Knots

In cinema there inheres a promise of viewership - as with writing, painting: the medium is a form given to intentional reception as well as to interception. Some films may be said to formally invite or close off viewers in some patterned way (the ‘openness’ of the classical Hollywood commercial text as opposed to austere high modernism, or dialogue-free chase film in distinction to in-jokey film about the film industry). There is truth to this. But a film is a knot of social forces, a note inscribed by actors, propelled into the social sphere - as weapon, encouragement, shelter, admonition …

Different 'discursive shapes' themselves structure an apparently discrete audiovisual object, not only in its production/encryption, but in its 'afterlives,' and in its directionality when released into the sphere as a knot (which is sometimes well before its full release). These shapes describe the cultural reckoning around cinema - not cinema as an entire medium or entity, per se, nor individual films, but in terms of cinema as an agglomeration of myriad strings of knots, beads (strings of types of knottings).