Practices of looking and evidence of being ( ooh wat a lovely plastic bag that is blowing in the wind !)

We've been taught about the difference between seeing and  looking and how that theory is interpreted in cinema and other forms of art/ media, after attending these lectures i could'nt help but realise how much we are bombarded by images, muisc, advertisments every day, the journey to college in the morning is filled with enough stimulants to make you want to spend your birthday in an sensory deprivation tank on your birthday!.
What do we make of of all these things?, well it's up to us to ignore them , it's up to us to interpret them as we will.  Our contextual lecturer asked , when you see a picture of a dog you think dog but you say "chein", you don't know what to think, In fact the word dog is both a verb and a noun and has many different expressions such as " he's such a dog!", which i imagine means ugly, which means seeing as many people have shouted this at me in the street before, i may need a makeover. If you want to get desperately serious think about the idea  about have different cultures see the character of father christmas?, every culture feeds their personal identity into this icon therefore our idea of santa is  different to Spain . the point being that every individual sees the world differently.

How do we feel when we are being  looked at , when we are the ones being watched. I always think it is interesting consideing that we are monitored by CCTV evryday  in all areas, yet the idea of us being spied on through a wall whilst we're in the shower  makes us very uncomfortable, i still can't pee in front of people in public toilets, unless i'm really desperate. George Orwell warned us about the horror of surviellance, the trappings of a social order closing in on you, for example, we are being monitored all the time, we're assured it's for our safety for our comfort, but how much safer are we truely, with everything that we touch generating some kind of fingerprint are we actually ever turely safe?
The Anthropologist Marc Auge stated

“If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity,

then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned

with identity will be a non-place . . . supermodernity produces non-places".

What he was saying  is that as the world is getting smaller and smaller as cities and civilisation gets bigger, CCTV and barcodes have made our lives more confined in a sense, we can never truely escape, yet we all live our lives being watched by something we cannot put a face to, even though  we, as people have conditioned our selves to not look at each other for too long  just in case we make each other uncomfortable. Many films  and writers have written about watching and being watched the difference between the two, filmakers look at the meaning of looking, the discourse if you will and how our perceptions govern our world, in essence, the power of the watcher is like anything, it has good and bad applications, it depends who's controlling. To finish off this post, lets talk about something more positive My Girlfriend made a very good observation about the theory of "seeing " is different than "looking" and she used the film American Beauty ( 1999. Dir. S. Mendes) as a good example
.Ricky Fitts: I was filming this dead bird.
Angela Hayes: Why?
Ricky Fitts: Because it's beautiful.
Seeing is a function, Looking is an ability which implies a greater sense of purpose, this film strives to show that we, as people, rarely actually "look" at anything.

My Post modern film...or how i learned to stop worrying and love the movie.

For my example of a post-modern film I have decided to write about Mulholland Drive (Dir David Lynch. 2001).

It tells the story of “Rita” and Betty two women who become deeply involved with each other after Rita is found in Betty’s home with no memory of who she is or how she got there  From the beginning we are led to assume that Rita is a successful actress and Betty is aspiring to be one.

This story is played out against the backdrop of Hollywood, the film business and the strange characters that litter this world, this results in several vignettes featuring these people working their way into the narrative.

We have a traumatised man in a diner plagued by nightmares, a film director threatened by the studio bosses to make his movie starring an actress that he has no intention of using.

A cowboy who cryptically warns the director to comply “or else”.

During the course of this movie, these people meet and interact at different points in the picture, as a viewer you are conditioned to believe that towards the end of the film you will know why all these characters have have been involved, hopefully filling in the narrative gaps, but the film never truly resolves itself.

This is where the idea of post- modernism comes in, in the sense that the film does not feature a linear timeline nor does it feature a definitive narrative, this, in a way, is a more subtle attempt than a film which goes for all out pop culture referencing i.e.  Clerks (Dir Kevin Smith 1992).

The story gets even more impenetrable around half way through when the two main characters swap names and motivations or maybe not, depending on your opinion. At this point in the film another character that has appeared to have been living in Betty’s apartment for ages, is seen moving out never to be seen again, People we deem to possibly important to the story are seen once and never again. It appears at the end of the film you are left to try and piece together the various story threads and try and make sense of them and identify what they had to do with each other, In other mystery films,  an object is sometimes given a tokenistic meaning in order to provide the necessary building blocks needed to piece the story together, in this case a blue box constantly appears in the film, but it is never divulged what it is doing there, what it contains or its importance to the narrative, frustratingly it does appear important to the characters and does make  an appearance just before the two women swap names and it appears personalities.

Dream-like sequences permeate the fabric of the film, although these may not be dreams at all, only the lighting, the camera angles and the character interactions indicate that these scenes may be of a different “consciousness” than the others.

     The film is a literal and Metaphorical deconstruction of the Mainstream film system; it also appears to a satire of Hollywood indictments itself. The overly antagonistic and mob like studio execs, disgusted by the poor espressos being served, screaming at the “hip” “tortured” Director.

Betty arriving in sunny, shiny L.A.  Surrounded by constantly grinning cutesy older people wishing her success in her acting career. Betty’s first audition in which she wows’s the studio head and steals the scene from the lead actor, because after all, it’s that easy in Hollywood.

A Romantic relationship blossoms between the two women but it seems to be born out of loneliness and desperation rather than love and trust. This film eschews any idea of tradition unless it’s looked at as individual scenes, in which there does seem to always be an emotional truth of some kind.

I think the very definition of why this film is a good example of post modernism is in scene in the film where the two main characters are in a club called Silencio, the two women are watching a singer who is giving a very impassioned performance appearing to bear her very soul to the audience, it moves both the characters to the point of tears, almost like they have both witnessed a pure moment of fragility until the singer faints and falls to the floor, but her voice is still being heard over the speakers, until they realise that she was miming to a backing track. Shattered and broken, they are left to question their own perception of truth and meaning.

My timeline ... The movie pt 1

Who am i? ( the non-emo version)

Hello folks,
It's been awhile and i'm a lazy git to be honest,  so let's crack on!. Over Christmas, i have discovered that for some reason i have lost all my notes from the first term of contextual studies, so i am going to endevour to write it all again, but on this blog page for all of you to read * insert whoops of joy here*.
Thankfully all of the topics which have been covered can be found on  the moodle page, so here's to starting from scratch.
 My Timeline
One of the first things  i was asked to do was to think about my past, what events have transpired throughout my lfe what has happened in the world whilst i was growing up?. I't s really interesting to think of the  way art, fashion, film changed over the years i have been alive. Are our opinions and our notions influenced by the things around us?, almost certainly. I wonder how many times people have had to listen to me rant about how" music was music when i was growing up, not like the crap  these kids are listening to." i never thought it would happen to me, but it did and it'll most likely happen to everyone.
We were asked to look at the year we were born and list some of the things that happened in the world, believe it or not some crazy things happened in 1981...
1.
March 30 – U.S. President Ronald Reagan is shot in the chest outside a Washington, D.C. hotel by John Hinckley, Jr. Two police officers and Press Secretary James Brady are also wounded.

2. May 13 – Pope John Paul II is shot and nearly killed by Mehmet Ali Ağca, a Turkish gunman, as he enters St. Peter's Square in Vatican City to address a general audience.

3.July 29 – A worldwide television audience of over 700 million people watched the Wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer at St Paul's Cathedral in London.


4.August 24 – Mark David Chapman is sentenced to 20 years to life in prison, after being convicted of murdering John Lennon in Manhattan 8 months earlier

5. September 19 – Simon & Garfunkel perform The Concert in Central Park, a free concert in New York in front of approximately half a million people.

plus these films were released  this year...
 Superman II
Raiders of The Lost Ark
Time Bandits
On Golden Pond
An American Werewolf in London.
Not too shabby really,also i would like to mention that one of my favourite bands Metallica formed this year, which is kind of poetic seeing as how i now play in a heavy metal band myself. Anyway i think that this is enough from me tonight, i shall be attempting to put together a timeline showing some of the memories i have from my life and show some of the key pieces of film and music that are still very important and influential to me today. Stay tuned and thanks for reading.
Dan.http://youtu.be/f63CswacQjc
http://youtu.be/anEuw8F8cpE



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