4.7: Massage Chairs and Timeout Chairs

Supplementary video on website http://www.film-podcast.com/#!blog/ch7d

“Limitations are not constraints, are not necessarily restraining: they are tests. If you can’t write a poem with only words beginning with “b,” you don’t deserve the rest of the alphabet; if you can’t paint with one color of the wind, you don’t deserve the spectrum. Constraints make it so we’re not the only ones in charge (even if we’re the ones that create them). You get a partner, a backboard in your creations.”

“The human brain operates on stimulus -- jolts of electricity come and domino as far as they can go. There is the initial zap, the travelling, and where it ends up finding its resting place. A minimalist/slow/ lackalist movie, with its lower number of spider-webbing zaps, forces the viewer to make some of its own thunder storms;”

“Maybe watching challengingly static films -- pain with little experientially fun payoff -- is exactly like forcing yourself to sit on an adult timeout chair. If the film gave in, like a weak-willed parent, and added in some T&A, a lollipop and some love, we wouldn’t benefit much.”