"Writing with Video" and the implications of self-exprssion and artistic exploration

I like long titles and by extension I love academia because it creates them. There is nothing quite like a witty, succinct title ruined by a long, descriptive post-script like above. The frustrating part is that they are so completely necessary and reflect a certain amount of security on the part of a time-pressed reader. Do I have time to read about the Diurnal Mating Habits of Uruguayan Rainforest Termites or rather Real-Time Distribution of Small-Scale Data Structuring Algorithms in Assembly Languages*? I don’t. But their titles are well written so I assume they do not lack academic rigor. In short, I’m forced to secretly hate them.

What I really love is stuff like Week-end by Godard, something so completely non-sequitur, encapsulating about 50 years of modern philosophy so as to be genius yet so pretentious and inaccessible that only a few people would get it. I honestly didn’t get it. Reading Wikipedia just now didn’t help me get it. Trying to make some rational, empirical conjecture about what the hell the movie is about from the title alone is so clichéd that I must call it an ‘exercise in futility’. And I dig that. I like obscurity and obliqueness because it represents a good effort of mental diligence to simply watch and piece together. It demands interpretation. And rather than some long string of nonsensical words strung together, film titles like Week-end, or just about any film title, are as carefully chosen as the brush-strokes on a Renoir** (An exception to this is a good favorite of mine, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, which qualifies as ambiguous both existentially and referentially).

As far as other foreign pretensions go, I confess that I have yet to see a Fellini or a Truffaut (I have seen some Herzog and Kurosawa, but who hasn’t?). I have seen a lot of popular German films, ranging from Run Lola Run and Goodbye Lenin to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. They are fascinating simply because they reflect a culture and a filmmaking style I’m not already submerged in. That is not to say I’m completely desensitized to the opiate that is Hollywood. My all-time favorite is The Godfather Part One for its brilliant acting and sheer epic proportion as the quintessential American tale of family, crime, politics and everything in between. I appreciate Wes Anderson’s cycle of films from Rushmore to The Life Aquatic for their particularly strange and well-shot studies of effete, intellectual, and mal-adjusted characters. They’re simply too weird and different not to pass up on a few repeated viewings. Upon a recent viewing of Annie Hall, I now appreciate the subtext that breaking the dramaturgical fourth wall brings forth. Also Woody Allen clearly falls into the mal-adjusted character column.

What I don’t like about films is something along the lines of Crash. Yes, it had a good message and yes it was heart-rending (if you aren’t already in tears when the Iranian father shoots the locksmith’s daughter, you have no heart). It was just very heavy-handed in its attempt to tell me I’m racist (which I claim not to be). Also as an aside, it did not depict Asians in a very positive light. At all. Crash’s brand of social criticism was just a little too much. Other that that, it wasn’t terrible.

I’d like to say that I have the vision of Anderson or Coppola or even Spielberg, but I haven’t developed fully my eye for moving pictures, much less opened it. If I were encouraged to follow my dreams, perhaps I’d have gone to film school. I had everything I needed growing up, a nice camera, a nice editing set-up, the technical know-how, etc. Instead, I was primed for “serious” academia and ended up in engineering school. How cool would it to be a film director? Then again, how big of a connection does it take to make a living in the business? Large-scale production and true artistic vision mix like oil and water. Instead, I ran with the opportunity to take this class and feel right about it. I would like to express myself in a creative fashion and work hard getting credit for it. I feel that I can exceed, especially in the first few movements of the class, the technical learning curve to spend time developing some semblance of artistry or at least come to some realization of how I view the world.

Among all my classes, this is the least straightforward. The title alone suggests that I will write something. To put a mathematical perspective on it, there are somewhere in the order of one million words in the English language after which one can logically put another of something like one hundred thousand words, and some fraction of that initial million thereafter and repeating until a sentence is formed. And from a collection of these sentences, a paragraph. And from a paragraph, something similar to this reflection. At the beginning of this sentence I had written 724 words. Even for a prompted response like this, the number of ways I could have completed it would be a 1 followed by 724 zeros. The possibilities are endless, compared to the math I’m assigned, which normally has one answer. I won’t even get into the “video” part. Together, you have “Writing with Video.” Behind such a simple title lay a gazillion and five different paths I could take, a title which I anticipate enjoying.

*Something I'm likely to end up writing.
**Or 'Insert your favorite Impressionist here.'