Roman's post

I have two points to make, but I shall use only one blog post.
One of them is a minor fallacy committed by Julie Hubbert. In this quote: "music was included early and often because it was an accompaniment essential to film's democratic appeal. It was what allowed the film to include in its audience both average Parisians or Americans and the Queen of England" (13). I believe that this quote is in a sense fallacious because it assumes that music was the democratic quality as opposed to the fact that well cinema was democratic because it was a cheap and mobile form of entertainment. Just because the Parisian Proletariat and the British crown both had music in their films does not in any way make film inherently democratic. I mean, both the parisians and the denizens of Buckingham palace use forks when they eat, but the use of forks is not what makes food democratic, rather the fact that everyone must eat in order to survive accounts for that. Additionally, I would argue that the difference in the kind of music both hear actually re-inscr
ibes class relations. In order for the queen to consider film it had to have a symphony orchestra, otherwise it is not worth touching; whereas, the rational for the piano is just to make the event more enjoyable. This criticism is not meant to detract from the otherwise informative text of Ms. Hubbert.

I know I didn't use one of DHF's fallacies, but I figure that if a fallacy is logical no reference to anyone else is really needed.

The second thing I would like to note concerns Decherney's "Hollywood and the Culture Elite." I do not wish to point out a fallacy, but rather a clever reappropriation of Benjamin. On page 133, he writes, "Linked to this aestheticization of politics was the politicization of Hollywood films." This quote resuses Benjamin's terms from "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:" socialism as the politicization of art and fascism as the aestheticization of politics. If we want to have fun with this phrase, we can say that Hollywood and Washington are composed of commie-nazis! I just thought that was really clever on his part.

Finally, just because I just talked a little about Benjamin, I would just like to briefly comment on Kaitlyn's post and say that Benjamin was not being fallacious in his linking of materialism and Marxism. Marx's theory of history was dialectical materialism, an modification of Hegel's dialectic view of history, centering on the class struggle. Thus, it is certainly not fallacious, although I do agree that the essay is problematic because of its on-the-run feel. Although, that might be where we can find the most truth. Who knows…

Roman Pazuniak