Week 16

This is our last week of class and we've seen some very interesting films. I would have to say that my favorite that we've watched so far was the film with the three old ladies. I feel like I asked myself so many questions while watching the film but none of them were answered. The film was almost completely up for interpretation. If I had to make up a story for the ladies I would say that they're three old swingers who never settled down and now all they have is each other. The film is interesting visually in that it looks like a moving painting. The women almost blend in with the background and their outfits match the rest of the shot.

Week 15

This week we watched a film that was written by Samuel Beckett and directed by Damien Hurst. It was called breath and it only consisted of one long breath in and one long breath out. I absolutely love independent films, foreign films and any other off-the-wall films but I've never seen a film like this before. There was zero narrative and it was obvious that the film was not made to make money or to tell a story. On some level the film seems really inventive and different but at the same time it doesn't seem very hard to come up with. It just seems like it really doesn't take very much talent to come up with that. But I guess you could same the same for modern art and it probably isn't easy to come up with anything that hasn't been done before. The visual aspect of the film was really awesome. It looked like the floor of a hospital room was just floating in space and I have no idea how they did that. It was almost like an anti smoking ad in that the breath sounded really painful and difficult and the last shot is of cigarettes in an ashtray. The cigarettes are in the shape of a swastika which is death sign to me. I think directing a piece like this would be a really interesting job and I'd like to know how detailed the scripts for these films are and how much freedom the directors have in creating them.

Week 14

I saw a really interesting French movie yesterday called Angel-A. It was about a guy living in Paris named Andre who is down on his luck and in a lot of debt until an angel comes to help him. Angela is not your typical angel. She's about six feet tall and wears a tiny little black dress with some four inch heels. She smokes like a chimney, beats up Andre's debtors and she actually describes her look as "sexy bitch." The movie was made in 2005 but it is shot in black and white with a really high contrast. This makes the movie especially interesting because it makes Angela, the angel, look so dark and we're used to seeing angels portrayed as glowing white figures. Actually, the entire movie is shot with an incredible emphasis on composition. In one of my favorite scenes Angela is standing behind Andre and they are both looking in the mirror. She is about a foot taller than him and in the scene she just looks like a giant. In the scene, she makes Andre proclaim his love for her and as he does she disappears behind him and he is left proclaiming his love for himself. This is really interesting because Andre has such low self-esteem that the viewer knows what Angela is doing.

Next Week....

I've watched Charlie Chaplin movies as a kid but I never thought about the historical context in which Chaplin was making the videos. When I watched the Tramp video in class I really thought about what was happening during this time. This was after WWI when there was a fairly pesimistic view of the United States among Americans. F. Scott Fitzgerald was in Paris writing books such as The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises which reflected the attitudes of the Lost Generation. Chaplin's films seem to have a much more optimistic view of life. Despite the fact that the world is always out to get him, he always ends up ahead. In the film hat we watched in class, Chaplin's character ends up getting married and having a house and farm. This is definitely an example of the American dream.This was after WWI when there was a fairly pesimistic view of the United States among Americans. F. Scott Fitzgerald was in Paris writing books such as The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises which reflected the attitudes of the Lost Generation. Chaplin's films seem to have a much more optimistic view of life. Despite the fact that the world is always out to get him, he always ends up ahead. In the film hat we watched in class, Chaplin's character ends up getting married and having a house and farm. This is definitely an example of the American dream.

Week Twelve

This week we started our film section of the class which I'm really excited about. We viewed Madonna's Like a Prayer video which was really amazing. The Madonna that I grew up with (not in her prime) was slightly less provocative than what we saw in the video. Watching this video really made me appreciate the visual aspect of it. I had no idea what the song was about until I saw the video. I guess the song can actually be interpreted in many different ways but I never could have imagined that this was how Madonna interpreted it. She combined issues of race, sexuality and religion to make a really thought provoking music video. Visually, it seems like she wants to make her viewers uncomfortable. This is seen when she has sex with the black Jesus and when she's dancing in a risque outfit in front of burning crosses. I think the image of a burning cross is an uncomfortable image for most Americans because it arouses so much fear. Despite the fact that she makes people a little uncomfortable, she gets her message across and she smooths it over at the end when she takes a bow with the rest of the actors from the video, like it was just an act. I really wish Madonna's videos were still this controversial.

Week 11

We looked at a lot of Dada and Surrealist art this week and one of the artists that I found most interesting was Loretta Lux. She takes photographs of children but they are so creepy looking. The children all seem to have a dazed and disconnected expression on their faces, almost like they aren't really human. The backgrounds in all of her photographs are photoshopped so they add to the unreal nature of the photographs. What really interests me about her work is the that she uses photoshop and that makes me wonder how much of the photographs have been altered. In some of them it looks like the color of the kids' skin has been changed and their features have been exagerated. I think this raises the question, what is a photograph? I wonder if we'll come up with a term for photographs that have been altered to serve other purposes that just documenting a moment. I also wonder where Lux finds all these creepy kids I certainly don't see these kinds of kids walking down the street everyday. If I had a kid I'm not so sure I'd let an artist photograph them knowing how the pictures would look. Actually, I probably would because she is such a well respected artist and I'm sure parents probably get frees pics of their kids.

Week Nine

This week we looked at documentary photography by photographers such as, Jacob Riis and Walker Evans. I find Jacob Riis's work very interesting because it is so raw. I was shocked to see how casual and comfortable the people in his photographs appeared to be despite the fact that they were living in such horrible conditions and being photographed. I'm actually surprised at how natural many of the people are in the photographs we see. This is seen in Evans's work as well. As soon as someone with a camera gets near me I always feel a little awkward. I couldn't imagine how weird I would feel if there was someone I didn't know taking pictures of me in my home, a place of privacy. In Migrant Mother, even the children look like they're at ease and their mother isn't even paying attention to the camera. I wonder if any of these photographers ever get turned down when they ask to take someones picture. I would probably turn them down unless I had heard of them. I guess today you never know if you're going to end up on the Internet. That was just one aspect of documentary photography that I found to be really interesting.