To the people in ART250, section M4:
You are all very very cruel people.
I really wasn't going after schadenfreude, but I guess there's an inherent comedic effect in the piece. Yes, it's very funny until someone gets hurt. Then it's Hilarious. In a similar vein, people in distress usually look funny and we can't help pointing and laughing, especially with Ben's stellar face acting and gesticulations. When filming 8 1/2 Fellini taped a message to his camera that basically stated "remember - this is a comedy." Perhaps in the course of filming I had it on my mind to remember that this is the black comedy of our college lives, and it was recieved that way. So to reiterate, you are all very very cruel people. But it was well warranted.
If we all have been put into a situation like this (which I gather was the case from people's responses) then naturally we tend to see ourselves in pieces like this, and it's perfectly okay to laugh at ourselves. We are all very self-abusive and thus self-deprecating. So, we are very cruel because we don't love ourselves enough to feel pity for the subject, or just love ourselves in a cruel manner because we recognize that this is painful and enjoy it. However you spin it, you can't hide from the fact. You're a cruel, cruel person.
Not all of you recognized exclusively the humour, some saw the frustration, the agony, the boredom, the other feelings that you thought of. On the whole, most of you liked the piece and didn't offer any criticism like you did for "Circles." I was kind of disappointed in that, seeing as how I didn't have a rough copy to show at workshop time (which also explains why I don't have paper copies of that round of the process), and hoped that someone would pipe up. I remember clearly that Heather offered something critical, but I forgot what specifically. I was too giddy at the fact that someone rendered some criticism (this is not sarcasm). That said, I'll make some of my own up. I had a lot of unintentional continuity issues that I didn't think people would notice, but someone did, that in particular was the fact that the hands typing were not the actor's hands, as the big red X on my hand but not Ben's would indicate. Danny noticed it enough to make a comment about it, citing the possibility that the night before, the subject had gone out and maybe had a little too much fun? The second time he drinks from the travel mug is just a longer take of the first time he does so, split apart and placed at opposite ends of the film from each other. Presumably, this cold have been retaken with the subject changed in respect to how he should be at 4 in the a.m.: hunched over and trembling slightly, eyes maybe blodshot. I did only have my subject for about 15 minutes though, and it was a distressing 15 minutes for him without changing how his eyes looked. Still, continuity issues were pressing.
Also, another criticism Cory issued was how we don't see the subject's frustration in writing alone, but merely implied as a lack of progress. What I could have included was some semblance of progress within the paper he was writing, only to be stifled by self-critical realization, for example, a whole, explicitly typed sentence deleted in a few backspaces. While this approach may have made contextual sense, I think it would have detracted from the character's development, in that this is not a Sisyphean effort at all, but rather a result of the character's inabilities to cope under stress and be creative.
I enjoyed everyone's comments greatly and the levels on which they appreciated the work. At the same time, this is a struggle of man, but on another level, this was portrayed as a struggle of man vs. machine. People recognized that the computer is itself a character, injecting itself into a strained relationship, rather than a static plot device. I especially enjoyed the little things that I thought were unconsequential, like the sentences I chose to write as a "paper." As I mentioned, those are my reward for you paying so close attention to the film. The fun is always in the details, and I'm glad you pick up on them.
So this is a new thing: I uploaded my video to YouTube instead of netfiles and posted a click-a-link to it below, rather than having to let it load and take up unnecessary bandwith.... Hooray! Enjoy:
Now that I look at it, it's not all that great because of the incessant and omnipresent YouTube label. Boo on video watermarks! This is the price we pay for free media hosting...
So these are where the critiques for my classmates shall go:
NATH - Before the Test
I recall being more rushed before tests, like I'm frantically trying to cram words and figures and formulas into my head from some lengthy tome, or else I'm rushing up Goodwin on my bike to get to Siebel Center before they pass out scantrons and don't want to run into a large lecture hall as sheepishly like I imagine, or fall down the stairs there, or whatever. This is your depiction and I can understand where you're coming from. I liked the use of your watch as a narrative component and source of that incessant ticking that keeps you going ten or fifteen minutes before the TA carts in that packet of freshly-copied exams. I noticed you did speed it up ever so slightly, but it is imperceptible and perhaps it is my imagination that actually does the acceleration. You might have wanted to increase it in volume, but you weren't going for an overdramatic depiction of such. Instead, you put yourself at a certain distance from the camera and kept yourself there, and focused primarily on what might be bothering you, that is, the book and leaves of paper that you have to shuffle and sort through, emphasizing perhaps the importance of what you're going over, rather than the emotions you percieve at the time. Or the emotional response is implied, but we do not see it, other than your sense and awareness of time with repeated glances at your watch. You are obviously rushed. But not that much. Maybe you're nervous. You removed yourself as a character with feelings and a (possible) sense of foreboding. I like the overall narrative arc of the piece and you really do document the minutes or so before going into DCL and having to wrestle with a piece of paper, much like how Joe leaves out the actual sparring in his piece. It's a depiction, rather than a feeling, and it's effective in this regard.
HEATHER - Waves of memory(?)
What hit me was the disturbing quality of your images and the effects you chose, for example, the reversed footage of the jet of water hitting the car windshield or the hands reaching towards the fireplace or just about the bulk of your images that on an initial viewing are unrecognizable. I would have liked to read your aesthetic writing. Or maybe I shouldn't like to. I suppose the whole point of your depiction was that it reflects a certain amount of uncertainty and unfamiliarity, and maybe emotions entailing confusion or mental unfocus or terror, or whatever. I couldn't guess at what you wrote because the channels between the writing and the images are blurred simply because of the premise of your piece. I can't say I remember my dreams, and I can't say I remember in vivid detail half of the images you used. Some stick out and are in that respect effective, and I guess that says a lot about the sheer number and variety of images you used. I must point out, however, that some shots were ambiguous in that they were not well-lit. My mind says this is a conscious choice on your part and only furthers the idea that they are left intentionally ambiguous, but there are a series of these images. Not enough to detract from the piece, but enough to leave me wondering what's the dark space in this video for? If I go on I'll end up speculating, so I'll stop. What I can point out is how you left the piece end. It just kind of ends. It's going in full force and then... stops. With the speedometer at 15 or so. Even a simply fade-out would be appropriate, something, anything! Again, this is merely a point of contention that someone like me would point out. Yes it would be nice to end gracefully, but it's an aesthetic piece, and does it really need such an end? I'll leave it at that.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Aesthetic Part Three: Post-production Notes
After hooking up my camera and importing the footage, I promptly gave it back to my friend who would return it to the window in the morning, upon which it would be promptly checked out to a reserved user, meaining there would be none left for checkout. This basically meant that I couldn't take any reshoots within a resonable amount of time, and whatever I hadn't already reshot would just be used as is or not at all. I tended towards the latter. I really dislike not having my own camera anymore, but such is life when it's not yours exclusively. The Art Department, however, has really nice cameras for being in such small packages and their picture quality is superb, though they have the most confusing user interfaces. What really takes the cake are their selection of microphones and video tripods, which are also great. What is not-so-great is the fact that everything has too quick a check-out turnaround. That's not too great for spontaneous capture. So this is just another thing to think about when doing my last two pieces, or in general. Stick to a schedule for a reason.
It all looked good, and I basically rendered everything sequentially as I listed out in my production notes. First was the drawn-out sequence of making tea, which I didn't draw out too much. I made it flow and took out the extraneous parts, like turning on the kettle, watching it steam it, turning it off, picking it up, pouring it out, putting it down, etc. Instead it was all implied, boiling water, pouring water. it's all that simple. The same feel I tried to employ with the tea part, trimming that shot down to about half and making incontinuous cuts. Then I got right to it, depicting the ill-fated attempt at paper writing. It begins with an empty screen, but suddenly, words! Which are being deleted. and replaced. and sip of tea. even more procrastination, or perhaps inspiration with a little music. Very little actual paper writing actually takes place after a while, and I wanted that suggestion to come about very quickly in the narrative.
When the music starts, it doesn't stop, with some very essential exceptions. I chose the Postal Service - "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight" because it has such an upbeat feel to it but reading the lyrics, is ironically depressing and deals with loneliness, appropriate enough for our solo student. It was also this song, during it's series of electronic blips that I looked up at my computer while laying my head down in the process of writing a paper and basically felt small and powerless compared to this thing in front of me. It was a great bonding moment, me and my computer. And that's why I tried to capture it. It's implied that the subject is listening to to song, perhaps over and over again, but it provides the only bit of continuity besides the fact that nothing meaningful is being put onto electronic paper. I could have chopped up the album the song was off of, which is also ironically titled Give Up, to make it seem like he was listening to a series of songs to give it temporal correctness and not just one. But I kept it simple and stuck to one song and it's qualities to invoke a concise, music video-type feeling.
As for the subject's downfall, I used the bodily detail shots more and more, to suggest some sort of encroachment on the camera's part on the subject's personal space. It hopefully would suggest a lot of discomfort on his part of being encroached. Also on par with a downfall motif, I use the blurrier shots as time goes on, just check out the clock and also how stable the image gets. The hand-held, mobile shots of what time it is again evoke the fact that the ability to focus and see straight is a linear relation to how late it is. Also, most shots to begin with are at eye level with the subject but are then framed from above, to suggest that the subject has been overpowered or has shrunk physically, psychologically, mentally, etc.
As the subject is looking at a skewed angle up from the desk at the computer, I employed a lot of super-soft focuses in post through iMovie's wonderful effects palettes. They didn't look as well as a wanted at first, so as I tried to revert the changes done to the shots to their original form, but I ended up just layering the new effect on top of the old one I didn't want. This is why those shots look super washed out. I kept them because they're so washed out, they're ridiculously altered, but so is the subject in some form (i.e. tired, NOT on drugs). At night everything just seems that much brighter if it's emitting some sort of light.
As the subject is out in the hallway, I increase the introspective subtext of the shot by framing the subject closer and closer. I also cut the music completely to begin with, but on the advice of one of my critiquers, I only subdued it to barely audible at the 8% limit that iMovie allows. The suggestion is that it is still playing somewhere in the background, perhaps in the room whose wall the subject is slumped up against. The music, as a consistent component of the piece, serves as the reminding thread that the situation at hand still exists, i.e. he has a paper to write. I use a parallel structure with the computer, which as a counterpoint, is shot from below and is visibly larger and as the shots progress, bigger than the subject, especially the blinking cursor that indicates where words should be written.
The last suggestion is that this has given the subject a new hope for completion, the raising of the head from the desk, the last hurrah of a swig from the travel mug, and the chatter of typing. Naturally, this is just exposition for the ultimate shot, the slamming of the computer lid, upon which the music stops, and the constant sense that something must be done.
I ended with the only title in the movie, "The Aesthetic Process," itself a reference to the fact that I went through the same process as the subject to do this process. I used the typing effect to display the text, as if this too is being typed up in some form (which it is).
The biggest consideration here was sound. I amplified everything that was pertinent and able, the sound of boiling water, pouring water, the rustle of an opening tea bag, typing, the slamming of the computer lid, and of course, the music. All of those sounds had to be considerably louder than the music, which itself was amplified above normal. In contrast, I blocked out the sound on anything that had ben in it for myriad reasons. For one thing, I was shouting motivations at him and had him play "District Sleeps Alone Tonight" while he was acting to put him in the right mindset, so I couldn't use the sound. Especially him swallowing pills or blowing his nose was disappointing I couldn't use. I figured it wasn't a problem, and where he was visibly typing at the end, I just took the audio from another of my typing exploits and pasted it over its audio. Basically, there is a hierarchy of sound with the subject. If he is sitting at the computer, the only essential sounds are those of him interacting with it, i.e. typing, or slamming it's lid shut. This fits well with the theme that the computer is an overbearing presence in the subject's existence.
So after I implemented all of this, I watched it a couple of times and was satisfied enough to put it on DVD...
It all looked good, and I basically rendered everything sequentially as I listed out in my production notes. First was the drawn-out sequence of making tea, which I didn't draw out too much. I made it flow and took out the extraneous parts, like turning on the kettle, watching it steam it, turning it off, picking it up, pouring it out, putting it down, etc. Instead it was all implied, boiling water, pouring water. it's all that simple. The same feel I tried to employ with the tea part, trimming that shot down to about half and making incontinuous cuts. Then I got right to it, depicting the ill-fated attempt at paper writing. It begins with an empty screen, but suddenly, words! Which are being deleted. and replaced. and sip of tea. even more procrastination, or perhaps inspiration with a little music. Very little actual paper writing actually takes place after a while, and I wanted that suggestion to come about very quickly in the narrative.
When the music starts, it doesn't stop, with some very essential exceptions. I chose the Postal Service - "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight" because it has such an upbeat feel to it but reading the lyrics, is ironically depressing and deals with loneliness, appropriate enough for our solo student. It was also this song, during it's series of electronic blips that I looked up at my computer while laying my head down in the process of writing a paper and basically felt small and powerless compared to this thing in front of me. It was a great bonding moment, me and my computer. And that's why I tried to capture it. It's implied that the subject is listening to to song, perhaps over and over again, but it provides the only bit of continuity besides the fact that nothing meaningful is being put onto electronic paper. I could have chopped up the album the song was off of, which is also ironically titled Give Up, to make it seem like he was listening to a series of songs to give it temporal correctness and not just one. But I kept it simple and stuck to one song and it's qualities to invoke a concise, music video-type feeling.
As for the subject's downfall, I used the bodily detail shots more and more, to suggest some sort of encroachment on the camera's part on the subject's personal space. It hopefully would suggest a lot of discomfort on his part of being encroached. Also on par with a downfall motif, I use the blurrier shots as time goes on, just check out the clock and also how stable the image gets. The hand-held, mobile shots of what time it is again evoke the fact that the ability to focus and see straight is a linear relation to how late it is. Also, most shots to begin with are at eye level with the subject but are then framed from above, to suggest that the subject has been overpowered or has shrunk physically, psychologically, mentally, etc.
As the subject is looking at a skewed angle up from the desk at the computer, I employed a lot of super-soft focuses in post through iMovie's wonderful effects palettes. They didn't look as well as a wanted at first, so as I tried to revert the changes done to the shots to their original form, but I ended up just layering the new effect on top of the old one I didn't want. This is why those shots look super washed out. I kept them because they're so washed out, they're ridiculously altered, but so is the subject in some form (i.e. tired, NOT on drugs). At night everything just seems that much brighter if it's emitting some sort of light.
As the subject is out in the hallway, I increase the introspective subtext of the shot by framing the subject closer and closer. I also cut the music completely to begin with, but on the advice of one of my critiquers, I only subdued it to barely audible at the 8% limit that iMovie allows. The suggestion is that it is still playing somewhere in the background, perhaps in the room whose wall the subject is slumped up against. The music, as a consistent component of the piece, serves as the reminding thread that the situation at hand still exists, i.e. he has a paper to write. I use a parallel structure with the computer, which as a counterpoint, is shot from below and is visibly larger and as the shots progress, bigger than the subject, especially the blinking cursor that indicates where words should be written.
The last suggestion is that this has given the subject a new hope for completion, the raising of the head from the desk, the last hurrah of a swig from the travel mug, and the chatter of typing. Naturally, this is just exposition for the ultimate shot, the slamming of the computer lid, upon which the music stops, and the constant sense that something must be done.
I ended with the only title in the movie, "The Aesthetic Process," itself a reference to the fact that I went through the same process as the subject to do this process. I used the typing effect to display the text, as if this too is being typed up in some form (which it is).
The biggest consideration here was sound. I amplified everything that was pertinent and able, the sound of boiling water, pouring water, the rustle of an opening tea bag, typing, the slamming of the computer lid, and of course, the music. All of those sounds had to be considerably louder than the music, which itself was amplified above normal. In contrast, I blocked out the sound on anything that had ben in it for myriad reasons. For one thing, I was shouting motivations at him and had him play "District Sleeps Alone Tonight" while he was acting to put him in the right mindset, so I couldn't use the sound. Especially him swallowing pills or blowing his nose was disappointing I couldn't use. I figured it wasn't a problem, and where he was visibly typing at the end, I just took the audio from another of my typing exploits and pasted it over its audio. Basically, there is a hierarchy of sound with the subject. If he is sitting at the computer, the only essential sounds are those of him interacting with it, i.e. typing, or slamming it's lid shut. This fits well with the theme that the computer is an overbearing presence in the subject's existence.
So after I implemented all of this, I watched it a couple of times and was satisfied enough to put it on DVD...
Aesthetic Part Two: Production Notes
This is completely new for me, having to make something with some semblance of planning beforehand, moreso than an idea or inkling of what would look good on film. I mean, I freakin' wrote two aesthetic pieces. This is all very incredible. Oh, I've written scripts and stuck to them before, but they simply don't count in this context. This is original in that I'm transferring one piece of media into another. Which I assume I've also done with a script and what not... dammit, none of how this was done is new; I just relied on old, bad habits. This is how I did it:
So I got a lot done with Ben in fifteen minutes. It was quite good, seeing as how I took a raw 7 or 8 minutes worth of him, rather than the hour and half or so I spent getting twenty minutes of something visibly decent.
- Frame
- Point
- Shoot
- Water boiling. I took shots of me turning it on and off, but the lighting was inconsisent with me pouring it, so didn't use any of it. Otherwise wanted to provide unnecessary amounts of detail relating to the preparation of a cup of tea, you know, like you're procrastinating a really long time on it.
- Water pouring. This I got and looked great. Unfortunately, steam doesn't show up unless it's opaque, and because it's apparently transparent in reality, it's gonna look that way on video. It was supposed to be hot, as if my room and the viewer is getting more humid because of it.
- Making tea. I used a shotgun mic for this and many of the computer images. I wanted a satisfying rustle to come up on video and the quiet dunking of a bag of tea in water. I wanted this and the other shots to be close-up and with reasonable amounts of detail.
- Tossing away of tea wrapper and other miscellaneous trash. I basically put the camera on a tripod directly above my receptacle, balled up pieces of newspaper and other trash I had and dropped it from above the camera. Unfortunately a tripod leg was in the shot and I couldn't use it.
- The clock on my computer. It provides a good context for time, especially since it ticks off seconds. I had a lot of fun reseting my computer's clock rather than having to wait about 7 hours.
- Framing of the computer. There were multiple angles for this, one that is objective, neutral, others that suggest an overbearing presence (one of my favorites was putting a piece of white cardboard behind the computer and taking it from a low angle), others that suggest a point of view and that the subject is looking from a very skewed angle with his head down, others that focus on details, as detailed below:
- Framing of the keyboard. Again, I had a variety of keyboard shots, both hands, one hand, focusing on one finger and one letter, etc. I was really limited by how close I could get to the keyboard. So I kept the blurred out shots, and thought that they would provide a convenient thread for progression: as the night goes on, the subject gets more and more tired, and simply can't see straight anymore.
- Framing of the Word document. Again, same as the computer and the keyboard, I wanted a variety that would suggest progression, first a broader shot, then something that focuses on a few lines typing, then one line, and at varying levels of clarity. I also played around with the built-in dictionary and thesaurus, a favorite pastime of mine when I don't know what to write and decide that certain words could be . . . wordier.
- Framing of the iTunes window. I wanted it to be clear that it was iTunes I was playing music from, so focused on the change from a Word window bar to an iTunes window bar, the iconic control buttons, and scrolling through my massively long music collection. If you look closely, you'll see I actually select the song I chose to use in post-production (more on that detail later). Again, the overbearingness of and overreaching abilities of computers these days.
- Framing of sickness. I wanted to suggest the subject was sick, so I shot my hand pulling tissues out of a kleenex box. Because I wanted the satisfying rustle that it would intonate, I put my shotgun mic by the box, but only noticed in post that you could see it, ever so slightly. I would solve this and another problem with that later. I also filmed a zooming shot of some medication scattered across my desk and my hand picking some up. The detail was reasonable but not so reasonable that one could ascertain whether it's adderall (gasp, college kids abusing prescription drugs?) or harmless pseudoephedrine.
The way I scheduled things, I took care of what I could by my lonesome, knowing full well that I cannot and will not film myself and that any of my friends I pull out of their room to be my subject would only do so for about 15 minutes and with a reasonable amount of direction. So in exchange for some Pocky sticks, I coerced my friend Ben Campbell into being my poor bastard of a college student-subject for fifteen minutes and fifteen minutes only. My main motivation for him, a self-described thespian and improvisationalist, was "frustration" which he initially took as "sexual frustration." Once I sat him down at a computer, he seemed to get it. To put him in the mood and to simulate conditions I went through, I put the song I framed as playing on my iTunes on repeat and shouted motivations at him: - Framing of a relatively focused subject. Just as the eye would see it, someone in front of a computer, sipping at a travel mug full of tea, maybe typing something ocassionally, but otherwise undaunted by the task ahead, focusing on the waist up
- Framing of bodily details and appendages. I took great liberty to film his mouth, eyes, and hands in various positions and stages of action. They are, after all, the windows and the machinery of the soul...
- Framing of a sick subject. This involved him blowing his nose and throwing the tissue to the side. What I didn't realize when taking this was that I had told Ben to move the kleenex box, but as I would find out, I couldn't use the shot of the kleenex box anyways, so eventually I just filmed myself reaching into a desk drawer and pulling out tissues from there. It also involved him popping pills, which were just cepacol lozenges, of which I got him chewing, which looked good out of focus.
- Framing of an increasingly frustrated subject. Eventually, everbody has to learn sometime. Naturally, I started out with him acting with his whole face, literally blowing off some steam and getting on with it. This is in contrast to the starkly-angled shots of him putting his face down, from above and below. Kind of a "oh how the mighty fall" moment, juxtaposing the two. My favorite shot of his frustration, however, is when it's on the desk at a skewed angle looking upwards towards the screen and his face is partially obscured by it, again suggesting the presence it has on him.
- Framing of a subject who has removed himself to regain some sort of sanity: Originally it was wandering the hall, him doing the "what the fuck am I doing" dance, but I chose something more simple in the time given, slumped up against an interior wall, rubbing the face, scratching the head in a manner of thought or apprehension or complete surrender. I let him act that one out.
- Framing of someone who has more or less regained some sanity. The action in these shots, rather than the framing drives it, as he picks his head up and starts to type again.
- Framing of the counter-argument to that last shot, where the final bit of frustration is realized. Again, something relatively neutral, as if they're level opponents in some metaphorical match between machine and computer. He loses, of course, but not without slamming the computer lid down first. Score, zero, zero.
- Framing of the subject asleep. Basically medium and close-up shots of him sprawled out on his bed, or in a fetal position, mouth slack-jawed, not visibly breathing, still dressed. Taken in both low-light and lit conditions as if he either fell dead asleep or fell asleep with some foresight, i.e. turned off the light.
So I got a lot done with Ben in fifteen minutes. It was quite good, seeing as how I took a raw 7 or 8 minutes worth of him, rather than the hour and half or so I spent getting twenty minutes of something visibly decent.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Reaction and thoughts on today's film
For inspirational purposes, we're watching a film today in class. I'm generally excited and awaiting something wonderful.
SUCCESS! It's 8 1/2 by Fellini. Never seen it, but have heard it's essential cinema. Let's watch...
Done. I was confused at first, thinking this would be something like Godard, without the French. It had a very shaky series of juxtapositions that confused me at first, like the man suffocating in the car sitting in traffic, but eventually straightened out into something with a plot, which is a big change from Sans Soleil. The plot was also confusing, but revealed itself as a movie about... movies, or at least the creation of such. I find it somewhat providential we watched a movie about the creative process seeing as how I had a hard time coming up with a workable concept. So perhaps, for my approach, I'll use a lot of handsome Italian actors and actresses. Seriously, they are all very fashionable in a bourgeois sense of the word, or at least that's how Fellini depicts them.
Right. Onto the nitty gritty. One could infer a lot about this movie, like maybe how it frustrated Fellini in the process, or how he dealt with personal problems of his own. Or one could read the Wikipedia article on the matter (we'll just call this giving credit where credit is due). As a matter of art imitating life, one would somewhat correctly infer that Fellini had director's block, like the protagonist Guido, but in a great twist of fate, life imitated art in that he eventually frustrated one of his producers by not finishing a film for which he had built an elaborate set, like the rocket launching site in 8 1/2. What I get out of all of this is that the only answer to creative frustration is meta-art. Art about art. Don't feel like writing a paper? Write a paper about writing a paper, or at least incorporate some dialogue about your thought process during your most frustrated times. That's what I did for a German paper I had to write and which ended up taking on the life of the aesthetic writing I wrote. Basically 8 1/2 is the ultimate cop-out, albeit a well-done cop out. On the other hand, it's the most powerful statement of how art is not something without a body or a soul, it has so many layers and a mind of its own simply because it originates within someone. It's also a continuum, it is a moment or series thereof in the director's mind, and will continue in time outside of the work, and like any moments in our lives, affect it accordingly. Again, art imitates life and life imitates art. It's the circle of life, or a series of cliches for that matter.
I really don't feel like injecting explicit personal anecdotes into processes I'm working on, like Guido's, however, they provide such a good context within this film. What stood out the most of those injections was his childhood experience with guilt, a great Catholic emotion. How it's painted is as something so stark, so institutional. In black and white, the confessional booths or the court of church fathers before which young Guido appears stick out in my mind and I'm sure his. Overall, the aesthetic of film was a pastiche of these memories interwoven with the surreal plot of a director's life gone awry. How cool is that?
SUCCESS! It's 8 1/2 by Fellini. Never seen it, but have heard it's essential cinema. Let's watch...
Done. I was confused at first, thinking this would be something like Godard, without the French. It had a very shaky series of juxtapositions that confused me at first, like the man suffocating in the car sitting in traffic, but eventually straightened out into something with a plot, which is a big change from Sans Soleil. The plot was also confusing, but revealed itself as a movie about... movies, or at least the creation of such. I find it somewhat providential we watched a movie about the creative process seeing as how I had a hard time coming up with a workable concept. So perhaps, for my approach, I'll use a lot of handsome Italian actors and actresses. Seriously, they are all very fashionable in a bourgeois sense of the word, or at least that's how Fellini depicts them.
Right. Onto the nitty gritty. One could infer a lot about this movie, like maybe how it frustrated Fellini in the process, or how he dealt with personal problems of his own. Or one could read the Wikipedia article on the matter (we'll just call this giving credit where credit is due). As a matter of art imitating life, one would somewhat correctly infer that Fellini had director's block, like the protagonist Guido, but in a great twist of fate, life imitated art in that he eventually frustrated one of his producers by not finishing a film for which he had built an elaborate set, like the rocket launching site in 8 1/2. What I get out of all of this is that the only answer to creative frustration is meta-art. Art about art. Don't feel like writing a paper? Write a paper about writing a paper, or at least incorporate some dialogue about your thought process during your most frustrated times. That's what I did for a German paper I had to write and which ended up taking on the life of the aesthetic writing I wrote. Basically 8 1/2 is the ultimate cop-out, albeit a well-done cop out. On the other hand, it's the most powerful statement of how art is not something without a body or a soul, it has so many layers and a mind of its own simply because it originates within someone. It's also a continuum, it is a moment or series thereof in the director's mind, and will continue in time outside of the work, and like any moments in our lives, affect it accordingly. Again, art imitates life and life imitates art. It's the circle of life, or a series of cliches for that matter.
I really don't feel like injecting explicit personal anecdotes into processes I'm working on, like Guido's, however, they provide such a good context within this film. What stood out the most of those injections was his childhood experience with guilt, a great Catholic emotion. How it's painted is as something so stark, so institutional. In black and white, the confessional booths or the court of church fathers before which young Guido appears stick out in my mind and I'm sure his. Overall, the aesthetic of film was a pastiche of these memories interwoven with the surreal plot of a director's life gone awry. How cool is that?
Monday, February 19, 2007
Aesthetic Part One, Take Two: Another Approach
Let's try this again.
Evening. The dark window sitting behind me, reveals to me the cold world outside, and among the 12 singly-paned pieces of glass a landscape of students coming to and fro, some inside, some to that octagonal edifice of a workout center, all atop the layers of snow that has impeded man and his herd of vehicles. I sit and contemplate closing the blinds or keeping them open, rather than filling up that empty plain of a Word document save for a name, a class, and an assignment. Paper number 1. Art or German or Computer Science or something like that. Something I care deeply enough about to keep it off until the after-dinner hour, Thursday night, wedged into the end of the week by other empty Word or emacs documents that were miraculously filled with only minutes to spare. I hope for a similar situation. I hope to cut a hole through my head and let those ideas flow out on this glowing monstrosity, or save that, build a machine that I can plug into the USB port and will take care of things for me, a couple concepts or themes at a time. That's years away, and unfortunately, I am in the present, and five minutes have passed. I should be thinking about computer architecture or the effect of Romanticism on German thought, or what to write to video. Whatever it is I need to do. I commence the thought process by walking down the hall to fill up my borrowed Kitchen Gourmet brand water-heater-kettle whatever-it's-called. It's a white cylinder and I wonder how I could describe the water level inside of it as a function of how much it's tilted under the arc of the water coming out of the stainless steel box in front of me. At this angle, the rate at which the water rises is decreasing, but will eventually become asymptotic, until it overflows and I curse a few angry words for pressing a metal button down too long. These are the things I think about. I've been here long enough.
Plugged in, that white cylinder is a chorus of air bubbles nucleated at the bottom of a gray circle that underneath is some sort of coil or ceramic heating element. The circle that the bubbles come out of suggests a coil. I could be wrong. It begins with a low hum, then it becomes an ebullient simmer, and then a roiling, toiling boil. It huffs and puffs and lets out invisible clouds of moisture and wets the air inside this dried out room. With a satisfying click, I rotate the dial to "off." The choir ends their song. I pick it up and empty out the hot water into the stainless steel travel mug I swagged from work, complements of some engineering firm, Johns Manville. Maybe they design water heaters or travel mugs. Or better yet, osmosis machines that you can attach directly to your brain into your USB port. There's always technology not yet marketed out there. I could not be completely crazy. I unwrap a bag of tea with another satisfying rustle of a sound and dip it into it's bath, in and out, until it's dark and soaked with it's briny, earthy goodness. This will keep me going for a while, I hope.
I set the mug down like a gavel on the wooden expanse of a desk, atop which is that aluminum-clad, wonderful technology that I have devoted my college days to sitting at and staring intently into for hours upon hours a day. The plain of a forested plane is scattered with the debris of academic warfare, a few depleted shells of radiant orange post it notes, missiles of pens and penciles, bloodied battlegrounds of syllabi and scribbled notes. Below them were signs from other times, like a note from my girlfriend, taped down and immortalizing the time she noticed I had made her the background of that aluminum laboratory in front of me. Among the wastes stand empty factories or office buildings, a civilization of technological life-enhancers. I can work inside this Bluetooth mouse and avoid having to commute to my computer. I can live inside a cell phone. I can recall my memories in this stack of digital video tapes. And towering above them is the inverted silo of caffeinated, bitter water. It feeds me, sustaining this distorted sense of time and alertness.
And still, the empty word document. I consider taking notes, and resurrect the dead from battle. I steal from the graveyard of deceased papers and desecrate their blank, untrodden side. I write in large letters. I write in small letters, equally unintelligible. It is all to no avail. I draw a bunny, or something resembling a broken cat. I start typing instead. The keys are a pitter-patter of activity for a few seconds. Then they fall into a slumber. Then they awaken with more intensity and die with equal decorum. This repeated pattern of life and death, planting and picking yields a meager crop of words, and together a short bale of sentences. Not nearly enough for an introduction. If words are all I have, then I am homeless and living under a bridge. I take great pride in the few precious ideas already presented, I search them over and feel them for their soundness. I look up a word in the dictionary. I look up another on Wikipedia. From there, a viral explosion of encyclopedic knowledge, the result of distraction, a fascination with hyperlinks to other articles, and tabbed browsing. God how I love wikipedia and all it's encompassing knowledge.
I decide this is bad way to do things. It's hours since I began. Probably two of them. Still a lot of time to develop relatively little, a lot of time to develop the rest of a relative lot. I pace the halls and discuss how we try to internalize nature and how it leads to an inner struggle. Or maybe it was the best way to execute thread synchronization. People look at me when I talk aloud about art and it's consequences. I end up in my friend's room and do a "I'm thinking about things" dance. First the left. Then the right. Then the left a step behind. The right in a similar fashion. Repeated a couple times, with the head down, arms moving as if I am waxing philisophically. Of course, I am. But I'm not nearly as prolific as Plato or motivated like Thomas Mann. I come to something and realize I need to write it down. Or carry around a tape recorder. I lose it and have to start over again.
It wasn't completely a loss. I wrote down a few concepts on my hands. Now I have to carry them out. Save for a name, a class, an assignment, and a few introductory statements, nothing. But soon I'll have something. I look back over the literature. It's as dense as the book it's written in, chock full of information surrounded by examples, anecdotes, internal citations, political dialogue, administrative statements, bureaucratic language, a sense of academic haughtiness, and topped with sprinkles. A single page is intellectually nutritious as a klondike bar. I could use some ice cream. The warm tea hasn't tempered my hunger. I settle on Corn pops, 'cause hey, I gotta have my Pops. They crackle as I cut through their ersatz popped-corn and sugar-coated surface and marvel at the taste of ... corn in cereal form? I could use some soy milk. I puncture the foil opening of one with their little expandable straw and let it pour onto my Pops like a small trickle of milk, but pressed from the bodies of little green pods and somewhat less environmentally detrimental. These are still things I shouldn't be thinking about.
The creative process has stalled. I take a kleenex and release my congestion. I do it again for good measure and shoot the wadded piece of grossness into the trashcan like I'm shooting hoops. Brick. I have to pick that up eventually. My eyes hurt and the letters are blurry. The computer has stolen my soul and has taken on an overbearing role in my life. It isn't that much bigger than a five-subject notebook, but thrice as hefty. It could scorn me like an overbearing mother and beat me up and steal my lunch money like a school-yard bully. It could steal my job, if it had arms. It's probably also somewhat more handsome. I'm pretty sure my girlfriend would break up with me just to be with it. I'm beginning to resent this thing. I'm beginning, that is to say I'm pretty sure I've already started a long time ago, I'm going crazy. The computer has put me in its chains and shackled me to this desk.
I put my head down on my folded hands and drift off. The music I started playing becomes ironic, with lots of uptempo electronic beeps and blips, and obtuse lyrics to match. I look up from an acute angle, and now I'm three millimeters tall, looking up at the facade of a glowing screen, like I'm a small-town boy living in a large, cosmopolitan city. People look different and talk different and everything is unfamiliarly large. If ideas are like water, then this paper is doomed to shrivel up and become a desert, a barren wilderness of topical development. I'll get through this if it takes me until 12 hours from now when it's due. Oh, and it's Friday. Morning. Early. Past my normal 1 o'clock shut-eye time. I look out the window, and like before, a street, the snow, the towering polygon of a fitness facility, and no one. Like a b-movie of a post-apocalyptic future. Except it's happening now and I'm alone with this silver rectangle with buttons on it. It's my only key to saving the world and I don't want to. Let it burn, or fry, or roast. I'm so hungry. I just want to sleep to dream about filet wrapped with pancetta. I will end up waking up with my comforter in my mouth. I try again. It's blurry. I type. It's incoherent. I'll do this in the morning.
I shut the lid and put my head down. Somehow I wake up in a fetal position. I look out the window and see the people, going to and fro. How do they deal with writer's block?
Evening. The dark window sitting behind me, reveals to me the cold world outside, and among the 12 singly-paned pieces of glass a landscape of students coming to and fro, some inside, some to that octagonal edifice of a workout center, all atop the layers of snow that has impeded man and his herd of vehicles. I sit and contemplate closing the blinds or keeping them open, rather than filling up that empty plain of a Word document save for a name, a class, and an assignment. Paper number 1. Art or German or Computer Science or something like that. Something I care deeply enough about to keep it off until the after-dinner hour, Thursday night, wedged into the end of the week by other empty Word or emacs documents that were miraculously filled with only minutes to spare. I hope for a similar situation. I hope to cut a hole through my head and let those ideas flow out on this glowing monstrosity, or save that, build a machine that I can plug into the USB port and will take care of things for me, a couple concepts or themes at a time. That's years away, and unfortunately, I am in the present, and five minutes have passed. I should be thinking about computer architecture or the effect of Romanticism on German thought, or what to write to video. Whatever it is I need to do. I commence the thought process by walking down the hall to fill up my borrowed Kitchen Gourmet brand water-heater-kettle whatever-it's-called. It's a white cylinder and I wonder how I could describe the water level inside of it as a function of how much it's tilted under the arc of the water coming out of the stainless steel box in front of me. At this angle, the rate at which the water rises is decreasing, but will eventually become asymptotic, until it overflows and I curse a few angry words for pressing a metal button down too long. These are the things I think about. I've been here long enough.
Plugged in, that white cylinder is a chorus of air bubbles nucleated at the bottom of a gray circle that underneath is some sort of coil or ceramic heating element. The circle that the bubbles come out of suggests a coil. I could be wrong. It begins with a low hum, then it becomes an ebullient simmer, and then a roiling, toiling boil. It huffs and puffs and lets out invisible clouds of moisture and wets the air inside this dried out room. With a satisfying click, I rotate the dial to "off." The choir ends their song. I pick it up and empty out the hot water into the stainless steel travel mug I swagged from work, complements of some engineering firm, Johns Manville. Maybe they design water heaters or travel mugs. Or better yet, osmosis machines that you can attach directly to your brain into your USB port. There's always technology not yet marketed out there. I could not be completely crazy. I unwrap a bag of tea with another satisfying rustle of a sound and dip it into it's bath, in and out, until it's dark and soaked with it's briny, earthy goodness. This will keep me going for a while, I hope.
I set the mug down like a gavel on the wooden expanse of a desk, atop which is that aluminum-clad, wonderful technology that I have devoted my college days to sitting at and staring intently into for hours upon hours a day. The plain of a forested plane is scattered with the debris of academic warfare, a few depleted shells of radiant orange post it notes, missiles of pens and penciles, bloodied battlegrounds of syllabi and scribbled notes. Below them were signs from other times, like a note from my girlfriend, taped down and immortalizing the time she noticed I had made her the background of that aluminum laboratory in front of me. Among the wastes stand empty factories or office buildings, a civilization of technological life-enhancers. I can work inside this Bluetooth mouse and avoid having to commute to my computer. I can live inside a cell phone. I can recall my memories in this stack of digital video tapes. And towering above them is the inverted silo of caffeinated, bitter water. It feeds me, sustaining this distorted sense of time and alertness.
And still, the empty word document. I consider taking notes, and resurrect the dead from battle. I steal from the graveyard of deceased papers and desecrate their blank, untrodden side. I write in large letters. I write in small letters, equally unintelligible. It is all to no avail. I draw a bunny, or something resembling a broken cat. I start typing instead. The keys are a pitter-patter of activity for a few seconds. Then they fall into a slumber. Then they awaken with more intensity and die with equal decorum. This repeated pattern of life and death, planting and picking yields a meager crop of words, and together a short bale of sentences. Not nearly enough for an introduction. If words are all I have, then I am homeless and living under a bridge. I take great pride in the few precious ideas already presented, I search them over and feel them for their soundness. I look up a word in the dictionary. I look up another on Wikipedia. From there, a viral explosion of encyclopedic knowledge, the result of distraction, a fascination with hyperlinks to other articles, and tabbed browsing. God how I love wikipedia and all it's encompassing knowledge.
I decide this is bad way to do things. It's hours since I began. Probably two of them. Still a lot of time to develop relatively little, a lot of time to develop the rest of a relative lot. I pace the halls and discuss how we try to internalize nature and how it leads to an inner struggle. Or maybe it was the best way to execute thread synchronization. People look at me when I talk aloud about art and it's consequences. I end up in my friend's room and do a "I'm thinking about things" dance. First the left. Then the right. Then the left a step behind. The right in a similar fashion. Repeated a couple times, with the head down, arms moving as if I am waxing philisophically. Of course, I am. But I'm not nearly as prolific as Plato or motivated like Thomas Mann. I come to something and realize I need to write it down. Or carry around a tape recorder. I lose it and have to start over again.
It wasn't completely a loss. I wrote down a few concepts on my hands. Now I have to carry them out. Save for a name, a class, an assignment, and a few introductory statements, nothing. But soon I'll have something. I look back over the literature. It's as dense as the book it's written in, chock full of information surrounded by examples, anecdotes, internal citations, political dialogue, administrative statements, bureaucratic language, a sense of academic haughtiness, and topped with sprinkles. A single page is intellectually nutritious as a klondike bar. I could use some ice cream. The warm tea hasn't tempered my hunger. I settle on Corn pops, 'cause hey, I gotta have my Pops. They crackle as I cut through their ersatz popped-corn and sugar-coated surface and marvel at the taste of ... corn in cereal form? I could use some soy milk. I puncture the foil opening of one with their little expandable straw and let it pour onto my Pops like a small trickle of milk, but pressed from the bodies of little green pods and somewhat less environmentally detrimental. These are still things I shouldn't be thinking about.
The creative process has stalled. I take a kleenex and release my congestion. I do it again for good measure and shoot the wadded piece of grossness into the trashcan like I'm shooting hoops. Brick. I have to pick that up eventually. My eyes hurt and the letters are blurry. The computer has stolen my soul and has taken on an overbearing role in my life. It isn't that much bigger than a five-subject notebook, but thrice as hefty. It could scorn me like an overbearing mother and beat me up and steal my lunch money like a school-yard bully. It could steal my job, if it had arms. It's probably also somewhat more handsome. I'm pretty sure my girlfriend would break up with me just to be with it. I'm beginning to resent this thing. I'm beginning, that is to say I'm pretty sure I've already started a long time ago, I'm going crazy. The computer has put me in its chains and shackled me to this desk.
I put my head down on my folded hands and drift off. The music I started playing becomes ironic, with lots of uptempo electronic beeps and blips, and obtuse lyrics to match. I look up from an acute angle, and now I'm three millimeters tall, looking up at the facade of a glowing screen, like I'm a small-town boy living in a large, cosmopolitan city. People look different and talk different and everything is unfamiliarly large. If ideas are like water, then this paper is doomed to shrivel up and become a desert, a barren wilderness of topical development. I'll get through this if it takes me until 12 hours from now when it's due. Oh, and it's Friday. Morning. Early. Past my normal 1 o'clock shut-eye time. I look out the window, and like before, a street, the snow, the towering polygon of a fitness facility, and no one. Like a b-movie of a post-apocalyptic future. Except it's happening now and I'm alone with this silver rectangle with buttons on it. It's my only key to saving the world and I don't want to. Let it burn, or fry, or roast. I'm so hungry. I just want to sleep to dream about filet wrapped with pancetta. I will end up waking up with my comforter in my mouth. I try again. It's blurry. I type. It's incoherent. I'll do this in the morning.
I shut the lid and put my head down. Somehow I wake up in a fetal position. I look out the window and see the people, going to and fro. How do they deal with writer's block?
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Aesthetic Part One: Pre-production note and other observations about bad weather.
So my aesthetic writing piece was basically a metaphor for how I felt about my relationship with my girlfriend a few weeks ago. Felt like a good idea, but basically got progressively worse. I had a gut feeling that it wasn't going to last very long at times, and it just kinda crept up on me, killing me slowly by taking whatever sense of warmth and optimism out of me. What I forgot to include was how I eventually turned around, took off my shoes, rubbed my feet while sitting on the sidewalk far behind Assembly Hall, hopped back on the bike and roughed it home. I guess this all reveals a lot about my insecurities. I had the tendency to abuse myself with exercise when things weren't going right since high school, but the difference is now that I'm out of shape, it really does hurt. I sometimes have too many feelings for my safety and well-being.
And then it snowed last Tuesday. I should have thought how it would have been impossible to take principal photography out on the roads of the south farms anyways, but the whiteout and eight inches sealed the deal. So no bike piece unfortunately, or lots of other things. The snow days were bad for me. For one thing, I didn't get a single thing done save maybe a chapter of German lit. Otherwise, like the snowdays of my youth, I played in the snow, bundled up inside, played board games, and then had to unbury some cars out of the parking lot, which led to a major back ache on Thursday. I'm never using the two-foot long emergency folding spade from my trunk ever again. EVER. Unless I need to. Which means next Thursday before I go home. I digress, a lot. What the Snowwednesday took away from me was structured time to sit down and think of a new aesthetic piece or approach to my existing one. I have to do that now.
It was hard enough trying to get that memory on paper in the first place. Mainly because I couldn't think of a memory worth putting on paper and eventually on digital video. Maybe I didn't search hard enough. Yes, that was it. There's this tendency to block out everything that, in my mind, isn't exceptional. And in that regard, I have really high standards. I could always try the luddite approach and try capturing some experience I had during the course of my week. One emotion I could encapsulate is excitement, there's a lot to be excited about. One subject I consciously avoided was the snow. Although convenient, it's too convenient. I figure at least one of my classmates will do something about it, and avoiding this preserved some semblance of originality. Plus I'm loath to put my camera in jeopardy by virtue of cold weather or moisture. Strike that idea from the record.
I'm now sitting in class and having a hard time coming up with ideas. I think I'll just try the original approach but in a different way. I'm too confounded by the fact that I'm choosing a subject matter and a story based on my schedule or technical restraints. And I hate this. I don't want to be restrained in my quest for creative expression and I am, I'm letting myself become that way. It's also hard because in some ways, I want to be the subject and behind the camera. This is an impossibility that I cannot get over. This is my tendency to micromanage. I'm making this too hard. I'm trying this again.
And then it snowed last Tuesday. I should have thought how it would have been impossible to take principal photography out on the roads of the south farms anyways, but the whiteout and eight inches sealed the deal. So no bike piece unfortunately, or lots of other things. The snow days were bad for me. For one thing, I didn't get a single thing done save maybe a chapter of German lit. Otherwise, like the snowdays of my youth, I played in the snow, bundled up inside, played board games, and then had to unbury some cars out of the parking lot, which led to a major back ache on Thursday. I'm never using the two-foot long emergency folding spade from my trunk ever again. EVER. Unless I need to. Which means next Thursday before I go home. I digress, a lot. What the Snowwednesday took away from me was structured time to sit down and think of a new aesthetic piece or approach to my existing one. I have to do that now.
It was hard enough trying to get that memory on paper in the first place. Mainly because I couldn't think of a memory worth putting on paper and eventually on digital video. Maybe I didn't search hard enough. Yes, that was it. There's this tendency to block out everything that, in my mind, isn't exceptional. And in that regard, I have really high standards. I could always try the luddite approach and try capturing some experience I had during the course of my week. One emotion I could encapsulate is excitement, there's a lot to be excited about. One subject I consciously avoided was the snow. Although convenient, it's too convenient. I figure at least one of my classmates will do something about it, and avoiding this preserved some semblance of originality. Plus I'm loath to put my camera in jeopardy by virtue of cold weather or moisture. Strike that idea from the record.
I'm now sitting in class and having a hard time coming up with ideas. I think I'll just try the original approach but in a different way. I'm too confounded by the fact that I'm choosing a subject matter and a story based on my schedule or technical restraints. And I hate this. I don't want to be restrained in my quest for creative expression and I am, I'm letting myself become that way. It's also hard because in some ways, I want to be the subject and behind the camera. This is an impossibility that I cannot get over. This is my tendency to micromanage. I'm making this too hard. I'm trying this again.
Monday, February 12, 2007
Reaction and thoughts on Sans-Soleil
future Memories
Global, woven images.
a Haunting soundscape.
To reduce San-Soleil to a haiku would be trite, but I just did. Forgive me. I didn't get it. And it's been a while. I just read the online text from where we left off in class, but it's little substitution for watching it again, in it's entirety, to get a real feel for it. The first time I saw it, I had to reduce it to a series of images, a narrative of sorts. Actually, to call it a narrative just confuses the issue. It was a documentary - but about what? The association between the images of Africa, Japan, and Iceland is loose at best. Is it some sort of 41st-centurian travelougue? Am I supposed to see things in multiple Vonnegutesque dimensions? I mean what the hell people?
Here's a different approach: it's all about memory and it's recollection. Our 41st centurian is merely leaking images out of his visual cortex onto our video screens and being narrated by Marker to make things interesting. The stream of consciousness approach makes good sense in this case, the recollections come out in blocks, related somehow by time or in this case, place, but are otherwise scattered in their subject. One could pick out various themes, youth, protest, death, war, religion basically a cultural anthropologist's wet dream. The common thread that binds them, though is how they're remembered and recalled, through Marker's lens. We are not supposed to suspend our disbelief at all. We are supposed to know that the woman's face from the beginning of the movie is only visible for 1/24th of a second, owing to shyness or cultural taboo.
From this one can infer that memory is rather impersonal, almost collective in a Jungian sense, the rememberance of something past is put down on record, permanently, rather than a biochemical process and evoked by words or paralinguistic gestures. Memory comes from moving images. Thus, feelings come from moving images. Everything so unique about visual cognition can be simulated by current technology. Mind you, it's completely ersatz in many ways. Its original context is lost. Its exigency is lost. The way the memories were originally assembled is lost. In a way, Marker is pointing us to how he wants to remember things, what to feel while remembering it, and what to tell the grandchildren when you talk about San-Soleil.
This is a potent example of how we are supposed to consider the potential of images as a series of memories. They are meant to tell. They are meant to evoke. Clever showing this before we begin our aesthetic video process... I'll end this by speculating on the meaning of 'san-soleil'. It means 'sunless' in english. That's half the battle. The other half is trying to pick out something from the film. The only part in the narration that refers to 'sunless' is alluding to the Mussorgsky song cycle. I tried to find a part of it on Altavista and got some guy singing operatically. Never mind on that. I'll assume it's full of pathos and longing for glories past, good Russian emotions. I'm guessing the 41st centurian hasn't a conception of emotion, at least in the kind that makes you shoot yourself, prompting him to jog in memory back in time. Thus the title refers to the dissattached view with which Marker tries to assemble his memories. Is he successful in this mission? Perhaps. Or perhaps it's an ironic comment on the fact that cinema cannot be dissattached if it merely an extension of memory.
Global, woven images.
a Haunting soundscape.
To reduce San-Soleil to a haiku would be trite, but I just did. Forgive me. I didn't get it. And it's been a while. I just read the online text from where we left off in class, but it's little substitution for watching it again, in it's entirety, to get a real feel for it. The first time I saw it, I had to reduce it to a series of images, a narrative of sorts. Actually, to call it a narrative just confuses the issue. It was a documentary - but about what? The association between the images of Africa, Japan, and Iceland is loose at best. Is it some sort of 41st-centurian travelougue? Am I supposed to see things in multiple Vonnegutesque dimensions? I mean what the hell people?
Here's a different approach: it's all about memory and it's recollection. Our 41st centurian is merely leaking images out of his visual cortex onto our video screens and being narrated by Marker to make things interesting. The stream of consciousness approach makes good sense in this case, the recollections come out in blocks, related somehow by time or in this case, place, but are otherwise scattered in their subject. One could pick out various themes, youth, protest, death, war, religion basically a cultural anthropologist's wet dream. The common thread that binds them, though is how they're remembered and recalled, through Marker's lens. We are not supposed to suspend our disbelief at all. We are supposed to know that the woman's face from the beginning of the movie is only visible for 1/24th of a second, owing to shyness or cultural taboo.
From this one can infer that memory is rather impersonal, almost collective in a Jungian sense, the rememberance of something past is put down on record, permanently, rather than a biochemical process and evoked by words or paralinguistic gestures. Memory comes from moving images. Thus, feelings come from moving images. Everything so unique about visual cognition can be simulated by current technology. Mind you, it's completely ersatz in many ways. Its original context is lost. Its exigency is lost. The way the memories were originally assembled is lost. In a way, Marker is pointing us to how he wants to remember things, what to feel while remembering it, and what to tell the grandchildren when you talk about San-Soleil.
This is a potent example of how we are supposed to consider the potential of images as a series of memories. They are meant to tell. They are meant to evoke. Clever showing this before we begin our aesthetic video process... I'll end this by speculating on the meaning of 'san-soleil'. It means 'sunless' in english. That's half the battle. The other half is trying to pick out something from the film. The only part in the narration that refers to 'sunless' is alluding to the Mussorgsky song cycle. I tried to find a part of it on Altavista and got some guy singing operatically. Never mind on that. I'll assume it's full of pathos and longing for glories past, good Russian emotions. I'm guessing the 41st centurian hasn't a conception of emotion, at least in the kind that makes you shoot yourself, prompting him to jog in memory back in time. Thus the title refers to the dissattached view with which Marker tries to assemble his memories. Is he successful in this mission? Perhaps. Or perhaps it's an ironic comment on the fact that cinema cannot be dissattached if it merely an extension of memory.
Aesthetic Writing Assignment. An excerpt
The south farms lie on flat, brownish-gray expanses under a speckled January sky, a matte of uneven, wispy whitish clouds, like fresh snow, except trampled upon by a thousand footsteps, now muddled and imperfect. They are divided into squares by strips of dark asphalt that, put in a long line, disappear into the horizon. They meet at crossroads and depart, meeting only again after multiples of miles. I pedaled along one of them one Saturday on a whim, chugging along under clinging layers of lycra and fleece. The wind blows through the vents in my helmet, cooling some spots of my head while leaving other bits of my tussled, untouched hair lukewarm. I extend my sinewy left leg and contract my equally slim right leg in smooth symphonic synchrony causing the series of silvery steel slender tubes beneath me to lurch forward. My bare hands are surrounded in wool and mesh, themselves surrounding the textured wrap of cork that themselves twist around bare black metal that stick out like bull’s horns, ready to strike, impaling the next thing that gets in it’s way. Save for a few automobiles that zoom past the sleepy prairie, there’s not a soul. The desolation reveals a charred stump of a mighty tree that, by virtue of once being the tallest thing around, was struck by lightning and felled in an instant, preserved into an anthill or an organic stalagmite of bark and burned wood. The cold inches towards my feet. In matters of minutes, they bear the brunt of shoes designed for warm weather and for being unwrapped, naked swaths of fake leather and heavy fabric on a platform of studded plastic clipped into a spinning metal contraption. Minutes linger like hours of dancing barefoot in the snow, and I pray for sheaths of warm woven polyester like large socks to cover my feet. I’m hunched over, my chest nearly parallel with the top tube, at an almost right-angle to the invisible line that extends from my immobile center to the rotating, round thing beneath me that, unconnected, could be a torture implement, and could possibly have the same effect, but instead pushes and pulls the pulsating pulley of a chain to another sharp-toothed thing that is tightly secured, unslipping to another round, shrunken Ferris wheel of a thing surrounded in hard, worn, and slightly smooth rubber held taut by trapped tenses of turgid air.
Oh what divine contraption, sent down from the sky to sit beneath my padded posterior. My feet are now numb
...
Oh what divine contraption, sent down from the sky to sit beneath my padded posterior. My feet are now numb
...
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
In-class writing assignment: some sort of dream?
Some sort of dream:
The blue of the day broke upon my eyes like the splash of a stone in a sea under a somber september sky. It languished. I took a step. Another, in a similar fashion. I rose over a hill, mathematical in proportion and symmetry and imperfect in natural texture, a perfect green. My body, it receded towards this expanse and perfectly parallel, put itself there upon. Eyelids close. Head down, foaming at the mouth, the voice of God talks about MIPS and argues about register locations. Head turns, eyes close again, a vacuum. Stillness, silence, slender sillhouttes, simple shapes, formless wonderful exuberant excellent moment in and out of lecture sleeping deprived processes in c plus plus. My eyes contort and fight the light around outside, battling boredom's blight. I gasp a gaping gaffe and go goalwards. Stuttering steps I stride to the sight and fight the forces that fail. Me.
[I should note my inability to remember dreams very well, or at all. I do, however, remember a recurring motif in which I'm running, putting forth a lot of effort and am not making much progress, taking only short strides and feeling powerless and physically confined. That and I fall asleep in lecture and drift in and out of my professor's drone among random images that I have no neuropsychological reason for seeing (It could be short moments of REM sleep, it could not be)]
Some well-described shots:
Medium. Skewed angle. Lit from four sides, irregular intervals. Still camera. Chalk outline on dingy gray concrete. Blood splattered liberally except where outline would suggest a laying figure. Light rain or snow. Wet. Feet move around the edge of the frame, perhaps we see yellow caution tape. Man stoops down partially out of frame, visible photo flash.
A shot that renders the sensation without being literal:
Men in overcoats, taking notes, asking questions. Child and mother hold each other, while gently weeping. Uniformed man guiding crowd, telling some to move along.
The blue of the day broke upon my eyes like the splash of a stone in a sea under a somber september sky. It languished. I took a step. Another, in a similar fashion. I rose over a hill, mathematical in proportion and symmetry and imperfect in natural texture, a perfect green. My body, it receded towards this expanse and perfectly parallel, put itself there upon. Eyelids close. Head down, foaming at the mouth, the voice of God talks about MIPS and argues about register locations. Head turns, eyes close again, a vacuum. Stillness, silence, slender sillhouttes, simple shapes, formless wonderful exuberant excellent moment in and out of lecture sleeping deprived processes in c plus plus. My eyes contort and fight the light around outside, battling boredom's blight. I gasp a gaping gaffe and go goalwards. Stuttering steps I stride to the sight and fight the forces that fail. Me.
[I should note my inability to remember dreams very well, or at all. I do, however, remember a recurring motif in which I'm running, putting forth a lot of effort and am not making much progress, taking only short strides and feeling powerless and physically confined. That and I fall asleep in lecture and drift in and out of my professor's drone among random images that I have no neuropsychological reason for seeing (It could be short moments of REM sleep, it could not be)]
Some well-described shots:
Medium. Skewed angle. Lit from four sides, irregular intervals. Still camera. Chalk outline on dingy gray concrete. Blood splattered liberally except where outline would suggest a laying figure. Light rain or snow. Wet. Feet move around the edge of the frame, perhaps we see yellow caution tape. Man stoops down partially out of frame, visible photo flash.
A shot that renders the sensation without being literal:
Men in overcoats, taking notes, asking questions. Child and mother hold each other, while gently weeping. Uniformed man guiding crowd, telling some to move along.
Monday, February 5, 2007
Motif Part Three: Critique and Concluding Remarks
I had my first critique. Now I'm really an art student. This of course is nominal, my visit to this department is only temporary. There really is no process like this in engineering, sharing each other's work and creating a space where a meaningful dialogue takes place. Plus, there's no creative experssion whatsoever. This is all fascinating to me.
I was encouraged by my peer's comments, and especially glad some pointed out the rougher spots of my work. In particular, I was fairly careless in some of my more staged shots, like the hair dryer or the spoon and bowl. If I could redo any shots, it would be those two, because I believe that thematically they fit within the phrase, but were just not executed with a good deal of forethought. One could say my style is "art by accident," I rely heavily on chance occurances during the shooting process, and if it produces a good image, I'll run away with it. The same does not apply for the editing process, I don't think you can edit without any amount of deliberate planning. And if something doesn't work, it's because you didn't make it work, in a mechanistic way. For example, my repeated images worked in one instance, but not another. One comment was made about the coffee cup and how the repetition didn't work, and I agree with that sentiment. I wasted precious seconds on the same image and had no defensible motive for it's inclusion. Luckily, I percieve that these nuances do not take away from the piece as a whole.
If this was an experiment, it was carried out successfully in terms of variety, pacing, aural qualities, some semblance of narration, etc. In other areas, not so well, but the process is a continual one, and improvement is an upward vector, whatever that means (to which I have yet to inject some meaning).
What I liked about other students' projects was the variety of their approaches, beyond my assembly of images having to do with each other. Some had a certain subtlety that I was unable to achieve. Some were over the top in terms of production values, others were minimalist in approach and had the same effect. Overall I enjoyed watching their projects, as it served to remind me how functionally fixed I really am. What I thought were a million different possibilities is more like a billion or so. I wish I had something more insightful to say at this point about the motifs in general, but it's not over yet. It's a continual process.
Here's what my group members had to say about Circles:
Danny: I really liked your shots. There was some aspects to them that seemed to interfere with the circle motif, but for the most part I felt that they actually added to the film and gave it more character. Your choice of music was good, and it synced up really well with the movie, and it's usually hard to make that happen. I really like your shot out the window of the library. The motion in the background really adds to that one.
Edward: I thought your video was so amazing because of the huge variety of detail you were able to capture from the motif of circles.
I especially thought your video had good transitions, the way you had the shots change in sync with the accents of the song, which gave the film a good flow. What I saw was that you were linking groups of circular objects, such when you had the picture of the no bikes sign, then the bike wheel, and the bike sprocket; the eye close-up to eyehole on the door; the music cover to ipod to record playing, etc. These groupings worked out, my favorite groupings probably involving the shots of the eye, since our eyes are the ultimate circle of perspective, they make the best transition between the different circle groups. My favorite shot that I think many others liked also was the elevator buttons scene, where you perfectly synced the pressing of the buttons with the music gave me a high point in sensation, it was so well done.
One thing that stood out a little was the incorporation of time. In the beginning of the film I really like how you start out with a shot of a window in a dark room with the sun and then to the green clock to paper sun to outside. Then towards the end you have shots of the moon, suggesting a passing day narrative, especially since you end the film at the beginning shot of the high window with sun shining through. Yet this time narrative doesn't necessarily fit in with the groups of shots in between I discussed in the last paragraph, but it's something you don't really notice until after you've watched the whole video. So maybe I would suggest to maybe remove the moon shot maybe to maybe not disrupt the circle groups you have going on. Other than that, this video was definitely one of my favorties. Great job dude.
Will: I think that your footage has a keen freshness, not only in the way it was shot, but also in the juxtaposition of the images. I loved the gear thing hanging on the bulletin board particularly. As I said in class, the repetition of the coffee mug felt a little unnecessary given the extraordinary range of your other images, but that's a really minor quibble. Like Cory, I feel that the brief instances of human presence were intriguing rather than distracting. The only exception was that for some reason the shot of someone pretending to eat distracted me; maybe because it felt artificial whereas your other images had a nice "found art" quality to them. The union of music and image was another strong point; one didn't interfere with the other and they had a balanced cohesion.
In terms of the overall "motif" I felt you accomplished your goal nicely. The suggestion of a progression (the daytime and nighttime shots of the circular window - splendid!) was subtle and enjoyable. The way that you combined things of such a varied sort (symbols dancing with eyes and windows and other objects) was commendable and stimulating.
I was encouraged by my peer's comments, and especially glad some pointed out the rougher spots of my work. In particular, I was fairly careless in some of my more staged shots, like the hair dryer or the spoon and bowl. If I could redo any shots, it would be those two, because I believe that thematically they fit within the phrase, but were just not executed with a good deal of forethought. One could say my style is "art by accident," I rely heavily on chance occurances during the shooting process, and if it produces a good image, I'll run away with it. The same does not apply for the editing process, I don't think you can edit without any amount of deliberate planning. And if something doesn't work, it's because you didn't make it work, in a mechanistic way. For example, my repeated images worked in one instance, but not another. One comment was made about the coffee cup and how the repetition didn't work, and I agree with that sentiment. I wasted precious seconds on the same image and had no defensible motive for it's inclusion. Luckily, I percieve that these nuances do not take away from the piece as a whole.
If this was an experiment, it was carried out successfully in terms of variety, pacing, aural qualities, some semblance of narration, etc. In other areas, not so well, but the process is a continual one, and improvement is an upward vector, whatever that means (to which I have yet to inject some meaning).
What I liked about other students' projects was the variety of their approaches, beyond my assembly of images having to do with each other. Some had a certain subtlety that I was unable to achieve. Some were over the top in terms of production values, others were minimalist in approach and had the same effect. Overall I enjoyed watching their projects, as it served to remind me how functionally fixed I really am. What I thought were a million different possibilities is more like a billion or so. I wish I had something more insightful to say at this point about the motifs in general, but it's not over yet. It's a continual process.
Here's what my group members had to say about Circles:
I especially thought your video had good transitions, the way you had the shots change in sync with the accents of the song, which gave the film a good flow. What I saw was that you were linking groups of circular objects, such when you had the picture of the no bikes sign, then the bike wheel, and the bike sprocket; the eye close-up to eyehole on the door; the music cover to ipod to record playing, etc. These groupings worked out, my favorite groupings probably involving the shots of the eye, since our eyes are the ultimate circle of perspective, they make the best transition between the different circle groups. My favorite shot that I think many others liked also was the elevator buttons scene, where you perfectly synced the pressing of the buttons with the music gave me a high point in sensation, it was so well done.
One thing that stood out a little was the incorporation of time. In the beginning of the film I really like how you start out with a shot of a window in a dark room with the sun and then to the green clock to paper sun to outside. Then towards the end you have shots of the moon, suggesting a passing day narrative, especially since you end the film at the beginning shot of the high window with sun shining through. Yet this time narrative doesn't necessarily fit in with the groups of shots in between I discussed in the last paragraph, but it's something you don't really notice until after you've watched the whole video. So maybe I would suggest to maybe remove the moon shot maybe to maybe not disrupt the circle groups you have going on. Other than that, this video was definitely one of my favorties. Great job dude.
In terms of the overall "motif" I felt you accomplished your goal nicely. The suggestion of a progression (the daytime and nighttime shots of the circular window - splendid!) was subtle and enjoyable. The way that you combined things of such a varied sort (symbols dancing with eyes and windows and other objects) was commendable and stimulating.
Sunday, February 4, 2007
Motif Part Two: Post-production.
I'm skipping over photography, because, like I said in one point two, it's not nearly as essential in the process, like raking leaves to clear a yard. My analogy has failed. It is important, but I'm just going to mention it in here: I took lots of circles. I used a tripod for the 18 or so hours I had it, and took even more circles. The outside ones were particularly difficult because it was maybe zero degrees outside. The inside ones were easy, but it was tough to do close-ups to fit my viewfinder guide circle for small ones. There was no preponderance of planning, other than the few motifs I knew were worth some space on tape.
Importing, I was impressed by uniformity of the circles taken using a tripod and liked the contrast with those not using a tripod. Before trimming clips en masse, I figured out the correct phrase timings. It looked good. I then went ahead trimming clips en masse. I organized them thematically and had some semblance of a narration. Any mention of the nuances of the editing process will just detract from the piece. I’ll mention them here:
And that is all. Movie will be uploaded once Netfiles works properly:
Importing, I was impressed by uniformity of the circles taken using a tripod and liked the contrast with those not using a tripod. Before trimming clips en masse, I figured out the correct phrase timings. It looked good. I then went ahead trimming clips en masse. I organized them thematically and had some semblance of a narration. Any mention of the nuances of the editing process will just detract from the piece. I’ll mention them here:
- Having noticed a thematic thread among my images, I decided I would delineate some sort of meangful narrative. I had thought all along that I wouldn't have wanted just a random assembly of images, but rather something that on a deeper level would invoke some sort of response.
- I started with the worm's eye shot out the exterior window from a skewed angle to begin with. It sort of suggests morning or at least a sense of wonder at the clouds outside. The implication is that it is a circle although that the image is an ellipse from the angle I shot at. Otherwise, when I took the shot, I just knew that it would be a perfect opening shot.
- Next, I juxtaposed more images that suggest morning, or some sort of routine that would prepare someone to facing the day.
- I repeated images, but obviously not in consecutive order. The effect evokes, within each "phrase" of the piece, a sense of repitition. Yes, this is redundant, but my motif is about circles. So, it's just another to invoke circularity.
- Then I selected images that suggest mobility, or transportation. Placed after images of routine, it begins to make sense; after we get ready for something, we have to get there, somehow.
- After this is a human element, a close of my friend's eye. It's the first image that isn't a uniformly sized circle. It was also the first example of how I'm limited by equipment, the field of view on the camera can't do extreme close ups. So I couldn't do my Kubrick homage, unfortunately. Other than that, it suggests individual disuniformity. (I think that' s a word, I'm trying to avoid using cliched descriptions, so I'll use obtuse ones instead.)
- Among that are images suggesting a destination, like work or school or some other place.
- Next are images of art or music. I'm guessing this is a "day in the life of..." an art or music student, or both. Or maybe I just thought the images looked good and worked together as a theme.
- The fifth phrase is unfortunately the last phrase, and I kinda wondered how I had only used about 35 of the 90 or so images already, and realized I couldn't include a lot of them. Such is the fortune of someone who takes a lot of footage.
- The last phrase is unofficially night, or some sort of winding down. The glowing round thing is the moon, and like the eyes, the camera doesn't have great telephoto capabilities. I wanted, however, to include it simply because it was a beautiful full moon taken on a crisp, cold, and clear night. The aluminum can was a Moutain Dew can, so one could say that this is really a day in the life of a student, something we could relate to (also as we will see in the phrase, night almost instantly turns into day, like a sleep deprived student).
- The passage of time is clear in my motif, it is appropriate that the last tempometrically similar image is a clock before it rushes into the final blur of images, framed through the eyes of my final subject. After that, I repeat the opening image before ending, suggesting that the series of images could be repeated again in a similar fashion. If anything, the piece suggests that the formula for existence is, Day, night, repeat.
And that is all. Movie will be uploaded once Netfiles works properly:
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