Comment

So I figured I would just comment here, as I couldn’t locate a comment button on the tumblr sites. I’m just commenting on Phil’s post: ‘Three things I can learn from Samson and Delilah’.

On the first point, great idea, the only pitfall could be if the actors end up making cursory, impatient movements, sounds, gestures, without motivation. Feeling the need to act ‘normal’, they might externalize too much, be too self aware (and hence produce ‘normal’ gestures). I’m thinking the vaccine for this might be if they know their character well enough that they may internalize as much as externalize. Remember, the audience is two inches away from their face.

With your film I would love to see this used to full effect in the social gathering scenes. To avoid having dialogue compete with high volume music (too much, some competition is interesting too), you could really go to town with body language. It could be very unique, the calculated glance, the studied gesture.

The issue of having things just ‘be there’ is a tough one, because, by showing it, I guess you are privileging it. If you are trying to avoid overtly didactic sequences, consider how Yoko interacts with her coworkers, and how yo might need to avoid juxtaposing her actions / attitudes to her coworker’s, or it could come off as a simple comparison. Just because no one talks about it, it doesn’t mean that it won’t be heavy handed. But it sounds like you already know what you are doing. Good luck.

Tableau Vivant

Looking for references to the aesthetic I am trying to achieve, I came across the Tableau Vivant. As Living Pictures, they consist of actors holding poses (on a stage). While they used to be used in erotic theatre, you can often find this concept reused by visual artists recreating paintings or photographs, and then re-photographing them. I’m primarily interested in how you might be able to integrate this aesthetic seamlessly into a traditional narrative film, how you might be able to jump into a Tableau Vivant for a single shot or sequence.

In Sans Soleil, Chris Marker perhaps uses a variant of this technique, freezing the action on particular frames, for instance to catch the moment when a girl glances into the camera. Also we saw in Historie Du Cinema, Godard’s video aesthetic, stepping through frames, recalls this. What originally led me to this practice was Kabuki Tableau, where at moments of importance in a play, everyone freezes, to highlight the importance of that moment, to privilege it. What Godard and Marker do recall this aesthetic, but perhaps I’m looking for a more complex way of doing this that goes beyond the notion of seeing the fleeting before another frame overwhelms it.

Barthes writes:

“Do I add to the images in movies? I don’t think so; I don’t have time: in front of the screen, I am not free to shut my eyes; otherwise, opening them again, I would not discover the same image; I am constrained to a continuous voracity; a host of other qualities, but not pensiveness”.

Perhaps Marker and Godard are doing this, transforming a frame into a photograph, leaving time for this ‘pensiveness’.

Gilberto Perez, in a book entitled: ‘The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium’, writes:

“A painting is the opposite of a narrative: it is all there at once. It may contain a story … but the story is all there at once. Narrative makes life into a sequence, painting makes life into simultaneity”.

What does this mean for photography? What about Tableau Vivant in cinema? According to Perez, perhaps I have been using the word ‘narrative’ in the wrong way. He goes on:

“A photograph is not a sequence but it is a fragment of a potential sequence; it invites being continued, continued by a caption, as happens with news photographs, or continued by other photographs, as happens in the movies, twenty four times a second”.

Is it possible to represent a ‘sequence’ in a single photograph? Or have I just been tied up in wordplay and mixed definitions? Perhaps a narrative cannot be contained in a single frame, but a visual narrative can.

One last thing I am interested in is extending the notion of the punctum to cinema. While Barthes seems to argue that it is a unique phenomenon to photography, I am certain I have read it used to describe affect in an article by Anne Rutherford (I think). If the photographer cannot knowingly capture a punctum (as it will be different for everyone, and non-existent for others), can we use this term to talk about cinema, where we use scenes, sequences, characters, and mise en scene in an attempt to create affect in the viewer, where we try to wound the viewer at key moments, at the points where a Kabuki performance might freeze? Furthermore, when I construct a single frame narrative, is it possible to construct anything other than studium? Does the narrative itself, no matter how affective it is, fall under this category. I realize that Barthes writes only for photography, so perhaps in cinema we can only reach toward a vauge notion of punctum, and in the attempt, unknowingly stumble upon some kind of cinematic punctum.

Saint Exupéry wrote:

“When a woman seems to me beautiful, I have no words to say so. I see her smile, and that is all. Intellectuals take her face apart and explain it bit by bit. They do not see that smile.”

Dürer – Narrative – Polyhedra

I have been examining some classic artworks, looking at how meaning is constructed within them, specifically narrative meaning. One of these is Albrecht Dürer.

While I am more partial to his works dealing with biblical themes, the engraving Melecholia I provides an interesting insight into the connections between symbolism and narrative.

It seems much speculation surrounds this engraving, all to do with ideas of ‘decoding’ the symbolic meaning in the artwork. Upon first viewing, I am always reminded of First World War propaganda, everything sketched (or etched, rather) with precision, the floating title reminiscent of cartoons where Liberty, for instance, is labeled, usually aiming for instant cognition. However Dürer’s work is dense and impenetrable; despite being littered with symbolic objects, as a whole no ‘cohesive meaning’ can be gleaned from the picture.

On the other hand, if viewed as a ‘spiritual self portrait’, I find that all this cryptography becomes rather futile, as each object is a completely subjective indicator of a meaning, and response to the depicted object. That being said, though, although I may not know what exactly the Comet or the Compass are indicative of, can I be affected by the image still? I would like to think so.

It brings to mind a chapter of Leo Braudy’s book: ‘The World in a Frame’, that I have been reading lately, and which will likely be a key reference for my thesis. The chapter is entitled ‘The Shaping Eye and the Recalcitrant Object’:

“the atmosphere of films infuses significance into everything they contain, not necessarily high-sounding, specifiable, even symbolic signifigance, but significance as an indication of something more, an invitation to go beyond the face of things, to create a narrative in which meaning often impends, frequently coalesces and solidifies, but just as often may vanish”

The reason I bring this up is to consider how we can approach the idea of symbolic objects in film. Dürer’s work is littered with what I would see as overt codes of a sort; even if they are personal and perhaps are opaque in their meaning even to Dürer (such as the Polyhedron). Each object represents something, what Braudy would call ‘symbolic significance’. Perhaps the following is too simple a distinction to make, but I will attempt to anyway. Does the film image lie on the other side of this symbolic order? If I place a polyhedron in the background of a frame, do I use this in a symbolic manner, or a something more manner? Specifically, I am thinking of techniques like lighting, and devices like repetition. As I said, it is never so simple, the filmmaker uses a variety of both ‘sides’ when filling the frame, however I find it useful to consider the process of construction in this manner.

However, to return to my point, does Melancholia I contain a narrative in the sense that another of Dürer’s works might (for instance Angel with the Key to the Bottomless Pit)?

Probably. Except where a painting may reference an external narrative (for instance Biblical or poetic) that is known to many, perhaps Melancholia I references a more subjective external narrative that can still be intriguing and powerful without being transparent.

I guess I’m not 100% sure what I am trying to say, perhaps I’m just exploring ways of constructing the image and approaches to using objects. In the same chapter, Braudy writes that in cinema objects are not necessarily used to create a real world, but a “believable, plausible, compelling world”.

Vintage Spirit Photographs

A flickr photogroup which has (some) spirit photographs and other images from that era or others with a similar aesthetic or subject matter.

Vintage Spirit Photography

Blur of the Otherwordly

Came across an intriguing exhibition that deals with some of the ideas that I ‘m thinking of exploring in my thesis. Even the title encompasses my research areas:

Blur of the Otherworldly:
Contemporary Art, Technology and the Paranormal

Except I will hopefully be focusing on cinema or perhaps media instead of just contemporary art, i think.

“featuring twenty five contemporary artists whose work employs modern communication technologies (photography, film, video, computers, radio, internet, and digital media) to explore culturally inbred questions / superstitions concerning parallel worlds to our own”

— I’m considering exploring other technologies, including automata and edison’s phonograph, as well as motion sensors and thermometers (old technology, and modern, ‘detourned’ technology)

“Whether it is conspiracy theories of alien invasion or age-old tales of haunted houses, believers and skeptics alike have employed technology to prove or debunk stories of these visitations. We desire otherworldly experiences yet we want proof … By definition, having proof means that otherworldly experiences are brought into the concrete world of clarity and legibility. But when this happens they are in danger of losing their mystery and power to make us wonder.”

— interesting to consider, earlier I was looking at the masses of videos on youtube debunking Uri Geller, when all I wanted to see was one of him successfully performing his feats. Has the demand for empiricism always been this strong?

Though it seems the highlight of the event would have had to have been Ted Serios’ ‘thoughtographs’. These seem to differ from the rest of the exhibition in that they are not art exploring the paranormal, they come from the other side, an artifact of the paranormal, if you will. They are polaroids, but the aesthetic is outstanding.

Photography and Death

Found a rather interesting post to do with still photography, movement, and death. Rather flamboyant and subjective, but looks to have a few leads worth chasing up:

Bureau of Ideas – Still Photography?

“Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there: the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre.”

“Coming to photography through ‘cinema’, I was struck by the possibility that the term ’still’ may not have been used in front of the term ‘photography’ until the advent of cinema: ‘moving photography’.”

“I would add: a sign posted outside Aumont’s advertised the wonder produced by the Lumière cinématograph as Living Photography: meaning photography, i.e. still photography, was not only not moving but not living!”

“Here, I can only agree with the major theorists of photography who associate the photograph with death. For Walter Benjamin, ‘the camera der Apparat imparts to the instant an as it were posthumous shock’; André Bazin has his notion of the mummy complex, death mask, Holy Shroud of Turin; Roland Barthes declares ‘death is the eidos of the photograph’; Jean Baudrillard concurs with Barthes, saying, ‘This death or disappearance, which in the heroic age was the virtual death of the object, is always present, according to Barthes, at the anthropological heart of the image. The ‘punctum’ [is] that figure of nothingness, absence and unreality ‘at the heart of the image which lends it its magic and its power’ ; Eduardo Cadava asserts, ‘Photography is a mode of bereavement. It speaks to us of mortification’, etc.”

Mortification

My supervisor pointed out the work of the artist Omer Fast as being potentially relevant to my research, and once I looked him up, I must admit his work has some of the more interesting examples of video art I have seen in a long time.

The Casting – Omer Fast

Primarily I am interested in his 2007 four channel video work: The Casting. Earlier on this semester I was talking about producing still photographs shot with video (or film), to emphasize the idea of the pose, and the imposed stillness of the actors as they each convey an emotion, in the way that photographed subjects who ‘freeze’ seek to convey something, albeit subconsciously for many I would argue, in the moment of exposure.

In Camera Lucida Roland Barthes describes this as a process of ‘mortification’. In the moment of the pose, the subject attempts to seize and represent their image, their identity, to coincide with the way they conceive or want to conceive their ‘self image’.

So it looks like all my conceptual concerns, those of posing, of reality in the image, and of my aesthetic concerns, of still/moving photography, of narrative photographs, may have been prefigured by these two sources.

Omer Fast’s work features two sides. From any side one can hear a voiceover, a story being told in an interview. From one side two screens show this story realized and depicted in highly stylized, posed moving-photographs (cinema-photographs). The other side reveals that this story has been highly chopped and selected from a series of interviews, drawing into question ideas of media, reality, and reliability.

But what I find most fascinating about The Casting is just how engaging it is on a cinematic and a narrative level. Essentially drawing on the age old premise of the cut up, this is one of the first works I have seen to use it in such a subtle way. From what I have heard, many people who saw the actual exhibition failed to realize there was a second side to the works (of the interview, the ‘truth’) on the reverse side of the projections.

I find it to be an interesting methodology to create narrative, taking an individuals life experience and rearranging it until it becomes legible, until it works as a story. And the casual manner of its delivery is believable, so much so that once the trick is revealed , you can’t help but wonder where all the fragments of story come from in the interviewee’s experiences, how they really fit together in ‘reality’.

My next step is to now reconsider how I will produce my creative practice component this semester. The Casting offers another way to approach the photographic story, and perhaps a model, or a proof of concept, already undertaken. Also I will hopefully look into Barthes more, and Sontag, and Kitler (the three heavyweights of photographic theory?). And I didn’t even get around to talking about the punctum.

Video Games as Art

Following on from our in class discussion on video games and cinema, I thought I’d share this. Jason Rohrer makes these lo-fi games that aim to be artful. There’s also a fantastic bit about Roger Ebert and his low opinions of video games.

If you are at all interested, I’d recommend playing the game Passage on his web site before you read the esquire article, they kind of lose their magic if you know what will happen, or if they are explained.

Jason Rohrer’s Site

The Future of Video Game Design – Esquire Magazine

In the context of my own work, I think it’s interesting to think about this article in relation to cinema, and why it is an artform, and is just an admirable way to approach one’s work, filled with expressions of anxieties, of thoughts, of musings. Some of these games are just experiments, thoughts about life condensed into pixels. They are like short poems. Perhaps soon we will see a epic piece of video game prose. Perhaps we already have.

Takashi Miike

Recently I have been trying to get my hands on as much material from Takashi Miike as possible. His films vary greatly, but he uses the language of cinema very well. Here’s the two latest I have come across:

Audition

Unnerving film, but has some beautiful moments and is told so proficiently. One of the most memorable techniques used is a denial of vision, whereby if a character experienced an emotional revelation, for instance, he wouldn’t reveal their face until that scene was over. A simple technique but very powerful. Also he uses stillness well, this is a very slow film at times, and the way he frames the spaces people live in is very realistic.

MPD Psycho

Very flawed Japanese television show from Takashi Miike. Nevertheless it has brilliant moments. The style of camerawork is a times very unusual, occasionally making full use of hand held cameras, in sequences where the camera starts upside down and pointing at the ceiling, for example. The special effects and soundtrack are awful, but it makes up for it with a dense storyline and some great narrative ideas. The best scene is probably a psychedelic mass murder in a school church.

Chung on Aeon Flux

Excerpts from an MTV Movies feature on Aeon Flux, but I’m certain Chung is only talking about the animated series.

Aeon Flux

“Refusing to pigeonhole his creation as action or sci-fi, thriller or drama, Chung insists that he “never understood why you couldn’t have a James Bond movie that dealt with psychology and metaphysics. My description of my own agenda [for the 'Aeon Flux' television show] was ‘James Bond directed by Ingmar Bergman.’”

“It’s a universal tendency in films to be more about sex and violence than the real world is,” he argues. Asked if he thinks “Aeon Flux,” the TV show, was more sexually charged than most people’s personal lives, he readily admits that he just doesn’t know.

“But I would pose the opposite question,” he adds. “Why are so many characters that you see on TV so desexualized? A lot of them seem to be completely asexual — especially animated characters — and it implies that those characters are normal. The characters in ‘Aeon Flux’ are normal people who have normal sex lives and appetites”

“The reason I created the show,” he continues, “is because it’s the show I wanted to see myself. That may seem obvious, but it’s actually not the most common attitude among people who work in the movie industry. Many people work on stuff that they have no interest in seeing themselves.”"