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.
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Probably all art is a link between perception and reality, and the myriad ways of attempting to communicate just what that is for one (subjectivity).
ReplyDeleteYour post is full of ideas for films! YOu begin with the bookends of life and death , with you in motion = the books themselves. That is an image, and a rhythm.
Binary is also a code, it's rhythm the two-step.
I read with interest your linguistic comparisons and maintain that your complexity of thought around this as a subject for a film (filmstrip=noun, projected film=verb) needs development, so as to bring your craft/expression in the film medium with all its constraints into a more equal relationship to your wordsmithing. Don't collapse all your ideas into one gesture. Slow down, and take one idea at a time and manifest them in turn. That way the fruit ripens, and we eat with you in time and motion.