Molotov Man

The article on the Molotov Man was interesting. I had never thought about the dangers of pulling things from it's context, and reappropriating them somewhere else. But, likewise, even the person photographing is taking someone else's life moment and putting it out into the world for them. The photographer was concerned about the value of the photograph and it's cultural meaning being lost, but she took it and put it out there. The artist did nothing wrong. Sure, she might have been right to say that the meaning of the Molotov Man was lost in our culture (as a Pepsi Product, an art show, a cool Icon or desktop graphic), but she isn't seeing the big picture. By recontextualizing these images, artists are able to reveal things that might otherwise never have been seen. They create new messages from the images they use. The photographer was worried about the loss of the struggle, of the Molotov Man's struggle, but at the same time, by looking at how the image is brought into our culture, it says just as much about who WE are and who the MOLOTOV MAN was at the same time. It's important to know where the image originated from to understand it, but you also need to realize why and how we are using it as a society to understand it's true significance.

Chion: Sound bites...

I agree with Chion on the importance of sound in film. It has dangers and advantages to what it can add to cinema. The moment people could capture still photographs, they wanted them to be able to move, so why not be able to hear what is going on in them? Soundtracks, FXs, Dialogue etc. are required to be in our mainstream films. We need the roar of a monster. Gunshots that lead to explosions, and so on. But sound, while it adds a great deal to what the filmmakers intended a scene to be like, can also dominate the image. Just like Sergei Eisenstein's experiments with picture editing, one could take the same clip of a dog playing and sitting in the yard. The change in sounds (FXs, music) can make things seem sad and nostalgic, tense and frightening, or humorous and playful.
Of course, an image carefully constructed and played silently can have the intended emotional impact that sound can lend to it. So sound has the danger of also becoming over used, and a way to (in Chion's reference to Bergman) cover sloppy filmmaking.
One will notice the absence of sound. But you will also notice bad sound editing/design. Chion points that sound is perceived far quicker than vision, which is why sound (if used) needs to be quality at all times because it will affect the sense of cinema before the eye ever takes it in.

Single Shot Balloon Head.

I had a blast doing the single shot take exercise. Our group idea seemed like it would be really easy and funny to do during class when we worked on it, but when we finally got around to the actual production, it began to appear somewhat harder than it was.
No one really ever thought about the logistics of not being able to see when your head is a balloon, or how quickly a three people can swap a “smiley face” balloon with a Mr. Bill-esque “OH NO!” balloon, particularly when you only have a minute to shoot the footage.
But our group worked really well together, and I think we all had a blast doing it. We rehearsed the scene quite a few times at the ATM, and we got a lot of looks from people as they came to withdraw money (I would occasionally turn the big gigantic balloon head at them and stare).
Doing the project has made me come up with some more ideas to involve the character of BALLOON HEAD, and I am working on a new short film script to involve him, and to hopefully implement some greats ideas we all had but weren’t able to actually put into the finished film (notably if Balloon Head was filled with helium and could be carried around on a string).
Hopefully using some of the things I’ve learned, and some digital Fxs that can “erase” a human’s head, I can fully bring the Balloon Head to life.
Also, as I have the original film print of the short, I am thinking about painting the piece frame by frame to hopefully give it a strange, animated look.

filmscratch junkies

So, after watching the Scratch Film Junkies after the several weeks of learning to do some of the things that they have done, and I have to say that I do respect what they do more.
It wasn’t that I ever dismissed that type of art film, but knowing all the tedious things one has to do in order to create the visuals that they came up with is impressive, and I can appreciate it more. When you watch something like that for the first time, it is easy to forget the fact that they’re working with incredibly tiny frames of film, doing even more incredibly tedious actions when the image is projected so large up on the screen.
The act of film scratching seems sort of anarchic when you first see it, and I wasn’t a fan of it really the first time I ever saw it. However, once you do it, it feels somewhat liberating to be “deconstructing” your images, and distorting them.
This might be my own interpretation of the act of film scratching that although it can be tedious, and requires an intense amount of concentration to create the image you want (being that you have to scratch 24 miniscule frames by hand to create the one second of film), but I just feel that no one really knows what they’re going to do while scratching until they actually start doing it. The scratch film junkies’ video is really interesting to watch, and it does move through many various different moods and aesthetics. But I get this feel that it might just be a collection of the “best ofs” from several different collaborators and being stuck together in an arbitrary pattern.
I am really just thinking this based on my own private experience of scratching, and the fact that the Junkies’ film was so long (the song was also quite catchy, thankfully) that it seemed they’d need as much footage as possible, good or bad, to create the bulk of their work.
There is also something kind of sad and creepy about seeing old footage being “reworked.” I felt a little uneasy at one of the images in the Junkies’ film of the little baby having all the scratches surround his head. It has a very dreamy quality to it, and it instantly gives a feeling of nostalgia because the moment the image is being projected you’re seeing things that have been lost.

Pes

Pes

Honestly, I didn’t actually like listening to Pes talk about his work as odd as that sounds. He didn’t sound the way I imagined someone who created something as wild as the things he did to sound. He sounded sedated, very introverted. His films were so loud and insane that it just really conflicted with my perception of who he would be.
But then again, the amount of patience it would take to do the films he made would require not a wild, roaming mind, but a focused one. Every single thing shown in the frame, even though they were all toys or ribbons or something, all made sense in the context of the story line of the “war” film, which I thought was very admirable. Things were happening so fast that the subtly of his work almost came by subliminally. My favorite imagers were the explosions. I loved seeing the “microchip” city turning into Christmas bobbles and ribbons as the matchstick missiles struck, and the ironic “clown head” gun bursts exploding from the key cannons. It was amazingly cinematic for something that was made entirely with objects that could fit in your hand, like it was a Michael Bay film or something.
The film commercial of the “skateboarder” was pretty hilarious. I had seen things like that before were people had just jumped up and filmed it over and over, and then cut so it appeared that they were just floating, but Pes’ work was much more complicated and smoother looking. I’m still trying to figure out how did the face of the “skateboard” with his mouth hanging open and wind filling it.
If you say you’re into “experimental” cinema, most people have this really horrible, mythic conception of what it is. Most automatically think of an Andy Warhol film they heard about one time where you have to sit for eight hours watching the Empire State Building until suddenly it’s office lights come on. “Can you make any movie doing that sort of stuff?” Is usually the next thought I imagine people who aren’t really that into the modes and styling of cinema probably think of.
Apparently you can.
Pes is good indicator of how important experimenting with film techniques is. His “avant-garde” pixilation process that he perfected making his painstakingly short films afforded him the opportunity to create a highly lucrative, and imaginative advertising campaign for a shoe company. I can’t help but to think of Michel Gondry’s music video for the Rolling Stones (the video was “like a rolling stone” I believe) where the camera technique he came up with was employed for the infamous shot in the first Matrix film where Keanu “dodges” the bullet. Most people see these things on television or in a big movie, and just assume that Hollywood is a gigantic brain coming up with these incredible things. In reality, it is the people that we don’t really hear too much about that are really providing the tools that push the film industry forward.

Animation

Now the concept of abstract and experimental animation is very interesting to me, but I will have to disagree with the author of the article. The author believes that experimental animation veers towards the abstract. That it has no narrative to it. It is all about rhythm and color, just like a painting. There is a feeling that even though the author admires and is amused by things like Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse, that he thinks of less of it when compared to something like Fischinger. There is something more "artistic" about the abstract modes of animation when compared to Daffy Duck "cussing" or having everything but his beak blown to smithereens. He sees "experimental" animation as liberating, as opposed to the narrative confines of a Loony Toons cartoon. But this very definition of what "experimental" is compared to the rest ultimately confines it as an art form. Why can't a cartoon be just as every bit as artistic as an experimental animation? Certainly Road Runners landscape looks more like a Dali than Disney. Great works of art until the rise of modernism, and postmodernism have always been able to convey a story inside of it's frame. An animator should be able to use all things, narratives and abstractions, to convey a feeling, an emotion, or a story. An artist shouldn't have to chose which "camp" they belong to. The moment that happens, it limits expression.

Brakhage

Probably the best thing about this article for me was the fact that Brakhage attempted to narrate a lot of these technical processes using an informal, and also poetic language. You could see what he was talking about much easier, because his writing showed an enthusiasm for the subject (as opposed to many books about film that are cut and dry, and overly technical). It's the difference between having a manual on how to correctly paint a picture, and actually having the artist of the painting you wish to emulate actually there telling you what to do. Every now and then, though, this poetic sense would sort of not mix quite so well with the technical sense of things, and understanding was muddied (although there was clearly excitement). My favorite thing didn't really have that much to do with Brakhage at all, however. I really enjoyed the parts that discussed Kenneth Anger, and especially the Polish Cinema with the different screens. It was a good story, and the concept of it when played out (I have seen several travelogue type films presented this way) is very interesting to watch, so to read how it was constructed was pretty cool.