Never Mind the Beasts

Reading a little James Monaco for the class I will be teaching on film a week from today.

He has a little chart. The spectrum from least abstraction to most:

1) practical: design

2)Environmental:architecture, sculpture

3) Pictoral: painting, drawing, graphics

4)Dramatic: stage drama

5) narrative: novel, story, non-fiction

6) Musical: poetry, dance, music

He argues film is unique in that it occupies all these levels of abstraction.

There are lots of in-betweens (poetry can have both narrative and musical elements for example).

This spectrum (connecting back to Aristotle’s Poetics) may still be interesting, but isn’t it seriously inaccurate after modernism?