Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema - 

Pg. 84

Syncretism is the combination of many different forms into one whole form. Persian tapestries and tile domes are syncretistic. Mandalas are syncretistic. Nature is syncre-tistic. The majority of filmgoers, conditioned by a lifetime of conven-tional narrative cinema, make little sense of synaesthetic cinema because their natural syncretistic faculty has suffered entropy and atrophy. Buckminster Fuller: "All universities have been progressively organized for ever-finer specialization. Society assumes that specialization is natural, inevitable and desirable. Yet in observing a little child we find it is interested in everything and spontaneously apprehends, comprehends and coordinates an ever-expanding inventory of experience.'' 10 It has been demonstrated that all species of life on earth that have become extinct were doomed through overspecialization, whether anatomical, biological, or geological. Therefore conventional narrative cinema, in which the filmmaker plays policeman guiding our eyes here and there in the picture plane, might be described as "specialized vision," which tends to decay our ability to comprehend the more complex and diffuse visual field of living reality.