Search found 1 match: Hideaki Anno

An interesting argument, though I feel it doesn't really do much to address my argument (though, being based on our personal tastes, that's probably going to keep happening). Perhaps "manipulative" didn't quite capture what I was intending, but what word would? Maybe "maudlin" would, at least in the case of Dancer in the Dark. But I have enjoyed other films that take a more analytic method, or at least try to force the audience to be more active in their experience (see Gasper Noe, Michael Haneke, and Hideaki Anno, among others), and that leads me to the point I was perhaps really trying to make.

Why did I enjoy those and not von Trier's films? Even in those works that tried to confront me and make me an active viewer (the ones I felt worked, at least), I was still "immersed" in a sense. Even if the synthesis may have "fallen apart," I was still engaged, if not a little confused. Did the analytic parts still make sense in the film's synthetic whole? I feel like that must be it. There must be some sort of emotional or logical "hook" to allow synthesis in the first place, before you even get to the analysis, which then must grow organically from that. In my opinion, von Trier doesn't achieve this first step, leaving me on the outside from the get go. His attempts at adding an analytic element to disrupt synthesis have themselves fallen apart.

djross wrote:An appreciation of cinema that involves analytic capabilities is possible only through an education that succeeds in drawing the viewer's attention to the analytical operations that lie behind the synthetic apprehension of the whole

An aside, wanted to ask you about this line. What do you believe provides or constitutes such an education, or in other words, what must a person understand to be educated in this subject? Maybe this is too vague a question.