RE: ART vs. DRAMA

["Nelson Zagalo" <ntz@ca.ua.pt>]

>Why 'emotional'?  

Because that is the big essence of Art, in my view.

>I do analyze and contemplate it.  

You 'cognitivize' it and feel it.

>such as "beautiful," "ugly," 

This labelling happens in your reasoning, which mixes your intellectual
analyses plus your emotional feelings in order to arrive at a conclusion
of the object you're facing.

>DRAMAtists tend to dwell on emotion, and I wonder if this is a strong, 
>perhaps insurmountable bias when they contemplate other forms of ART.

Dramatists have lots of different artistic schools and trends as any
other arts. Just take a look at Bertolt Brecht theories. I'm not really
with him, with his vision of emotion in the work of art, however lots of
people works by his vision.
  
>Here, 'decoration' sounds like a label for 'bad', without having any 
>more substance to it than that.  

I'm not labelling it as bad, but as "decoration". To me this is
different. Rocky V has good technical work done by good artisans. The
problem is that they limited their work to that, artisanship. 

You have a story that doesn't add anything new to the original story.
Neither in terms of content and lesser in terms of form. The story is
built on top of a too fragile conflict between the main characters,
however in terms of maintaining viewer attention it's well done because
technicians were good enough for that. The story keeps progressing in a
very simple way, putting you waiting for things in order to maintain
your focus, that never happens and so the cognitive change never occurs
and the emotional comes to be very weak. This is what makes the big
difference between the two movies.
In terms of editing and cinematography, the same thing. Good technicians
that are able to deliver a good work, but never surprising and so never
showing you anything that can survive for it self. Rocky V, could have a
bad story and be a magnificent artwork only in terms of editing, however
what you see is nothing more than what you learn in the editing manuals.



Labelling something as "decorative" doesn't mean the work or the people
who do it, are bad. But it means that people learned how to do it, but
they never learnt how to surpass it.

nelson