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.

Spiral Jetty

Today we watched Smithson's Spiral Jetty. I am supposed to pick an specific aspect of the film and relate it to the whole film. I choose the sun. Smithson shows it at the beginning of the movie. The sunspots are really similar to the spiral jetty. Also there is a shot at the end of the film from the helicopter that is of the spiral jetty with the sun reflecting off the middle of it. This makes me relate the spiral jetty to more than just the great salt lake but the whole universe. It gives it a broader lens to be viewed from.

So what i really thought about during this whole film was this question: who do we think we are? As humans do we have complete dominance over nature and do we have the right to change it permanently as we please? Did Smithson consider the possible side effects to the ecosystem of the lake? if he did and found that nothing would be poorly affected then i guess i will back down (even though he permanently altered the lake, side effects or no). I can't look for artistic metaphors and find meaning in which way i draw a spiral if right in front of me is a cocky human being, altering nature for his own means. Humans think they can do whatever they want with earth because they think they the "right" to it, like we are better than anything else. When is see that blatantly in front of me, i get distracted from metaphors and deeper meanings. Maybe Smithson did think about this stuff though and maybe i'm just worked up because i just saw the film, i just thought i'd put my ideas out there. i think exploring creativity and expressing deep ideas is a great, wonderful thing, but i also think that there is something that goes beyond that: our need for humbleness as a finite race of mammals and our need to understand our place in the infinite world around us.

Please don't actually watch this video and just take my word for it that it will make your head explode. This video is of a girl with too much time and poor judgment, talking about her wonderful self. This relates to Alex Bag's video because Bag criticized the mindless, brainwashed young person by dressing up like one and this youtube video is of a real live brainwashed young person! Both video's encourage you to look at yourself, the only difference is what side the video maker is on. Really though, don't watch this video. i almost cried.

-jack

Few Thoughts

The Mirror:
This film was a great film i thought because of it's simplicity and accessibility. It was simple and yet really beautiful and attention grabbing. The mirror made such a powerful effect. it was really interesting.
Lemon:
As i was watching this i felt like i was guided to examine the pores and textures of the lemon. This film took something ordinary; a lemon and combined it with another simple thing; angled lighting, and made something really intricate and artistic. Ordinary to extraordinary through simple combination
Semantics of the Kitchen:
Through the actresses violent nature and deadpan acting it makes it seem like she was forced into doing this and she's trying to rebel. It was funny at times but also sad. it definitely evoked emotion.
A Short Film About Tate Modern
Her style/voice was really cool. When she didn't talk but you heard the voice over, it made the piece really serious and intriguing. She described a situation and how it made her feel and then she reenacted it for us and we were in her place. It was so powerful when she was behind the white sheet. it made me feel exactly how she described feeling, exposed to the max-and i wasn't even in the room. If i was i would have been overwhelmed with the feeling of being exposed. It was really good.

Comments on Miranda July and Guy Ben Her

i enjoyed taking apart the miranda july film as a nice reentry back into the film world from break. a few things i noticed in it was the relationship of men and women, the role of authority, and also how the characters appealed to the viewer.

i thought this film was demonstrating how men can think they have authority over women and then only see their authority and not the woman's opinion. In the film the woman is obviously unhappy and rebellious but the "man" doesn't seem to notice that or credit it at all. But on the other hand the same women played both parts so if you looked at it like that the film could describe the split roles that women have to play in different settings.

The role of authority in this film was shown by the "man" having the woman trapped in a little black and white tv while "he" was watching from the colorful, real world. "He" thought that the woman's animosity was something that "his" authority overrides. It is one-way communication. But also at the end "he" seemed to get more and more anxious at the women being angry.

In the film, the "man" character is explaining the woman like she's "his" little kid or something. But he's explaining her in a way that makes it feel like the viewer is his boss or something and we're checking up on him. This makes it feel like you're on "his" side even if you don't want to be. You feel bad for the women but the "man" is talking to you like a friend or colleague.

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