One of my favorite films, Peter Greenaway’s The Falls, is itself constructed like a scrapbook (and the collages in the film - I was reminded of them by the scrapbook in my previous post - look like the pages of one), the only structural principle (in the film) being a numerical-alphabetical one (the 92 victims of a “Violent Unknown Event” whose names begin with the letters “fall”). You could say that a scrapbook operates with the same minimum of structure: the content belongs just by virtue of its 1) occupying a page 2) in the same book. Each image or doodle seems to inform the next but who knows whether it’s germane or merely exploratory, whimsical. Just as holding a camera gives you the right to bend down and take a picture of a flower, whatever is in a scrapbook belongs there by being there.
One of my favorite films, Peter Greenaway’s The Falls, is itself constructed like a scrapbook (and the collages in the film - I was reminded of them by the scrapbook in my previous post - look like the pages of one), the only structural principle (in the film) being a numerical-alphabetical one (the 92 victims of a “Violent Unknown Event” whose names begin with the letters “fall”). You could say that a scrapbook operates with the same minimum of structure: the content belongs just by virtue of its 1) occupying a page 2) in the same book. Each image or doodle seems to inform the next but who knows whether it’s germane or merely exploratory, whimsical. Just as holding a camera gives you the right to bend down and take a picture of a flower, whatever is in a scrapbook belongs there by being there.
