Gilliam on Meaning
I've been re-reading
Gilliam on Gilliam, a book of extended interviews with director Terry Gilliam.
And if other people offer different justifications or interpretations?
When that happens, I just go along with it. It becomes their version of the film. I'm not proprietorial about the films; once they're done they belong to anyone who wants to watch them, and each person who watches creates a different film in their watching of it. But I also like throwing in things that don't quite add up, that aren't completely sensible, to create questions for which people can supply their own answers.
There's been a lot of discussion about the ways in which a medium like hypertext allows readers to create their own versions of a text, their own differing meanings for the same set of nodes, and how that activity enacts deconstruction. But it's always seemed to me that hypertext was a sort of training system for deconstruction, a way of helping readers/users see that this sort of activity goes on even for traditional texts. The hypertext version, too often, mistakes this fact, acting as if it's an extension or rather than a preparation for deconstruction, sort of like playing scales rather than using scales to enact a new musical composition.
Posted by johndan at October 27, 2004 04:01 PM
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