Poetics of space.
I’ll say right off the bat, that a lot of this book goes right by me, but there were a few parts that I found very interesting. Just in general, it is interesting watching someone struggle with building a philosophy of things that are as transient as dreams, imagination, and poetry. He is quite aware of the paradox, pointing out that the very act of describing and analyzing a flight of the imagination pretty much kills it, nonetheless, he does his best to construct a coherent philosophy, and quite often succeeds. In terms of the type of work we are discussing in this class, his book definitely has some relevance. The choice to take a story out of a conventional venue, like a cinema, and to place it in other locales out in the world is not one that is generally made simply ‘because’, hopefully there is a reason to do so. His book attempts to explore, both the inherent meaning in different types of spaces, as well as how they affect the person experiencing them.
Although I don’t know how it might relate to the type of work we are doing in class, the chapter on miniatures, in particular, had a lot of resonance for me. In my own filmmaking, I have worked almost exclusively with models and miniatures for over fifteen years, and so I suppose I have developed my own philosophy of miniatures, although not nearly so expansive as his. I have tended to think about them more from the perspective of the artist, pondering the drive to build tiny worlds, so his analysis of it from the perspective of the viewer, and the effect miniatures have on their mind and imagination was very interesting to me as I haven’t given as much thought to that side of it. There were a few quotes that really stood out for me. “The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it. But in doing this it must be understood that values become condensed and enriched in miniature.” And, “values become engulfed in miniature, and miniature causes men to dream.” It is certainly my experience that miniatures and models cause my mind to light up imaginatively in ways that are different than when I experience something similar first hand. I’ve looked at the model ships in the AGO collection, and I’ve seen actual tall ships, and for some reason my mind takes imaginative flights of fancy far more readily from the models. I’m not sure if that has something to do with the training of childhood, where the mind can easily slip from a toy, into a world of imagination, or something else, such as the unreality of the scale, or the feeling of superiority and control you get from looking at a miniature. Reading this book has actually made me start to regret my thesis, because my original thesis proposal was a film that explored exactly these ideas, with the main character being a dioramist(?) So that within a film made using scale models, the characters would be themselves making scale models, much like the world’s within world’s that Bachelard refers to in the work of Cyrano DeBergerac amongst others.