OTF Reflection 1
Discussing films with people who are not as passionate about films as I am, the difference between the ways we approach watching and enjoying movies always surprises me. I have always been taken with beautiful looking movies, always audibly oohing and ahhing at fantastic looking shots and that is why I was drawn to On The Frame. Tuesday’s class was a great introduction to the course and it allowed me to really begin to think about what goes into a visually stunning shot. I rarely stop to consider that every second is made up of (usually) twenty-four frames and being introduced to that way of thinking awoke the connection in my mind to paintings and drawings. Dan introduced the film frame as an “individual snapshot of time” and this connects to Susan Sontag’s views on photography as ‘principle devices for experience something.’ I have always valued candid photographs over staged portraits because it captures a more realistic vision of the event, a more accurate look into the past without put upon smiles and upright postures. Sontag describes photos lend a certain importance to an event and I think expanding on this thought to include the emotional weight each photograph is key to understanding a film’s DNA.
This is one of my favourite shots from Mad Max Fury Road.
It is not a grandiose action set piece, which were spectacular in their own right, but this shot stayed with me after I had left the cinema because it tells the story about the world of the film and George Miller’s creative endeavours all in one frame. The barren wasteland and the costuming speak to the harsh environment while the patterns radiating from the wheel shows how a perverse beauty can be found in every inch of this world if you only looked hard enough.
I mention this to portray how I see film frames and photographs at this moment, at the beginning of this studio. These slivers of time can capture an event, but just like how my friends and I can have differing opinions about what makes a great movie, the core and importance of the film frame is the emotional impact it draws from its audience.
References
Miller, George (2015) Mad Max: Fury Road, Warner Bros. Pictures
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