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.