Lyrical Sanctuary

So i went to this slam poetry thing a while ago and forgot to post about it. It was in a small theater on oakland on a weekday. There were about twenty poets who performed and it was amazing. Some were very animated while reading their poems and some were pretty quiet. This one guy did a poem about "real poets" who scream and act really dramatic but actually have nothing to say. It was really interesting to look around at the audience because there were all kinds of people there, many people you would never expect to see there. Another thing that was interesting was how the space on stage changed right before the speaker went on. Usually they played music in between people but it stopped as the speaker went on. The speaker would usually stand there in silence for a couple seconds and when that happened the room was thick with this energy. Everybody looked right at the speaker as they absorbed this energy and then burst into poem. All in all it was really powerful and interesting and i'm definitely going to go again.

George Kuchar

I thought George Kuchar was great. From his films, especially "Hold Me While I'm Naked", you could feel his love of melodramatic movies. His sense of humor was so funny. He used over the top techniques in acting, colors, and music but together they produced a sincere, warm tone in the movies. Maybe i liked the films because they were pretty simple. They were about the love of movies and that's pretty much it. After "Hold Me While I'm Naked" i totally felt that emotional release thing you get after you read a good book or watch a good narrative film. Also the film had a set of defined characters and a plot which was easy to follow so you weren't lost trying to piece a story together, you could just sit back and enjoy Kuchar's humor and style.

Duck Soup and The Way Things Go

Wow that blog prompt was jam packed full of questions. Hmm Duck Soup as a narrative... is it bad that my mind is drawing a blank and all i can think about is the scene at the peanut stand. Well actually the movie functions as a satire of old theatrical productions so it can be an intervention in that way. it causes the viewer to relook and laugh at certain things. The two films are related in a sense by the fact that you have no idea where the "plot" is going. Duck Soup because it's a marx brothers movie and doesn't have to follow normal narrative guidelines and The Way Things Go because it was a rube goldberg contraption. I'll conclude with a deep thought: these films are less about what you see and more about what it makes you think about.

Barbie Liberation

Point One: The Barbie Liberation Organization is an amorphous group of activists and media intervention superstars, whose most famous action involved switching the voice boxes in 300 Talking Barbie dolls and Talking G.I. Joe dolls during the Christmas season of 1989. The goal of the action was to reveal and correct the problem of gender-based stereotyping in children's toys.

Point Two:

"This will move us to have a good laugh and go on making more G.I. Joes," said
Wayne Charness of the Pawtucket, R.I.-based toymaker. "Barbie dolls and G.I.
Joes are part of American culture."

"I think it really became an educational toy. I'm really happy it worked out
this way," said Zachariah's mother, Susan Orlofsky. "Our job is to help him
understand so that he doesn't think he has to be a soldier. I think it's amazing."

Point Three:

Craig Baldwin, Mock up on Mu

this is my extra post...

So this "narrative" film was very interesting. Baldwin's use of old footage worked amazingly well to piece together these characters and this story. i thought it was really cool that images of completely different people, doing similar actions could all work together to create one patchwork character. Also Baldwin's use of "puppet-ing" which is where he would show a person talking but put a different person saying something else over it, was very metaphoric and intriguing. There were a few parts where the film lost my attention and got kind of slow but other than that it was very entertaining. The thing i love most about this film is that no one but Baldwin could have made it. he has honed his style of film-making into one completely his own and that's very impressive.

Natural Features/Love's Refrain

Natural Features- i thought this film took the viewer to another world. it immersed the viewer in this dark workshop with hidden secrets. the use of so many layers created this intricate tapestry of images. As i was watching it i focused on how the film maker created it, why she created it, and the paint brush. There were barely any living elements in the film and when the hand holding the paint brush entered the frame, the sense of two different dimensions was revealed; the mostly 2-d dimension of the table top with all the images and the 3-d dimension above that with the hands manipulating the 2-d dimension. The paint brush was one of the only things that remained through most of the film and added a vague sense of narrative and again a human (almost god like) element.

Love's Refrain- i feel like the film maker wanted the viewer to see the beautiful images in the film as shapes, colors, and lines as compared to a lake with birds or some people in a coffee shop. from a completely personal view the colors and images in this film were extremely beautiful and peaceful. There were many shots where it took a second to realize what you were looking at and this contributed to the encouragement to see just lines and patterns. So i guess i focused on trying to view the film like that. Also i tried to see how the choices in shots and images revealed something of the film maker, i felt like it was a very personal film.

James Benning

James Benning’s presentation was very interesting because it showed how there can be beautiful, “artful” things in places that we least expect. To me the message of the piece was find beauty in unexpected places. Man that whole number globe thing is really crazy. Also a good point that Benning expressed was to find an elegant, beautiful answer to problems with your art, like the fraction representation of the square root of two.