the politics of perception (1973) 33 minutes

Why representation? From cave drawings, to Plato's shadows, to the melding of photo-chemistry and optics with the maltese-cross movement, humans are always projecting. Cinema (originally cinematographe,"motion writing") is a mechanical transport that projects an artificial sun through a sequence of celluloid shadows. Into shadows we project meaning using a medium on the precarious edge of entropy. In the movies, curiously, there is no motion in the projected still frames.

All movement is the viewer's illusion. Enter the gangster film, mechanically produced, reproduced, distributed, exhibited, and consumed. What to make of mechanized cultural productions? What meaning, and illusions, in these images, words, sounds, and rhythms, methodical as a machine, as precise as a computer?