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.

Week Eight

Something that we discussed in class this week that I found very interesting is environmental portraiture. It refers to when a photographer photographs his subject in their natural environment or a place where they feel comfortable. It's amazing how easy it is to tell when someone is being photographed in their home versus when they've been photographed in a studio. People look so much less posed when they've been shot at home. I think in most cases photographers try to make their subjects as comfortable as possible when they are being shot. The whole profession of modeling is about one's ability to look at ease in front of the camera. On America's Next Top model the contestants are constantly be scolded for not looking comfortable enough. The models will often times be told that their arm looks awkward or that they have a strained look on their face. I wonder we are so concerned with looking happy and comfortable? I can understand that when someone has their portrait taken or has a family portrait taken they want to be remember as they really were which is generally not posed. My favorite pictures of myself were caught in the moment when I was in the middle of laughing or talking. I think they look more like me and capture more of my personality. Last year, my mom made my sister and I get our pictures taken at a studio for Christmas cards and we looked so stiff in them. My boyfriend made the comment that we didn't look like ourselves.

Week 7

This week we looked at some work by Braisse who was a Hungarian photographer working in France. He is one of my favorite photographers because of his amazing photos of Paris. Looking at his photos of the Folies-Bergere and scenes from cafes and subways it's impossible not to know that they are taken in Paris. His photos have so much personality and character that make it easy to identify the location. In his pictures from Paris he takes on the role of a true Parisian and captures seemingly random moments. Nothing is posed, it's all real. His night shots are especially haunting because there is something alive about them. The viewer can almost feel the fog coming out of them. As soon as I started going through his photos I felt like I was back in Paris. He's just able to capture so much of that Paris-feeling that it amazes me. I really like his photo "Lovers in a Bistro" because of the way the two lovers are looking at each other. Paris is the "City of Romance" and when I visited Paris over the summer I saw so many couples that were in that same trance.

Week 6

This week we began looking at photography and the work of Cindy Sherman and Henri Cartier-Bresson. When I first saw that we were spending an entire section on photographs I didn't really understand why. After, turning on the TV realized how important photography is to visual culture. Flipping through magazines it's hard not to notice that 95% of the magazine is photographs. Almost all advertisements today contain photographs. We document our lives and important moments with pictures. If I look through my mom's photo albums I can see pictures of myself when I was first born and pictures of my little sister's first haircut. It's amazing to think all I have to do to relive memories from 15 years ago is open that album.

I was watching a French movie yesterday and at one point in the movie the main character said that when you take photographs you detach yourself from the situation. She complained that instead of enjoying a gondola ride with her boyfriend, he took pictures of her smiling the whole time. That made me ask myself, do photographs always capture real memories? My mom has a picture of me that she took before I went to a school dance and in the picture I'm smiling. I remember that when she took it I was actually really upset but I smiled for the picture. Is that a false memory? Now, I remember that I was really upset when the picture was taken but in 20 years I won't.

Week 5

Today, I saw a preview for a movie coming out called The Other Boleyn Girl. It's supposed to be about Anne and Mary Boleyn and their relationships with Henry VIII. One thing that really stuck out to me from the preview is the fact that Henry VIII is being played by the hunky Eric Bana. I have seen pictures of Henry VIII and I'm pretty sure he was a fat guy with red hair and pale skin. Eric Bana is extremely fit with dark hair and an olive complexion. This really took me back to our discussion about the gaze. In reading more about the movie I learned that Henry falls for both Mary and Anne Boleyn. He falls for Mary first but loses interest in her when she gets pregnant and loses her looks. Scarlett Johansson plays Mary Boleyn and Natalie Portman plays Anne Boleyn. In watching the preview I noticed that despite the fact that all of the characters are attractive, Portman and Johannson are the main receivers the gaze. Their goal in the movie is to catch the eye of the king but their goal on the screen is to catch the eye of the viewer. They're depicted as flawless and the camera seems to stare at them. Eric Bana is also very attractive but somehow his looks seem to have less importance. When he is being filmed the camera seems to move around much more as if it's responding to his personality. This reminded me of something I wrote in my notebook from class, "Women are and men do." It's obvious that all three of the actors were chosen for their roles with much thought given to their looks but there is much more stress given to the women's appearance than Bana's.

Week 4

This week we looked at some art by Michael Ray Charles who I find really interesting. He appropriates racist images to raise issues regarding race and we studied him in History of American Art too. He uses images like that of the mammy character and blows them up so that they are in the viewers face. He makes the figures look extremely gruesome and haunting which is one of the reasons his work has raised so much controversy. In one of his newest pieces "The Three Graces," he has three abstract sculptures standing together and they look like three members of the KKK.

We also talked about Marcel Duchamp who is one of my favorite artist. He was part of the Dada movement and created a lot of found art. One of his most famous pieces is "Fountain" and it is literally a toilet signed with R. Mutt 1917. There are certain pieces of art and certain art movements that have really raised the question, "what is art?" and I think "Fountain" is one of those pieces. I think the ability to create art that causes so much controversy is amazing.

Week 3

This week we talked a lot about modernism and what makes things modern. I think it's fancinating that people are beginning to find that modernism really emerged during Romanticism, when artists begin to look to the present for inspiration rather than to the past. We also looked at the art movement Dada, which is one of my favorite styles of art. I think Duchamp's Fountain is so interesting because nothing else like it had been done before.

We also looked at some Calvin Klien ads from the 90's. Normally I would think nothing of these ads but after listening to the class discuss them I was able to see them differently. People mentioned that they are making fun of the working class which I never would have noticed. After hearing this I went through some of my fashion magazines to see if I could find similar "trashy chic" ads. I found a couple but not too many.

Week 2

This week we discussed some really interesting topics in class. Something that really interested me was the concept of the gaze. The gaze refers to interactions within art. The gaze in feminist terms refers to the way men in art look at women in art or even the way a male viewer looks at a woman in a peice of art. Historically men look at women and women look away but pieces like Mannet's Olympia and Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring counter that. The women in these pieces stare back at the viewer boldly. The prostitute in Olympia is so bold as to stare back at the viewer as if he is her client and she is not ashamed of her position.

In photographs by Sally Mann, her use of the gaze makes her photographs powerful. One of her photographs consists of her son and two daughters standing topless. They appear to be staring back at the viewer as if provoking him/her to say something. The confidence they have while topless is almost disturbing.

Alejandro Heiber

I went to see former Centenary student Alejandro Heiber present some short films. It's so inspiring to see someone from Centenary working in Hollywood and living his dream. I thought all of his work was amazing but I especially liked Pituco.

Week One

We began class by discussing the differences looking and seeing. We basically decided that looking is the physical act of seeing and seeing is looking in depth. We also discussed interpretation and how there is no meaning in a text until someone interacts with it. I thought that this was interesting. It almost sounds like the old question, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around does it make a sound?



The reading for class basically taught us how to see. One text gave questions to ask when looking at thingss such as, What do I describe? It stressed asking these questions until it becomes habit. I think the idea of learning to see things on a different level is really interesting especially in pop culture. It's so easy to look at something like an advertisment and then forget about it but when you stare at it and ask questions it becomes really interesting. We experienced this in class with a Calvin Klein ad.