Category: Cinema

reflection

I’ve been thinking a lot about my participation: how I would grade myself, how I would justify it, how I would present it in class, etc.

In the beginning I said I would:

  1. read the assigned reading and notice current affairs that related to the class
  2. find a passion point
  3. take notes of what I learn in class
  4. practice the art of noticing during the week

However those changed as the weeks went on, and participation started to mean different things like:

  • working with the group on the exquisite corpse project
  • keeping up with blogging
  • being organised with the google doc folders
  • internalising what we’ve been reading about

I am getting stumped.

catalyst camera

“the camera was a catalyst and the director should embrace rather than try to hide its presence because it gets things out of people that they wouldn’t normally ever say in real life. You get extraordinary versions of people, things they don’t normally present to the world, when you point a camera at them.”

“And Errol Morris talks about the same thing. He has this three-minute rule; he says if you let anyone talk to a camera for three minutes just about themselves, uninterrupted, you will discover that everyone is mad.”

– An interview with Anna Broinowski, director of Forbidden Lie$ (2007), Monique Rooney

Big thoughts on tiny things.

Many thoughts from today’s class:

technological determinist – being controlled by technology//what we do is determined by technology. We can choose if it controls us though, but it takes effort? i.e. controlling ourselves from not answering the phone.

Cinema’s definition of “a story”. Having a resolution. La La Land – how it didn’t end in the typical Hollywood way where “boy meets girl, they get together and stay together” they go their own paths and they have successes, and some failures, their lives do not “end” in the movie but they move on, they had that moment in both character’s lives, but it was just “that one time”. Much like how in life we meet different people at a time in our life, this class for example, and we become friends and work together and have shared goals and dreams, but because the semester ends, our relations end. (cinema’s attempt at breaking out of the narrative.) <– is this way of trying to relate/understand things in terms of ‘life’ no good? too general? 

Teleology and death. Is death the great inevitable ending; the specific conclusion for where we end up? Some might argue yes, but do we actually live like death is the end of our story? Do we see every event in our life as one that helps us progress towards our end, that is death? Yikes, what a thought!

zooming out vs zooming in – how far can we go? How deep can we go? How do we come to a stop? Do we even get to decide when we stop? – constraints on number of pages you print, how much time you have to write, how much information is available to you. You can’t have a book that doesn’t have a last page, it cannot not end. The media we put it on is finite, and has to have an end. (what about the internet cloud? – I guess, the amount of terabyte space that it needs?)
What about our brains? The amount that our brains can contain seems to be infinite – or is it constrained by memory? though memory itself is but information recall; the process of bringing it up from the depths of stored knowledge to the “viewing platform”. How do you keep knowledge? how is it entered in? Does it grow over time? Does it need to be fed? Are there compartments, or are they all in a big heap? Is a memory different from knowledge?

talking to myself helps me think

I love how young and fresh the research is in the reading! It’s current and up to date as it uses examples shown in popular TV shows and films of this generation – unlike the film books I’m reading for other classes that are rather ancient in their sources and evidence cited… I got excited because Rushkoff talked about Community. (It’s one of my favourites!) It really helps that I’ve watched the shows he’s bringing up because it helps me understand his argument and the overall concept better.

“Characters must learn how their universes work. Narrativity is replaced by something more like putting together a puzzle by making connections and recognising patterns.” – Douglas Rushkoff

Now I can intelligibly explain why I like Community in the first place. I love the randomness of it. Everyday at Greendale is different and wacky; you can’t predict what the producers are going to come up with next. Unlike in Hollywood films where there are the basic narrative arcs and “main character immunities” that we’ve come to expect.

Characters are well defined, but a few seasons later, the members in the group begin to analyse each other and use their set characteristic traits against them – so much like life! It’s not uncommon that people form impressions and judgements of others and then use what they’ve learnt about them to manipulate or use them.

Perhaps cinema is an enjoyment to us because it simplifies life for us; makes it seem like a narrative and that because we’re the main character, we will turn out okay in the end. Is that why as humans, we inherently want the film to have a neatly tied up ending because we hope that will be so for us? Using the film’s screen time to escape our complex lives to enter a world where we wish we could belong…