...And now for something completely different...or not.

Christian Metz was a french film theorist who was known for trying to make connections between cinema and Sigmund Freud's psychology as well as Lacan's mirror theory. The way he saw film was that it has become a language, because of the films that have told stories which have now become narrative conventions, we as individuals understand these conventions as primers if you will,  something that is presented on screen is instantly labelled in our heads, for example a shoe, on screen is always going to be just that,  an object we all know and understand, but in most other languages, there is a different word for that object. You could play someone form another country an English speaking film without subtitles and they could know the narrative of that story, basically enough, through images, the words are not important, in fact if you say "bird" to one person, it might drum up a totally different image in someone Else's head.  It has been suggested that there are only seven true plot lines in existence, so every movie, no matter, how original they seem to be, will somehow fall into one of those seven stories. Which in fact makes it easier for everyone to understand the supposed "language" of film.
It's interesting to note that , if you read a book, your imagination does the work, in film it possibly can't, in these terms film is a fixed medium, which maybe a reason why many adaptions from book to film do not go unscathed by criticism. Many people say that the more you move something further away from it's source material the more it suffers., but in some cases, is that because many people have that film in their heads because they've read the book, their ideas will not necessarily end up on screen , because only the perspective of those involved in the making of the film will maybe get to see what's in their heads put on screen.It's interesting that many films have to deviate from the original novel and to create a cinematic narrative, characters can be changed or removed entirely, large portions of the novel can end up being re arranged and replaced, expanded and reduced for a cinema audience, in fact to film a book page by page would be impossible, simply because linear time is not relevant in a novel, in a film you have only a certain amount of time to tell the story, or one of the seven.In fact when mining for new stories to adapt, some films simply take story threads from author's works Philip K. Dick and James Elroy are two prime examples. Usually  a movie based on a Dick story features the tag line "inspired by..." or "based on..."

Film can mean anything to us, we can choose to put as much meaning and information in it as we want to,if we choose to analyse a film, other than the technical and visual aspects we must consider the author themselves, what they maybe trying to say with their work and what context it is in, films are always a product of their time and what the people involved  have experienced in the world around them whist making it.Our interpretations may differ from everyone else;s but  a film maker in one way or another is communicating  and commenting on their environment, culture, political climate, other media and the general state of the world. the best examples of this is when different filmmakers cover similar themes in different time periods, through this you can see how different these films are, in their visual and technical states but also  in terms of mood , pacing, sound and themes. These two clips being a very appropriate example of how two completely different films can be made from the same source material in two different times.
I could literally go on about this subject for ages, i really feel that this the very core of theory of film and why it remains  a very subjective subject, that anyone can put them selves into whether they are the viewer or the author.Don't worry i will be revisiting this  topic at  a later date!. Don't fall asleep!

Places.

This is  a picture of a train travelling between Teignmouth and Dawlish, these towns are very significant for me, as they are the first towns that i lived in. They're dirty, rough, plagued by a failing tourist industry, yet as a child i felt differently. These were the places i made friends, the places i took my first tentative steps, the places i first fell over in the street, anyway you get the point. It has been said that "home" is a point of departure, for me that means, whatever i have seen, experienced  and lived through, this place will always be home, for all it's faults and it's fairly  non - descript setting it will always hold some  sort of significance.To me this is very definition of "place" somewhere that has a very specific meaning and historical significance to it. it represents my "roots" if you will. even so i do challenge the theory of "non place" in the sense that non places describes areas of transience i.e. ; airports, subways, shopping centres etc. but i almost feel like Dawlish train station is  part of my home, yes the urine soaked, grey, damp, station where crazy hobos dwell and train arrive when they want to, it's a strange idea that something like this is something that you can regard as "home".
It's interesting to think that  as people with actual homes that we retire to regularly, how a homeless person makes that choice or even if they can. I can't imagine how it must feel to think of your home, your point of departure , to where you are now, if you don't have one. De Certeau said " space is a practised place, what we do in it give it it's significance.". This is certainly true if you think about how, subways and stations are seemingly  non threatening during the day, they serve their said purpose, yet in the evening, the minute, you see people there that aren't usually there, passing through or hanging around in groups, the place seems to take on a more ominous atmosphere, simply because it's being used for something other than what it's meant for.


















Marc Auge talks about the theory of "super modernity" which i mentioned in an earlier blog, and maybe that gives an explanation as to why as a society our definitions of home are changing. i.e. the world is getting more populated, cities are getting bigger and stretching out wider. We're being slowly  consumed by cashpoints, b billboards, franchise restaurants, shopping centres etc, they are meeting the needs of the consumer in us all, "supply and demand" is very much part of the lexicon of modern living, we're willing to let those that supply take up more space, appropriate the land that we once knew as home to make space for more advertisements, more buildings that are there to facilitate the research that decides what we "need" as consumers. I always like to say  that as  the unique character that we imbue into the places we call home slowly fades away as office spaces grow larger, McDonald's spreads wider and shopping centres have more air conditioning we will lose our ability to know what "home " really is, the space that we call our gets smaller, our back door is slowly becoming everyone's back door.  Just like everyone else i let this happen, it shows that i saw a train station as part of my home, where my parents saw the villages they grew up in, the fields they played in homes, spot the difference?, What in the name of Bill Murray  are my children going to recognise as home?. It's a scary thought, this is why people hang around where they're not supposed to, because In a  world that is meant to meet their needs and give them what they want, they have no place to go. It's scary that you can watch a work of fiction like Blade Runner and what you see is in the city scenes is becoming a very strong reality.

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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