Category Archives: Thoughts

Media 1, Thoughts

Human Rights Arts & Film Festival

Since January I’ve been volunteering on the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival team as Awards Coordinator. It’s been a great experience, working with a very small team with tight deadlines and a lot of hard work required, and since I believe strongly in the ideals of the festival it’s been rewarding on a personal level too.

For months now I’ve been organising and facilitating three jury panels of industry experts to determine the winners of HRAFF’s annual awards: Feature Film, Australian Short and International Short. The panels are made up of representatives from the world of media and human rights, who each bring their own unique experience and knowledge to the table helping to amplify human rights issues through film and art.

Last Friday we presented the Best Australian Short Film award to Darlene Johnson’s Bluey, which is a spirited film about redemption and courage. Darlene was absolutely stoked to receive her award, which was a particularly joyful moment for me.

The festival continues in Melbourne for another week, so I definitely recommend you check it out if you have the time.

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Media 1, Thoughts, Workshops

Don’t read the comments

In my personal opinion comments have a net negative effect on the quality of discourse on the internet. For every wonderfully considered, well written and pleasant comment, there are a thousand hissing piles of disgust and vitriol, from the racist and misogynist to the plain incorrect. I genuinely don’t believe that the potential for constructive, positive comments justifies enabling the internet’s worst tendencies by allowing people to place their comments on the same page as an article.

For publishers to place peoples’ comments at the bottom of an article is to say “your opinion is as valid/worthy as the author’s”, which is now and has always been wrong. Everyone is entitled to hold an opinion, sure, but they’re not necessarily entitled to have their opinion legitimised. Some opinions deserve to be amplified more than others. This is a fine line and opens the door to nebulous accusations of “censorship” and “political correctness gone mad”, but the alternative is to enable racists, sexists and the absolute worst of humanity to promote their terrible opinions to the world unfettered – which is infinitely worse than some casually racist bogan from Ringwood feeling “restrained” from expressing their opinion of Muslims on an article on the Herald Sun website.

As Karl Pilkington would say… comments: get rid of ’em.

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Media 1, Thoughts, Workshops

Trigger warning

An interesting and, I’m ashamed to say, surprising conversation was sparked in our Workshop this week. The concept of the trigger warning was raised and I was shocked that in a group of twenty or so young university students there were very few who defended their existence and use.

I honestly (naively) expected the bulk of my class to fall on the same side as me on this issue, but I turned out to be spectacularly wrong. Most of my classmates seemed to agree that trigger warnings had gone too far, and there were some cries that they somehow curtail the inalienable right to free speech or artistic expression. (Note: we don’t have an inalienable right to free expression in Australia, and there are plenty of forms of speech that we as a society have deemed appropriate to curtail.)

It’s so easy for people who have never experienced any real trauma to complain about people (usually rape and domestic violence survivors) asking not to be exposed to material that could have long-lasting harmful effects. But I think if they actually knew the level of damage involved, most people would change their tune.

I understand that it might be slightly annoying to have to go out of your way to post and read trigger warnings, but does your desire to avoid that slight inconvenience trump a DV survivor’s wish to avoid a severe anxiety attack after randomly being shown a video of a woman being choked into unconsciousness in a university lecture (which we were actually shown in our Lectorial three weeks ago)? Personally, I think no – my right to say what I want is less important than the right of another human being to not randomly suffer an attack of PTSD, no matter how important I think what I have to say is.

I’m sure it was also really annoying for people in the 1960s who felt like they were no longer “free” to openly tell racist or sexist jokes in public – but that right was deemed less important than the right for women and people of colour to not be offended or discriminated against.

It’s important to note, though, that nobody argues that content that could be a potential trigger should be censored, necessarily — just that it should be labelled as such so people can make an informed choice to avoid it. We already have classification advice on films and TV shows, and language warning stickers on albums, and trigger warnings are in many ways the same thing — only driven by our desire to be respectful of others. To me, that’s a good thing.

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Media 1, Thoughts

How to Become Great at Just About Anything

The latest episode of the Freakonomics Radio podcast is called “How to Become Great at Just About Anything“, and it’s all about the concept of concerted practice that we tackled in the first couple of weeks of Media 1. There are some great interviewees including Malcolm Gladwell and psychologist/sociologist Anders Ericsson, who has done some prominent work in the field of expertise and development.

It adds some important context around the concept of the “10,000 hour rule”, including that just practice by itself is not enough – one must also have a number of other advantages too (talent, opportunity, support, etc.). Good things to keep in mind!

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Media 1, Thoughts

Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes

Video

Last night I watched a great little short documentary by Jon Ronson on the archive of boxes Stanley Kubrick left behind after this death. The boxes contain vast amounts of research for his films (both completed films and those that never made it off the ground), threatening crank letters, odd memos from Kubrick to his staff, and much more.

It’s a fascinating insight into the level of minute detail Kubrick obsessed with, which definitely shows through in his films. I think above all a producer/director needs to be concerned with detail.

Media 1, Readings, Thoughts

Narrative and story in a poetic short film with no dialogue

The presence of Michael Dudok de Wit in the 2016 Cannes film festival announcement prompted me to re-watch his 2000 film Father and Daughter, which won an Oscar in 2001 for Best Animated Short Film. You should definitely watch it if you have a spare 10 minutes:

It’s a beautiful film. The amount of story and feeling Dudok de Wit is able to express without dialogue, just through movement, music and sound effects, is really incredible.

It got me thinking about this week’s readings, and I realised that Father and Daughter has all the major elements that a cohesive film should have. There’s a three-act structure, a protagonist and an antagonist, and the success of the film relies on its ability to evoke empathy in its audience (which is does very well, at least in my case).

The protagonist is the daughter, as the whole story is told from her point of view narratively and emotionally. She undergoes the most change/development, as she grows from a little girl to an old woman, and has a conscious desire (for her father to return).

The antagonist is the father. This is interesting because the father is actually barely in the film at all, and he’s not an enemy in the traditional sense, but his character’s desires/behaviour lie in opposition to the daughter.

Act I sets up the characters (father, daughter) and the setting. Depending on how you read the film the inciting incident could be the birth of the daughter, or it could be the start of a war. There is a first-act turning point when the father gets into a boat and rows away, never to return. The film leaves it intentionally ambiguous, but this could be read literally (he abandoned the daughter) or metaphorically (rowing away could be a symbol for death, or for going off to war, or various other potential explanations).

In Act II we watch as the daughter goes through her life, growing older little by little, revisiting the many places she and her father visited on their bikes when she was younger. We see her go through her entire life, wondering about her father and the loss in her life.

Finally, in Act III we see the daughter, now an elderly woman herself, literally follow in her father’s footsteps as she steps out from the beach and finds his abandoned, decaying rowboat. Again, depending on your reading of the film the climax and resolution could actually mean different things, but they’re certainly present at the end of the film.

So it goes to show that even a poetic animated film with no dialogue can be read according to the principles of narrative and story laid out by McKee and Rabiger.

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Media 1, Thoughts

Cannes program highlights

The official line-up for the Cannes Film Festival was announced a few days ago, and as expected it’s a hell of a collection of films.

Every year the Cannes announcement is exciting for two reasons: one, as the world’s most high-profile festival, many filmmakers premiere their work at Cannes and it’s fun to get a look at what some of my favourite directors are up to; and two, the Melbourne International Film Festival draws a lot of its program directly from Cannes, so in some ways it’s a very early MIFF pre-announcement.

I’ve been to MIFF every year since around 2009 (seeing between 30 and 50 films across the three weeks of the festival), and I plan to continue that for as long as I live in Melbourne, so these are (hopefully) some of the films I’ll be watching in August:

  • It’s Only the End of the World (Xavier Dolan, Canada) – Dolan is a 27-year-old Canadian director who can only be described as a wunderkind. He’s made six films prior to this (the first when he was just 20), and at least two of them are modern masterpieces. It’s Only the End of the World sees him working with two of my favourite French actors, Marion Cotillard and Vincent Cassel.
  • The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook, South Korea) – Park’s first feature film since he made the jump to Hollywood with Stoker (2013). He returned to his home country to make this period film set in South Korea and Japan of the 1930s, which seems like it might be a little out of his usual wheelhouse.
  • After the Storm (Hirokazu Koreeda, Japan) – I’ve been on a huge Koreeda kick for the past few weeks. He makes amazing small-scale family dramas that aren’t flashy on the surface, but underneath are just endless caves of emotion and humanity. They don’t call him the reincarnation of Ozu for nothing.
  • Baccalaureat (Cristian Mungiu, Romania) – Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is probably in my top 20 films of the 21st century so far, and his follow up Beyond the Hills is also incredible. The only synopsis I’ve found for Baccalaureat so far is quite vague (“a family drama about parenting set in a small Romanian town where everybody knows everybody”), but the beauty of Mungiu’s films are that they’re not usually about what you think they’re about.
  • The Red Turtle (Michael Dudok de Wit, Netherlands) – Dudok de Wit won an Oscar in 2001 for his short film Father and Daughter, in my opinion one of the most soulful and beautiful animated shorts of all time. The Red Turtle is his first feature film, a dialogue-free story about a man trying to escape a desert island. If that doesn’t sound like it could sustain a feature-length film’s running time, you haven’t seen what Dudok de Wit can do without dialogue.

Those are my most anticipated picks – if these five films make it to MIFF in August I’ll be a very happy camper.

 

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Media 1, Thoughts, Workshops

Life casting

In our Workshop this week the subject of David Boltanski came up; specifically, the agreement he made with David Walsh and Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art to broadcast his entire life into the gallery until his death.

It’s an amazing story, and has just made it even more clear to me that I need to find my way to MONA sooner rather than later, but it also reminded me of a weird relic of 90s culture that has always fascinated me: life casting.

Back before people streamed their every thought to YouTube, back even before reliable internet video really existed at all, there was a small, strange subculture of people who recorded every detail of their lives and placed it online for the world to see. The most prominent practitioner of life casting was JenniCam (Jennifer Ringley), an American who began broadcasting her life in 1996, at the age of 19, by placing cameras throughout her college dorm room. She continued the practice for almost a decade.

The compulsion to live your entire life in public is something I just cannot understand, no matter how much I try. I didn’t even appear in my own “creative self-portrait” video for Project Brief 2, that’s how little I want to be on camera. But there are others who are so secure and comfortable with themselves and what they’re doing that they give strangers unmediated, unrestricted access to it via internet video. It’s crazy to me, but it’ll probably continue to grow and become normalised over the next decade or so and I’ll be even less in the mainstream.

If you’re interested in the topic, JenniCam and Jennifer Ringley was the subject of an episode of the Reply All podcast – it’s a great episode and definitely recommended.

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Media 1, Readings, Thoughts

Everything is a text

For certain types of media, textual analysis seems quite natural and obvious. Attempting to find meaning in visual art, cinema, music, television, etc. (where there is an author and they are trying to elicit some kind of meaningful response from an audience) is a relatively normal thing to do and is generally an inherent part of understanding that piece of media.

But I’ve begun to realise that almost any form of communication can be read as a text. Building on our exercise in Week 1 in which we surveyed the visible media at the State Library, practically every part of our environment can be analysed in this way, including things as small and seemingly insignificant as directional and traffic signage.

Why is a stop sign red, and why is it octagonal? What meanings are connoted by these aesthetic properties? Why do the directional signs at Emporium use a sans serif typeface and monochrome colour scheme? Answering these questions can explain how society functions on a deeper level. Even an entire city as a whole could be analysed in this methodical way — what are the semiotic signs and codes that can be identified within it, and what part do they play in forming meaning?

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Media 1, Readings, Thoughts

Do you see what I see?

I picked up on an interesting point from this week’s reading Beginner’s Guide to Textual Analysis, that depending on the culture to which the interpreter of a text belongs, a text can mean very, very different things. It reminded me of a fascinating BBC Horizon programme I watched online about five years ago, in which researchers performed experiments and found that people from the Himba tribe in Namibia could not identify the blue square in the right half of this diagram:

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The researchers discovered that Himba, who culturally and linguistically treat blue and green as the same colour (with just one umbrella word that describes both), but have hundreds of words to describe individual shades of green, actually see the blue square as being visually indistinguishable from the green. And the opposite was also true – Himba were able to positively identify two different shades of green in the left half of the diagram that, to westerners, were seen as a single hue (spoiler: it’s the same position as the blue square).

Unfortunately the documentary I saw is no longer available online, but the next best thing is the xkcd colo(u)r survey, in which web comic artist and former NASA engineer Randall Monroe surveyed over 200,000 people and asked them to name colours. The differences in results from men and women is really interesting – although it must be remembered that the data set for this particular study is incredibly small and skewed (not just to people of the western world, but specifically to people who read xkcd) – and backs up the idea that what I see may not match what you see.

The results of both these studies prove that even something as seemingly universal as the interpretation of colour can vary widely between cultures. The differences would get wider and wider as you move further up into high-level cultural differences – making it a wonder we’re able to function as a global society with common thoughts and interpretations at all.

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