After writing a hundred pages or so for my field statements, due a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been a little short on words. It’s slowly coming back to me though, and Spring Break is helping immensely. I’ve been reading and taking notes in preparation for my orals, and it’s been a luxurious break from the usual hustle of the semester.
I often wish I had Bill and Ted’s phone booth so I could steal away to read, say, Derrida’s corpus, or watch a few hundred ethnographic films, but when I actually do manage to free up some time, I’m often too exhausted to do very much. So this break has been nice–I’m actually taking time to absorb some of the things that I read through in a rush to finish my field statements. And while the ethnographic films are out of reach (there’s nothing deader than an out-of-date ethnographic film on VHS in the two-hour-loan section of the library, I swear) I have been finding a few gems on youtube.
So, a rescored, remixed The Man With the Movie Camera, one of the few movies made as an explictly theoretical exercise exploring cinematic language. I’m delighted that it’s been chopped up and put on youtube–a relaxing break from these pesky words.
Colleen Morgan 