"Film making today is...

...questioning our understanding of our relationship to the universe." Yeah, that's pretty heavy handed. I thought about using world, or reality, or consciousness but none of them sounded any better. And how many times do you really get to use the word universe? All of my readings this semester were trying to build tangible pieces of understanding out of the vagueness of life. They cited philosophers throughout our history and applied their thoughts to films looking for the same answers, or to films that brought new questions to the old answers and ideas. I think film making, and really all art, gives us the chance to explore what we think we know. You know what, that sounds a lot better, but I'm sticking with universe.

Field Report #3: Art Encounter

One of the readings for class, Sounds of the Season by Ivan Peterson, stresses the need for us to open our ears. It suggests we should take the time to listen to the details of sounds, particularly the sounds of nature. It talks about wind and birds and barking. I wonder if any of them have ever listened to the sun. There are so many things were can listen to beyond what our naked ears can perceive, and Semiconductor’s Brilliant Noise and Jeanne Liotta’s Observando el Cielo provide some amazing examples. I was struck at first by both films mostly because my final project for another class was an animation of an eclipse that used the sounds from the magnetosphere and other satellite gathered radio recordings. So I was at first very surprised, but also I was so excited to see other films using this material. I will limit my discussion only to Observando el Cielo though because of their similarities. There were a couple things I noticed about the sound besides its familiarity. The first is that for most of the film it felt like a separate entity from the image. It always complimented the image, but there is hardly any fidelity between the two. I feel if the image and sound were to be separated each could stand alone as its own piece. I think this is a result of the filmmakers intending to put these sounds, which most people have never heard before, on display. I get the feeling like they want to display the sounds purely and don’t want the sounds and images to combine. But then there are points at which they do synergize, and what sticks out to me is the lunar eclipse sequence. This sequence also involves the second aspect of the sound that I found incredibly interesting. This sequence uses, what I’m assuming, is a bounced back a.m. or f.m. radio signal from decades ago. It gave me this incredible feeling of time passing, but the scope of time is so small compared to the age of the universe and the millions of years the light from the stars has traveled to be captured on that piece of film, and then that is paired with the cyclical nature of eclipses and the time lapse photography. It all combined to from this crazy sense of time travel.
I also want to talk about the sound in Takashi Makino’s Elements of Nothing. The first thing the sound does in this film is progress with the image. It varies at parts, but mostly in the beginning the sound is a sparse, solitary piano and the image is very dark. In the middle the piano has gained in volume and melody and is also accompanied by other instruments while the image has lightened , spotted with color, and the trees are easier to make out. Then at the end the piano gives way to a siren like tone as the image is overtaken by the strange light. Secondly the sound is repetitive. The piano repeats measures of notes, establishing a pattern, but every once in a while there is a flat or sharp or wrong note thrown in to disrupt it. It seemed to me like the soundtrack was trying to develop a melody but it was intentionally denied. This works well with the image because it is equally denied to us by appearing barely long enough to be perceived on a single frame. Thirdly, the sound is also very combative in a passive/aggressive way. Chords are hit that do not mesh together. There are sometimes two notes played that are out of tune. These cause each other to wax and wane as they boost and cancel each other out, creating this disturbing warbling sound. This echoes the combative nature of the images as each frame competes for its fleeting time on screen. Lastly I want to mention how although the pacing of the image never changes, always one image per frame, the sound’s tempo changes dramatically. I found myself experiencing the film according to the tempo of the sound. I think it is a good example of the influence sound can have over the image.

Field Reports Round 3: Journal

For the final journal blog post I will be writing on Alex Gerbaz’s selection Direct Address, Ethical Imagination, and Errol Morris’s Interrotron. This journal questions if the prevalence of screens (television, movies, internet, etc.) in the way we communicate has made it harder to communicate face-to-face or if they have extended our ability to communicate by presenting us with opportunities to perceive social views that without we would never be exposed to. His stance admits that screens can trouble communication because it is mediated, but he believes they overall benefit us because film still provides an ethical relationship. He provides two main points. His first is that film does in fact allow us to see different perspectives of the social world, and the second is that these different perspectives have an ethical relation. His biggest support for his first point comes in the form of direct address. He argues that by using direct address the viewer is put in the place of the subject that is being directed to in the film. We are literally subjected to that subject’s point of view. Gerbaz goes on to illustrate this point with Errol Morris’s Interrotron and the pieces he has filmed with it, namely Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999) and The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003). The interrotron is like a teleprompter that bounces the image of the interviewer’s face onto glass in front of the camera lens. This effect allows the camera to capture the eye contact between the interviewer and interviewee. Played back, it simulates eye contact between the screen and the viewer. He then moves onto his second point and uses these films to explain how this kind of direct address has an ethical relation to the viewer. He quotes Paul Schrader to begin his argument, “[direct address] inspires an ‘I-Thou’ devotional attitude between the viewer and work of art”. This is transcendent, and this transcendence creates the possibility for ethical relation. He goes on to mention the argument that images and images of faces cannot be ethical because by capturing them they are frozen as caricatures, but he counters this by saying that this cannot be applied to film because film can capture the movement and expression of faces. This then allows for social interaction with the film because it allows us to perceive an ethical consciousness of the film. Lastly he uses Levinas’s philosophy to explain the importance of the moving face. He says, “ethical experience occurs when we encounter a being or phenomenon which cannot be reduced to presence or contained within a field of pure knowledge”. When we look at a face we know we are encountering another being that cannot be fully known by merely looking at it. A face cannot be fully understood, but we understand its otherness. Therefore he argues that direct address is ethical. Although the face is objectified more than anything else in film it defies objectification because it can transcend beyond its form and we perceive subjectively. By extending this to multiple faces we are able to have ethical relations of multiple perspectives.
Gerbaz brings up a lot of interesting debates, in particular whether a face on film can be ethical or not. He suggests the comparison of direct address on film to that of statues and religious paintings. Statues and religious paintings have and ability to appear like they are looking right at you, sometimes it looks like their eyes follow you as you move around them. But he states the effect is much different than when a face on film appears to be looking right at you. And I agree with that statement. Those paintings and statues often creep me out and before I read this article I didn’t have words for why, just that it didn’t feel right. It makes sense that because these faces are frozen that they would feel weird looking at them, but know that he suggests a lack of ethical relation to the image I feel that is a better explanation. There is no social interaction with an image that I am use to interacting with. But because the face on film is able to capture the movement of expression the possibility for ethical relation exists. I think it’s kind of interesting though that because the possibility exists doesn’t necessitates it’s existence. I’d like to see a direct address on film that does not display an ethical relation. That would probably be really creepy.

Journal post #2 response

Before I begin on the next round of field reports I'd like to take the time to respond to the previous round. Mostly I'd like to offer my personal response to the two articles. I have this weird thing about robots. It's not something I've ever really noticed until I began school here, and it's was definitely not anything important to pay attention to until I took the film 319 class on American Science fiction. But since that class themes about robots and cyborgs have really interested me. And it's not because I'm like, a huge mechanical engineering nerd or something (no offense to mechanical engineering nerds). I'm really interested by how films with robots and cyborgs address the question of what it means to be human. It's definitely not a question unique to the scifi genre. It's probably hard to find a genre that doesn't address that question in some form, actually. But scifi provides the opportunity to present the human artifice in a sprectrum form. The robot has a cultural iconography that retains a coherence from film to film. It's my impression that if you take a handful of robots/cyborgs and ask 100 people to rate them on a scale of "most human to least human" you would get similar results from each person. I think that is because everyone quantifies the human condition in a similar way. Thats like, a huge deal to me! I found it really interesting how these two authors discussed these quailfiers with the ideas of philosophers that lived well before the matrix went online or skynet became self aware. (You know, figuratively, as in before the movies were released). I think it is interesting how robots and cyborgs can play a cathartic role in answering questions about humanity, as in being able to question what we are from a safe distance. But also how robots and cyborgs can play a troubling role and make us doubt our place in the universe. I like how these articles provided a more concrete way to discuss human approximation.