What's your take on....what's your take on... Cassavetes?

I thought it interesting that Sharon Lockhart came and brought with her images of people, ideas, and concepts that drove her work. We saw that among many things she was interested in ethnography, children, and social spaces. I noticed one of her inspirations was John Cassavetes.
We talked a lot about what our interpretation of the piece might be, and one of those questions addressed the idea of performance. Sharron used different techniques to blur the lines of sport and performance. The proscenium theatre, the attention to chanting/singing/dance, and choreography. When I considered basketball and how it began as a western sport I thought about the comparison cultures adopting this sport. Basketball in Japan might be something more of a performance than about strength, points, and winning as it is in western culture.
The stars of Japanese culture were and still are often times their most disciplined and revered actors/actresses in Japanese theatre (No and Kabuki.) Maybe these are their Michael Jordans, and that is what Sharron was asking us to consider? Sport as it is in one culture can look very similar, have some of the same rules, but mean something very different to the people of that culture.

Render them both alive and moving

We are alive and moving in this film. Porterfield has taken restraint and asked us to work a little harder I feel. Hamilton is just as much happening as a drama outside our bodies on the screen as it is inside. It makes sense to hear Porterfield talk about images in relation to each other and that he is interested in seeing our stories as much as this story. I can't describe how emotional I felt at points in this film.
I'll talk about one part that was especially moving. The scene that took place in Joe's bed. The audience is placed behind the television that sits at the end of the single bed that he and his girlfriend/father of her child share for the night. We are only given audio clues from a black room and then the scene opens when the light from the television turns on. It's the middle of the night and Joe wakes up to play video games while his girlfriend sleeps. Tomorrow she will leave for a long trip. I don't know what it was, but I could just feel the disappointment and uncertainty between the two and it was done with no dialogue. The images and actors carried this drama with no dialogue and that I felt did a couple of things: to clue the audience into each of the characters, and to let the audience make up how they felt...to let them imagine how it must have felt in the characters position and situation. The scene showed many struggles in one package (time, love, responsibility, class, age.)
I enjoyed how much I was able to wonder and sit on each character in their life in those two days. I enjoyed the "work," and enjoyed the payoff.

Love at age 25

Jennifer Montgomery describes her editing as chunking and mixing, a sort of moving around of ideas in space that come together serendipitously. She said "I should go to plot camp, " in response to her technique. This kind of collage and almost associative editing really makes sense to me, I appreciate her dedication and belief in her "fuck you" filmaking. The kinds of images as well as concepts I feel collage together and leave the viewer thinking, "wow, I knew there was a connection between gender roles and Wolf pack behavior, but how amazing to experience on screen." She was showing footage and image behavior that I've never seen, and with no apologies. I found myself, and this happens more than most, laughing at some of the material, and I don't know if it was because it was over dramatized or that I was uncomfortable with how brazen some of the images were. I could feel how it must have seemed to someone at the age of 12, I could feel how much at that time in our lives, we're making new connections...some connections are clear, some foggy and some kind of obscure but all very personal. At that age you aren't thinking about how the world might judge what you're doing, you just do what feels good, you do what is you.

Border and Body: We don't discriminate, we'll violate both!

I just wanted to chat about "A Stranger Comes to Town" by Jackie Goss since we didn't really hit on it during discussion. How interesting to see these different forms of media (yes, they were tweaked with) come together to form a sort of visual conversation on the current immigration, naturalization, and debate of borders that seems to be all over the media.
I didn't know that much firsthand experience with customs before this film, so seeing it presented in a non traditional or animated way almost makes it more personal. I thought about why the filmmaker would have chosen to use this kind of format with the topic rather than shooting similar to a documentary you might she on PBS. I then realized that she almost had to do it this way due to the politics surrounding these folks lives. The format needed to almost have that distance from "real" and "animated" to synthesize maybe what these folks were talking about. The interviews were very intense, and at times were hard to believe. A woman interviewed was talking about having to be strip searched and a part of that entailed checking her genitals. What? What is this and why do we think this action is going to make it "safer" in this country. Hearing that just outraged me, I couldn't believe it. I understand Jackie. I thought back to the kitschy DHS video explaining each step of the customs process, all of it seemed so simple, so removed and so unreal that it would make sense that they would think that shoving their hand down someones pants was "going to extreme measures to keep our country safe from terrorism." The story, the images, and everything seemed so fake, but that's it, Jackie is telling us something very real. Didactically of cartoon plus clear abuses of power = better understanding of who controls borders and what it means to cross them (literally and figuratively.)
This piece made me think of how with current technology borders of both land and body can easily be manipulated depending on which side you may be on.

My own little show

Vladimir! How amazing of an experience!
What I found most interesting about this showing, presentation, group project, was the manipulation of a medium to tell a story in a new way minus a lot of technology. Vladimir opened up a door to storytelling using this simple 3D image made by our eyes....no wires, no fancy editing...just us and our eyes and hands doing most of the work. I can't imagine what it's like for her as an artist to get these ideas for stories or situations, draw up how she might photograph them, write the script and arrange to have it recorded, and then on top of it all, make the disks and cases...etc. It's just a lot of work for a 10 minute show per 4 disks. I can really appreciate the kind of dedication that she had to this idea, the time and energy, and to have it come to life must be awesome. I don't know if I could have that kind of devotion, or still be interested in pushing the boundaries of my medium if it took this kind of time. Maybe.
I enjoyed the artistry of scenes in I think it was called "fear and trembling." We were in the place of the viewer, our body was this machine. This POV was different than that of the other films. I really liked how she was able to build anxiety and fear with both using different shot angles (at chest level, from below, up in the sky) and symbolism of images to evoke feeling and how yes, they did make me fearful and anxious. When I took a step back I could kind of take apart why I felt anxious and why certain images made me feel more or less anxious.
Vladimir not only is an amazing storyteller and ingenious craftswoman, she is asking important questions of the viewer like:
"Where am I when I look into this and why am I here?"
"What does it mean when I can understand and relate to characters in a simple 3D image made by my eyes as much as I can in a technologically pumped up medium on a big screen."
"How do I relate to the person having their own show next to me?"

Dark Room

"I wanted to have it make me dumber."
-Ethan Jackson

Such an interesting quote from Ethan Jackson about his relationship to building temporary camera obscuras. I wonder what it is about the process, maybe it's because of the simplistic qualities. Jackson's installation was about experience, temporal space, and kind of a naive play. He spoke about his interests in "turning the outside in," or being able to project in a way that disorients the viewer. This concept or research question is similar to what we've been grappling with as far as the films we've seen this semester. I'm kind of a performance artist geek, so I couldn't help but think of this as an element of performance, maybe a setting in which one can play. In real time. I think he showed us pictures of a room in which he set up three "walls" (I can't remember if they were sheets....anywho, it doesn't matter) where the images were projected. The most interesting thing about this setting, kind of lens, light play, was that he included a stool. A symbol or a point in the lanscape that connected us to reality. I asked whether or not that the placement of a stool in this setting was intentional, and he elaborated on its main purpose; to convey proportion and scale...something to gauge the size of the projection. The stool to me sparked ideas of performance and play, how could the projection of real time be played with, and how would we, like he said "viscerally react" to its movements. What kind of world do we want to see play out against our real time screen?

Intimate Filter

Seeing the intimate projection of the super 8 flicker out "The Lace of Summer" by Storm De Hirsch, I couldn't help but think of home movies. There's something about the sound of the projector mixed with the creamy tones of the images that makes this kind of film/projection style transport the mind to memory. Why did De Hirsch choose to have this type of projection? The film was mostly comprised of shots from a balcony out over a low contrast overcast day at the beach (?). Repetitious pans back and forth, some shots seemed to rest on a zoomed in shot, and then zoomed back to include the foreground. The style of shot kind of reminded me of Akerman's shots where she let the camera sit as the world came into the frame and then back out. It's an interesting look at the idea of "home movie." When the camera would zoom back in to include shots from the foreground, De Hirsch captured a woman standing on the balcony. The woman was sometimes shot through the lace, and sometimes spared its fog. These techniques made me think of why the woman was shot like this, in relation to these "waves" of beach tents and low lighting. Was this representative, these shots through the lace, of the sometimes foggy image we think of when we see relatives on film? How does an image change with filter? Maybe De Hirsch was trying to capture the feeling of her memory of this woman, of anyone...and what better way to do that than through the filter of fabric.
I wonder what techniques I might choose if I were to represent my relation to my family through memory. Through urine? Through a dirty casserole dish? Ok, I'm getting weird, but really, it's interesting to think of representative filters through which we might capture our world.