Ion’s blog

“Neoformalism posits that viewers are active—that they perform operations. Contrary to psychoanalytic criticism, I assume that film viewing is composed mostly of nonconscious, preconscious, and conscious activities. Indeed, we may define the viewer as a hypothetical entity who responds actively to cues within the film on the basis of automatic perceptual processes and on the basis of experience. Since historical contexts make the protocols of these responses inter-subjective, we may analyze films without resorting to subjectivity . . . According to Bordwell, ‘The organism constructs a perceptual judgment on the basis of nonconscious inferences.’ ”

Then came the question itself:

“What kind of pressure would Metz’s description of ‘the imaginary signifier’ or Baudry’s account of the subject in the apparatus put on the ontology and epistemology of film implicit in the above two statements?”

I looked up at my daughter. She smiled triumphantly. “Welcome to film theory,” she chirped.

[…]

From movie critic Ebert: “Film theory has nothing to do with film. Students presumably hope to find out something about film, and all they will find out is an occult and arcane language designed only for the purpose of excluding those who have not mastered it and giving academic rewards to those who have. No one with any literacy, taste or intelligence would want to teach these courses, so the bona fide definition of people teaching them are people who are incapable of teaching anything else.”

From Kevin Brownlow, the world’s leading silent movie historian, author of “The Parade’s Gone By . . .,” and co-producer, with David Gill, of acclaimed documentaries: “You would think, from this closed-circuit attitude to teaching, that such academics would be politically right wing. For it is a kind of fascism to force people practicing one discipline to learn the language of another, simply for the convenience of an intellectual elite. It’s like expecting Slavs to learn German in order to comprehend their own inferiority. But they are not right wing. They are, regrettably, usually left wing—quite aggressively Marxist—which makes the whole situation even more alarming.”

In short, the company is selling lifestyles and (in the pro line-up) workstyles, a computing platform that makes a statement when you buy.

And these are all niches. You could argue that, from the moment Mr Jobs returned to the company and launched the strategy being pursued by Apple today, it has been about pursuing small parts of the market left unsatisfied by the beige boxes and cheap clunkiness of the PC market.

In any other business, chasing niches is a perfectly acceptable plan. Look at the car industry, retail, or the rest of the consumer electronics industry and, around the mass-market players, there are successful, profitable companies serving specialist needs or high-end, high-margin markets. It is a strategy that could easily work quite nicely for Apple.

However, the problem, for some, is Apple’s early promise to make a “computer for the rest of us” – a vow which still defines the Mac experience for many of its users.

[…]

Yes, the new-look Apple might be beautiful, and the functionality may be wonderful in some, mostly creative, fields, but all pretence at going for the real mass market has long since been dropped.

Today, the “rest of us” are mostly using Windows, and Apple is no longer concerned with changing that.