Sunday, February 21, 2010
Addendum to "3rd Post"-Post
I forgot to mention that Naomi Uman's "Removed" also exemplified how one can use formal technique to make an actual point. She recycled pornography, and bleached out the images of women.
3rd post
Seeing the photogram/bilayered portion of our class film caused me to ruminate on the line that is often drawn between craft and content. I do not really think it exists. We may be trained, culturally, to read films within the parameters of a specific vernacular, but humans have been engaging similar themes for millenia. The poignance of a work is not so much rooted in the evocation of these unanswerable, perrennially re-treadable themes, but in their presentation. Craft renders content more or less accessible, striking; our vernaculars revolve around content, rather than catalyzing its evolution.
As was pointed out to me regarding my collage, an interesting idea in a work only goes so far without proper presentation. Which is why I dug that photogram/bilayered portion of our class film... the technique used formally pointed to buried qualities in our found footage.
As was pointed out to me regarding my collage, an interesting idea in a work only goes so far without proper presentation. Which is why I dug that photogram/bilayered portion of our class film... the technique used formally pointed to buried qualities in our found footage.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
My Collage Piece
My sense of selfhood has been very much impacted by the sort of view that I am in motion between birth and death-- experience enveloped by non-experience-- amidst static external existence that suspends me momentarily. I think this sort of view is rooted even in the language I utter. Take, for example, a noun that members of this society would only subscribe agency to, maybe, poetically... "night." I may "verb" through or into or against or before or after the night. Any preposition could make sense in this context, except "with." If I were to say, "I move with the night," I would be understood as temporarilly placing myself in tandem to it, not progressing together with it; this same linguistic phenomenon applies, I think, to all nouns that we do not consider to possess a human-like monadic agency. This is rooted in binary internal-ego/external-corpotemporal ontological theory, which I posted about a week or so ago (on our "Recycled Images" class blog, I think).
A large part of film's allure, for me, is that I percieve the projected image within temporal parameters; I actually progress with the object(s) informing my experience. This sensation is amplified when a film departs from its template 24 fps "real time" mode. An equivalent, but less prevalent, amplification of this sensation results from manual collage, because physical objects are extracted from "out there" and affixed to film, running the projection cycle along with viewers.
Of course, the irony here is that the cinematic experience, as professor Liotta enjoys discussing, is an illusion possible thanks to persistance of vision. This cinematic experience is particularly explicit artifice, simulating experience with extant artifice; to whatever extent "reality" itself is artificial, our experience watching a film is no more or less so. I drift about a simulacral scape (as mentioned above, a lot of this refers to previous class-blog post(s) I made).
So, film condenses time and matter at a rate fixed with the time a viewer spends engaging it, thus deconstructing boundaries between internal identity and external existance. Yet, this experience is possible only through a phenomenon exploiting empirical functions engrained in humans, thus reinforcing the void between perception and existence. I've based my collage film on this irony.
Media Journalism is a product to be sold to a populace. Archetypal stories-- a fight between simple good and evil, etc.-- sell well. Much as collage films feel as though they are a link between perception and reality, media journalism adorns itself in the trappings of objective representation. I've taken prepositions and articles, and torn them straight out of newspapers, so that that only remnants of "solid" words beckon from the periphery of each piece of paper. In doing so, it became obvious that these empty conjoiners compose the bulk of the space a typical article takes up. I've arranged these words throughout the harsh white space of the frame, which stands in-- a pan-color vacuum-- for distinct words. My decision to allow plenty of space was also a great way to set a frame-rhythm to my piece.
The result is a frenetic simulacrum that presents disembodied simulacri.
A large part of film's allure, for me, is that I percieve the projected image within temporal parameters; I actually progress with the object(s) informing my experience. This sensation is amplified when a film departs from its template 24 fps "real time" mode. An equivalent, but less prevalent, amplification of this sensation results from manual collage, because physical objects are extracted from "out there" and affixed to film, running the projection cycle along with viewers.
Of course, the irony here is that the cinematic experience, as professor Liotta enjoys discussing, is an illusion possible thanks to persistance of vision. This cinematic experience is particularly explicit artifice, simulating experience with extant artifice; to whatever extent "reality" itself is artificial, our experience watching a film is no more or less so. I drift about a simulacral scape (as mentioned above, a lot of this refers to previous class-blog post(s) I made).
So, film condenses time and matter at a rate fixed with the time a viewer spends engaging it, thus deconstructing boundaries between internal identity and external existance. Yet, this experience is possible only through a phenomenon exploiting empirical functions engrained in humans, thus reinforcing the void between perception and existence. I've based my collage film on this irony.
Media Journalism is a product to be sold to a populace. Archetypal stories-- a fight between simple good and evil, etc.-- sell well. Much as collage films feel as though they are a link between perception and reality, media journalism adorns itself in the trappings of objective representation. I've taken prepositions and articles, and torn them straight out of newspapers, so that that only remnants of "solid" words beckon from the periphery of each piece of paper. In doing so, it became obvious that these empty conjoiners compose the bulk of the space a typical article takes up. I've arranged these words throughout the harsh white space of the frame, which stands in-- a pan-color vacuum-- for distinct words. My decision to allow plenty of space was also a great way to set a frame-rhythm to my piece.
The result is a frenetic simulacrum that presents disembodied simulacri.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
On" Cameraless" Techniques
When the camera is removed from the process of making a film, a filmmaker has the potential to channel inspiration more immediately. A camera-shot film requires at least two stages: shooting and editing. Even if one were simply to pick up a camera, shoot "in the moment" and develop this exact strip of film, the apparatus of the camera itself constitutes a sort of divide between creator and creation.
The first two films I made were more analogous to automatic writing I might do than to premeditated, edited writing; I loved the process of making these. My next project, a collage film, is more structured; it sort of feels too rigid right now. But thinking back to the films we have viewed in class, it seems possible to project spontaneity with one's methodology.
"Linear Dreams"-- the most strikingly psychedelic piece I think I've ever seen, by the way-- was obviously a labor-intensive film to make, to the point that its creator could not have been automatic scratching/painting. Yet, something in how its frame-by-frame and soundtrack rhythms juxtaposed against its imagery lent it almost a sentient quality.
The half-hour's worth of found footage collage that we watched on Thursday last week was, in a word, hypnotic. Although this piece was tightly structured, I think it was, again, its dynamic between frame rhythm and actual frame content that made it so engaging.
When I produce work that I feel I've overcomposed, I tend to feel like it's lost its nuance, an intuitive "flow."
I know that visual rhythm on film is ultimately so many fps, so our perception of frame rhythm is linked directly to each image each on frame. But in distinguishing between frame rhythm and frame imagery I am distinguishing between what I feel are two distinct and contrapuntal sorts of patterns at play in the succession of images. The former functions more systematically; the latter more contextually... kind of like the difference between the ink words are printed with, and the words this ink forms.
Both of these works seemed like they were structured cohesively, but with room for contrast. For some reason, "rhythm," which I've not always given all that much consideration to when I view films, seemed to provide for cohesion and contrast.
... I guess I've got some experimenting to do.
When the camera is removed from the process of making a film, a filmmaker has the potential to channel inspiration more immediately. A camera-shot film requires at least two stages: shooting and editing. Even if one were simply to pick up a camera, shoot "in the moment" and develop this exact strip of film, the apparatus of the camera itself constitutes a sort of divide between creator and creation.
The first two films I made were more analogous to automatic writing I might do than to premeditated, edited writing; I loved the process of making these. My next project, a collage film, is more structured; it sort of feels too rigid right now. But thinking back to the films we have viewed in class, it seems possible to project spontaneity with one's methodology.
"Linear Dreams"-- the most strikingly psychedelic piece I think I've ever seen, by the way-- was obviously a labor-intensive film to make, to the point that its creator could not have been automatic scratching/painting. Yet, something in how its frame-by-frame and soundtrack rhythms juxtaposed against its imagery lent it almost a sentient quality.
The half-hour's worth of found footage collage that we watched on Thursday last week was, in a word, hypnotic. Although this piece was tightly structured, I think it was, again, its dynamic between frame rhythm and actual frame content that made it so engaging.
When I produce work that I feel I've overcomposed, I tend to feel like it's lost its nuance, an intuitive "flow."
I know that visual rhythm on film is ultimately so many fps, so our perception of frame rhythm is linked directly to each image each on frame. But in distinguishing between frame rhythm and frame imagery I am distinguishing between what I feel are two distinct and contrapuntal sorts of patterns at play in the succession of images. The former functions more systematically; the latter more contextually... kind of like the difference between the ink words are printed with, and the words this ink forms.
Both of these works seemed like they were structured cohesively, but with room for contrast. For some reason, "rhythm," which I've not always given all that much consideration to when I view films, seemed to provide for cohesion and contrast.
... I guess I've got some experimenting to do.
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