartets, and sprinkle nearly everything with operatic pizazz. His ascetic, masterful Bach-like counterpoint in late keyboard pieces wasn't the culmination of a career, but rather a passing interest of two-part writing after a friend showed him a copy of Bach's two- and three-part inventions.
I once turned to a random page of his string quartet collection. It was a finale where he purposely leaves out the main melody, builds the ensuing sections around that lack of melody, and then has the 1st violin play the main melody only once, right before the end. He also purposefully fucks up pacing at the point when the players take the repeats. Consequently, he goes on to write in awkwardly-paced transitions between the rest of the sections of the movement. Most of those transitions serve to highlight the lack of a main melody. Yet if you aren't paying close attention, you could easily miss that any of this is happening because the counterpoint, harmony, and form are otherwise working exactly as they should.
The point is-- the likelihood of finding something masterful and innovative like this remains the same for Mozart, no matter which (post-teen) period you're in. It's such a bizarre phenomenon that Glenn Gould leveraged it to make a tongue-and-cheek argument that Mozart became a bad composer toward the end of his life. :)
2. Beethoven's counterpoint. It was clunky when he was young, and it got even clunkier when he was old. It's just that he found a really clever and effective use for clunky counterpoint in the late piano sonatas and the grosse fuga. That, coupled with Bach's Art of Fugue at the end of his life, probably convinced later composers that old age means it's time to get serious about counterpoint. So in a way he helped lead to a pattern of better form and expression in old age, as you speak of, even though he himself didn't follow that pattern wrt counterpoint. :)
1: And even that non-sequitur musical joke is so well-written it stands in for an Irish folk song 250 years later in a whiskey commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEFk7JRdcUY
2: https://youtu.be/Z__wnalazuQ?t=1274
Hey, some lovely thoughts, cheers.
I think what's going on with Mozart is play. Far from being frivolous play can be a very serious exploration of form, but often unstructured and, from the outside, incomprehensible. Robin Williams comes to mind as someone in that "play zone" with words. Maybe Moxart didn't want/need to, or never found a way to incorporate psychological life into his music. Indeed, maybe it was a distraction from it.
For me, Beethoven is better explained by struggle. Sometimes the beauty of an artist is in the fact that they're not technically that brilliant, or they face an impediment. Overcoming is a primary intrinsic motive, and they go on not merely to overcompensate but achieve a level of unique brilliance. Django Reinhardt's unique guitar, incorporating two missing fingers, comes to mind.
Perhaps both can be understood as states of flow that feel right for that particular artist. Not sure how much Mihály C14i's "flow" concept is applied to whole life experiences, but some people clearly find their sweet-spot in the struggle zone - overcoming themselves - for example as a mountaineer.
Perhaps tangentially, absence is an amazing device. I wrote about it in designing sound, because an implied, missing thing is actually a very common device for sound designers, who often need to work like magicians, carefully (mis)directing the listener.
If done well it can lead to assumption, where the audience fully believe the missing thing to be literally there. A revealed assumption can then be used, which may be shocking or funny, for example via the crafty cinematography of Tak Fujimoto in Shyamalan's Sixth Sense, we assume by implied interactions that Bruce Willis is in the same world as everyone else, until the sting. Mozart putting in that last bar of explicit melody is playfully rubbing our noses in our assumption
I think what's going on with Mozart is play. Far from being frivolous play can be a very serious exploration of form, but often unstructured and, from the outside, incomprehensible. Robin Williams comes to mind as someone in that "play zone" with words. Maybe Moxart didn't want/need to, or never found a way to incorporate psychological life into his music. Indeed, maybe it was a distraction from it.
For me, Beethoven is better explained by struggle. Sometimes the beauty of an artist is in the fact that they're not technically that brilliant, or they face an impediment. Overcoming is a primary intrinsic motive, and they go on not merely to overcompensate but achieve a level of unique brilliance. Django Reinhardt's unique guitar, incorporating two missing fingers, comes to mind.
Perhaps both can be understood as states of flow that feel right for that particular artist. Not sure how much Mihály C14i's "flow" concept is applied to whole life experiences, but some people clearly find their sweet-spot in the struggle zone - overcoming themselves - for example as a mountaineer.
Perhaps tangentially, absence is an amazing device. I wrote about it in designing sound, because an implied, missing thing is actually a very common device for sound designers, who often need to work like magicians, carefully (mis)directing the listener.
If done well it can lead to assumption, where the audience fully believe the missing thing to be literally there. A revealed assumption can then be used, which may be shocking or funny, for example via the crafty cinematography of Tak Fujimoto in Shyamalan's Sixth Sense, we assume by implied interactions that Bruce Willis is in the same world as everyone else, until the sting. Mozart putting in that last bar of explicit melody is playfully rubbing our noses in our assumption
What makes film directors, composers and maybe some writers and philosophers interesting is something that you don't see until end. A 60 or 70 year career as one long project of psychoanalysis, with the seeds in earlier works getting ever better formed and expressed later. So it's a privilege to live outside a great person's lifespan and see the "full works" as it were.
Here's where I cannot see AI comparing. Even if an AI could make one brilliant box-office killer film every day, using generative scripts, the hottest CGI and so on, those movies could not collectively compare with a human who is working out a deep question through the medium of an art and audience.