binary culture

> I recently watched a movie called You, the Living. That's what my Netflix instant watching queue tells me, and it tallies with my memory, so I'm sure I did.
I know it's a wry episodic comedy of short interconnected scenes, because that's what I saw. For the first half of it (approximately) I thought it was a movie with an interesting esthetic device: most of the sets were flats, either digital or actual, with working elements incorporated - a door, a chair, a table with two people at it foregrounded against an unreal background. I admired the execution of it, and how it complemented the theme of lives in physical and emotional isolation.
About halfway through (approximately), lightning struck. Figuratively speaking for me, actually in the movie. All the lighting, previously, had been quite static. Now a rain was falling in the world of the movie, and it changed the light in the movie, and the changing light in the movie changed how I saw the movie I was watching in/from the real world.
With the shifting light of rains falling and clouds moving darkness and light, the backgrounds all became digitally alive, changing texture, taking on depth within the two dimensions of my TV set. The backgrounds had not been flats, digital or actual - the movie had been digitized and compressed in a way that averaged out static elements so that they appeared unreal, manufactured or synthesized. The interesting esthetic stroke was a flaw in pixelation.
Once the rain stopped, I watched two movies, or maybe three: the movie made, with formally limited but nonetheless actual sets; the movie I could make visible by relaxing my sight and allowing the compressed pixels to become static again; and the one I made by shifting my conception of it back and forth. I moved my conception, an abstraction, back and forth in a space that was actually a preponderance of impressions altering the balance of perception - I watched a movie.
Netflix tells me that Roy Andersson, director and writer, was "[i]nspired by Goethe's poetry series The Roman Elegies." I don't know if this is true: I've seen the movie but I am illiterate in Goethe and have never read The Roman Elegies. But now that I've seen the movie I will go to Wikipedia and read about Goethe and The Roman Elegies and then I might go somewhere else (in digital space while still sitting on my couch) and read The Roman Elegies. Whatever reading is.
In the meantime, You, the Living, has fallen off Netflix's watch instantly stream, so unless the DVD has the same digital deficiencies, which it shouldn't, you won't see any of the movies I saw. By some wild freak of chance, you could see it projected from film in a theatre, as it was meant to be shown, but you won't see any of the movies I saw either. But you still might feel something for the little fat man who cries, "Nobody understands me."

The wind was flapping a temple flag, and two monks started an argument. One said the flag moved, the other said the wind moved; they argued back and forth but could not reach a conclusion.
The Sixth Patriarch Hui-Neng said, "It is not the wind that moves, it is not the flag that moves; it is your minds that move."