Helen Hill's Recipes for Disaster

http://www.angoleiro.com/cine_texts/recipes_for_disaster_hill.pdf

Camera Lucida

I like this essay because it poses the photograph as record of something that existed. Nothing more, nothing less. And perhaps that is one reason that I find myself so drawn to film. You're creating a record of something that existed in the real world. With digital photography and photoshop, you can piece things together and easily create things that never existed in the real world. But with film, if you want to play a trick, you have to make the trick exist. George Melies and his magic tricks, he had to create them in real life. Now we can computer generate anything we want, and it makes everything less exciting. Maybe that's why magician acts and elaborate makeup are still exciting. We know that they're not real things, but we don't know exactly how they came to be, and so it's fascinating and exciting.

I guess this reading just made me realize how disappointed I am with digital media. We can't trust images anymore, which is what Barthes was so excited about. 

"Impotent with regard to general ideas (to fiction), its force is nonetheless superior to everything the human 
mind can or can have conceived to assure us of reality-but also this reality is never anything but a contingency"

We've now lost that in a way, which brings me a kind of sadness. 

Tom Gunning and the Cinema of Attractions

I wonder if Tom Gunning is actually writing about cinema, and its effects on the viewer, rather than how critics and history have treated audiences. He spends a good portion of the introduction discussing the audience, and how critics, and thus historians, have portrayed their reactions to film. We don't have interviews with audience members to record their reaction, only those who were paid to write about it.

I think this essay is more about how present people have a tendency to look back on past people, and  think that they were somehow less intelligent, less aware, and that's insulting to our ancestors. Sure, the essay is built up around that one specific moment with the film of the moving train, but that is merely one instance of a fairly common misconception.

Audiences today are just as credulous as those in the past, humanity has not changed much, just because we've seen more films does not mean we cannot be astonished by the same cinema of attractions as our predecessors.

What is Cinema

Our reading “What is Cinema” described the ontology of the photographic image by recounting the “mummy complex”, the concept in which man has a need within to withstand the fatality that time often brings. It seemed to be at first a comparison between the images that are forever saved to a piece of film, a piece of life that is embalmed much like that of the flesh and face of a mummy. I discovered as I continued to read that it is much more of an evolution of this “mummy complex”. Due to the fact that even Egyptians used the arts to withstand the time that tends to slip away to leave a message for the future.

            Painting typically took on two forms, creativity within the mind, and also images that reflected the outside world that existed during the same period.  Most would argue that those two forms exist in film and art as well by truth and fiction. Documentaries and typical cinematic experiences today definitely exemplify these two different reflections of art back then. The psychology behind the need for someone’s mind to wander past the bridge of normalcy into a world of magic and creation is somewhat astounding. I find that this tendency continued to evolve into what it is today absolutely mind blowing.

The “Reflections on Photography” piece really opened my eyes to the instantaneous past that is created by taking a photograph. The author did a superb job of describing this contrast of the current subject when the photo is taken versus the piece that is sparks history the second it is printed. It was exemplified by the experience of death and life. This comparison was very interesting because it’s something we can understand in a physical sense. A fleeting moment in history is something that can’t be easily described by much else than life and death. One day the moment is here and the next it is just a distant memory, and we sometimes grasp for exact details in those moments, just as the author yearned for the exact memory and detail of his mother.

The two phrases that stood out to me regarding the superimposition were “in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there” and also, “it has been irrefutable present, and yet already deferred”. This is a powerful tool because it documents anything that enters its path. It was interesting that the author chooses to believe that photography was created solely by science even as an artist. This train of thought seems to be brought on by a thought that many of us have which he also mentioned in the reading as “Why is it that I am alive here and now?” The coexistence of past and present is something that we can physically document what we are doing with our lives, and it was intriguing to see how an artist can drives his work by this idea.

Final Project- Stefan Williams

With the final project and the end of the semester approaching we have been asked to present details on our final project. As discussed in class, I would like to present a film which is fused together with music, emotion, and experimental film. Out of the numerous techniques, we have used and watched, the cynotype film process sparked a particular interest to me, especially in regards to music videos. Thus, I would like to use this process to add a certain element to my film.

            Regarding the topic of my final project, as stated above it will be a fusion of emotion, music and experimental film. I will be presenting a music video, with music from my own personal work. Although, my music is  heavily Electronic Dance Music focused, for this particular piece I am aspiring to make a song that is a more emotional in nature, and that follows a very emotional particular storyline. Thus, the music will have a large amount of orchestral elements, which account in my mind to big emotional scenes in the film. It is paramount that I follow the storyline of the song, when shooting. As the song will have a lot of emotion, the moments captured must also follow it. If I would like to make the impact which I am looking for, both the music, the film and cynotype processing must be executed correctly, which will hopefully lead to a fantastic overall piece of work!