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Mon
13th
But here’s the really annoying thing. Sanders told us about a classical Greek concept that Burns uses to describe his (their) objective in documentary film making. It’s about crafting an idea until it is irresistibly obvious and so well formed that it goes straight into consciousness, carrying all that grace and subtlety as it goes. As Sanders pointed out, people watching a documentary film get it the first time or they reach for the remote. And I sat there thinking, yes, in the contemporary world all of us succeed because we worship at the temple of X [insert name of Greek concept here] or we court the obscurity we so richly deserve. Damned if I can retreive the term. If someone knows it, I will come back and edit it in. Both these things, compressing fantastic data of impossible breadth and diversity into a few elegant generalizations, and then finding a way to communicate these generalizations with the utmost clarity, these are two of the most compelling tasks for most of us who loiter at the intersection of anthropology and economics. Perhaps the temple we should be worshiping in is not [greek concept here] but documentary film making of the kind practiced by Sanders and Burns.
