How should I create a variety of very atmospheric scenes without access
to the places I'd like to shoot them in? I suppose I just make Theatre.
With these images I have created an alpha mask to shade out the
silhouette of a certain scenic element I want in a piece of video.
Then I layer the mask over the silhouetted video I've taken to put the
characters in the scenery. The end result is not necessarily photo
realistic as American filmmakers and audiences typically find as the goal of film, but instead creates a mood narrative.
In these scenes the nuns take Kloeshi with them from their humble cloister in the woods, to pay a routine visit to the clergy at the large expensive cathedral in the city. Here we begin to see the hierarchical structure of the society in this story, and the power inequality and suffering which stems from within.
Yesterday I went to the Writing Center for help writing my thesis. I've had little direction on how to go about it or what the guidelines are. I've visited the University's online resources, which would be more helpful if they showed an example instead of a page of words describing pagination... ultimately I find again and again that words of help written by people, are alienated from those people, and that true help is a feeling. Suffice to say, Jennifer at the Writing Center was helpful and I have an appointment to see her again in two weeks.
Though I've been reading from a variety of sources over the last two years, my research has been scattered, non-linear, and the antithesis of efficient. Nonetheless, I can't be ashamed of the process because I've been absorbing information all this time. During my session at the Writing Center, Jennifer suggested I had a lot of research to do. This was a blow to me, because I thought I had been staying ahead with the assortment of self-imposed readings I had done. When I consider what a slow-cooker I am, I forget to look at the other end of that spectrum, the pressure to produce. The Raphael reading made me think in terms of pure planning vs. pure production. Like the anecdote concerning the wall decoration he had no time to plan out with preliminary drawings, I like to wade in the pool of possibility and the fearful waters of the concern that the product might not realize my concept. I have full control of the planning. I have virtually no control on the reception of the project. While I might be happy with the end result of my careful planning and execution, there's still the concern that I won't make the deadline because I was not ready to leave the planning process. But far more frightening is the fear that I will leave the planning process in fear of the deadline and make a monstrosity that I can never love.
Jennifer, whose livelihood comes from her tutelage in getting results in writing form, needed to light a hotter candle beneath me than I had lit for myself. Typically, I'm too busy counting the different candles burning, and from both ends, to think about how hot each one is, individually. There is a collective heat that never stops. I filled the time between the appointment and my next appointment with more time in the 3rd and 4th floor stacks.
"You need to find the gap in all previous research on this topic." She explained. My thesis topic is broad because art is criticized for being too personal and Art is that which appears to invoke the primal unity of all things. Firstly I spent a lot of time working on imagery that would evoke an experience which could only be communicated through the medium of art, and now I'm being asked to convert that language into written English. Even more problematic, the English should be logically formatted, an argument, a dogma which is so well-researched it must become truth (i.e. aspires to publication). Meanwhile, my art should be original. I must research my methods as I work. I must spend all my time practicing and gaining new insights into the practical methods by which I make it. I must contribute to the technology of making art.
Fill the gap, contribute to the technology, perfect my craft, perfect my writing, perfect the world. Produce, produce, produce.
And students are supposed to do this in two years with the scantest finances. What a system our idealism has created! Oddly enough, my thesis research focuses on modernity's idealistic pursuit of knowledge and production as a linear (logical) progression biting it's own tail as it reaches its limits and rediscovers that as the people it is made up of, it is only half ideally human. When we ignore our animal drives in the hopes of transcending them, we segment ourselves, only to see that we are really werewolves terrorizing each other at night, while during the day we continue producing.
For me, process entails a lot of time because it's my wish to balance these two halves of myself as a person so that I do not become segmented and look for escape from reality. Nietzsche said we "need art for protection and as medicine." And as a society, I feel we are under-medicated because we are conditioned to value the product. It pleases me to focus on and even imagine the artistic process of Raphael and Michaelangelo realistically without the Apolline veil. In this way we are creating new myths which in turn reconnect us with our primal core. I've been a painter in Raphael's shop. I've been a designer explaining my vision in it's cohesion to an artistic director's vision to a shop of builders and painters. But I understand the plight of the whole organization too. Produce. Produce Produce... load-in on Friday...
My electronic music teacher, Krzysztof Wolek, sent me this link - presumably because I would appreciate the grammar of film used to dissect one of this generation's most unique entertainonomic phenomena in film. The Dark Knight.
I'm glad I don't make "Hollywood" movies. As soon as your work starts making money, people have found a new pariah.
While much of what he said about this movie was accurate from the
standpoint of technical filmmaking rules, (which are about as
"universal" or monolithic as the rules of tonal music) are true, I think
he would be less likely to spend so much time ripping apart a Kurasawa
or a Tarkovsky or a Herzog. Maybe the guy just fancies himself an action
sequence guru? I guess I didn't think of the sequence as disorienting
because it fit into the context of the film. Granted, I will rip up on
the script - why writers or producers-cum-writers think it's a good idea
to give non-characters these stupid, needless lines (i.e. "Lock and
load!") is the reason I tend to stay out of the movie theater and stick
to my home projector.
It seems pretty banal actually to watch a movie and pick apart how
physically impossible the action is. What does that say about our
culture? Why do people have this dual demand that films should behave
completely in every aspect as if they are happening in real life right
now, but when these things are sad, depressing or true to the content of
life people are mad because it's not an "escape" anymore. If people
really wanted films to be true to life, they'd make movies about the guy
that hates his job working at Best Buy. There would not even be such a
thing as an action sequence. Life is not physically that exciting. So
the only thing of value I can see that Mr. Emmerson says is "All the
jumbled up movement can cancel out any sense of momentum."
I suppose this is because I have come to see film making as if it were
music. This is probably why Joey and I like David Lynch. Is the acting
immaculate? Not in the usual sense for sure. It seems sometimes the
characters are not even acting. Do we receive all the visual information
we need to follow a plot that is real to life? Absolutely not. Do we
find an overall form, rhythms, harmony, dissonance, contrast of
elements? Absolutely so. Life IS as exciting as an action sequence at
times, but not because things are literally physically happening like
they do in action sequences. Life is exciting for the same reason music
is exciting - it moves from moment to moment, ideas culminate, things
appear to have happened for a reason and we perceive action and
momentum. We could not experience music with only our sense of logic and
reasoning. We require our emotions to make sense of music, and music
makes sense of us. I don't see why filmmaking is judged any differently.
I suppose it's not. There is radio pop and there are Blockbusters.
Critics will leave us alone so long as we continue not making any money.
:) And you will never make money unless you follow the instruction
manual for making a movie.
As far as The Dark Knight goes, I don't love it. I'm honestly a bit
indifferent to it. I like Heath Ledger's masterful portrayal of a 2D
comic villain as a fully rounded human being. I like the darkness, the
Noirish chiaroscura, and the cocktail of comic-like simplicity and
familiar political themes. But what I can truly not deny about this
movie is that it managed to draw a crowd from so many sects of people.
This was a movie I DID see in the theater, right there next to the
people who come to see every blockbuster, the nerdy boys who only see
action movies and cult specialties like Star Wars, the critics (which I
don't identify with either) and the independent crowd.
Actually, I like the role of the critic when I think about it - yes they
are annoying naysayers that quest after the conquest of ruining a good
thing because it's just not good enough, but they're the system of
checks and balances. No one should ever make too much money.
First of all, here is a test that I've been working on...
and you can visit the link at YouTube should you like to watch it in glorious 720/1280 at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs81UeXlQ5I
And right now, it looks neat, but what is it? That seems to me to be the worst state of affairs for an artist. When I listen to Matthew Barney talk about his work, talk about the concepts behind his work, as an artist, when I listen to someone who just doesn't jive with me, all I hear is I made this thing from my intuitive feeling about what is aesthetic and I came up with a way to justify the images later. On one hand, it annoys me because so much money backs his productions and his sheer charisma and social (or socioeconomic) opulence propel him into a world that is his oyster - one in which he is allowed to express narcissistically and like pop artists, we look at a well-chisled american football player's face and assume the art is profound. I don't think his art is profound I don't even think he's charismatic.
But in all this, I realize it's more that I champion the underdog and loathe the celebrity. In this sense I see myself as a balancing force. I'm not going to turn it all the way back around, because the irony of this situation is that as soon as the underdog becomes the jesus whose face we see in the towel used to wipe the fluids away, I no longer see a savior or a confidant but a mere celebrity. I should look for the world's answers in the gibberish of a homeless man before I turn to someone with too much celebrity because I lose trust in someone who has happened into this type of power and embraces it. While I fully understand with all the empathy a human can possess what it is to lust after the "truth" in the world, I came to understand what a temporal concept "truth" is. Truth is not eternal, people just want it to be.
So I've been reading philosophy for a bit now - I was into Ayn Rand's theories of Objectivism in high school, but more importantly I was into a boy who was into Ayn Rand. I left my beliefs in Christianity because I had found someone with the truth. I found someone to take care of me and lead me out of delusion and tradition. Four years later, my savior had lost his shimmer. He didn't really know the truth, he just had a big personality and very persuasive way with words. He was a dialectician, a logician, an orator, and a huge deluded misanthrope. In a small town, he was also the underdog. I trusted him completely and justified all his actions because of my trust. But I feel certain that it was his actions that made me trust him in the first place. Actions are, after all, movements from point A to point B, not the intentions that drive them. Those intentions are as ephemeral as "the truth" and equally subject to interpretation.
Now I'm reading Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and considering the world's famous polarizing German personality for his influence and his power. Another great orator, I find a great deal I like in his perspective. On the one hand, he's a snooty elitist and typically chauvinist, but what surprises me is how difficult it is for great humanists to apply their philosophies to their own lives. Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer (and smacking of much older Eastern Buddhist thought) believed that there were two drives in all of humanity. Apollo named the drive that compels us to make order of things, to categorize and individuate. I think this runs parallel to Freud's libido or creative energy. But later in life, Freud recognized Thanatos, which was the name for his "death drive" which he eventually believed was in conflict with the libido. The death drive was a limiting force which drives us to suicide and self destruction because like Nietzsche Dionysian drive, we are always trying to return to our original primordial inorganic state, a state of "oneness" with the world. Dionysus is the force of chaos that makes us dance in a crowd, losing our faces to a group ritual where we no longer exist as individuals but feel the "truth" of that blissful "oneness" sought after by Buddhist monks. He romanticized the society of the archaic Greeks whose Attic Tragedies were the locus of all activity, just as the Christian Church was in the Middle Ages and as Science became to modernity. Socrates, for Nietzsche, ruined the world by having such a profound influence through his charismatic oration that he caused us to think optimistically, and with great arrogance that we could "know" everything through logic. But even worse, Socrates believed we could "know" morality through logical reasoning. Great job Socrates - knowing requires education, and education then becomes another subjective measure by the elite or those in power. Classes emerge and the "unknowing" become justified as morally inept and thus dehumanized and we enslave them. Slavery, Socrates. The logical end of morality. Yep. Logically infallible.
Nietzsche sums it up for us:
"When
to his horror, he sees how logic curls up around itself at these limits
and finally bites its own tail, then a new form of knowledge breaks
through, 'tragic knowledge,' which, simply to be endured, needs art for
protection and as medicine."
Through art, that thing that is so illogical but as yet full of "truth" in an opposite but equally viable manner to scientific and logical "knowledge," we experience the Dionysian return to oneness that has become so foreign to us since the Industrial Revolution. I get it when I look at a Rothko painting or watch Tarkovsky's films? Does that make these artist more "truthful?" I think only in the sense that any "truth" is a fleeting, overturning ephemeral thing that we can lose ourselves in only for a moment, like the glitter of silk spun in the wind.
Do I know what this test piece of film that I made is? It's practically part of something bigger, a section of the entire form of an artwork I'm making. At worst I believe it has nothing to do with the larger philosophical issues I have discussed and is instead something much more personal to my own subjective aesthetic, technology, and expression, but at best you and Nietzsche and Socrates alike can get something out of the product that I am able to get out of the process of culmination.
I shot these images last night to help with my drawing and color studies for my stained glass window. Some are altered in Photoshop and others I left alone. I think some are quite cinematic, some are sexy and some are just plain creepy.
William Wallace's A Week in the Life of Michaelangelo follows the world's most celebrated sculptor through a the romantic back-looking gaze of veneration. While Wallace takes great care to illuminate the artist's difficulties, daily minutia, and treatment by other members of society with whom he had direct or indirect contact, he often glazes over his foibles, as is common of anyone whom we, as a present culture, deify. Wallace is fair, though, in contrast with historians who encase in marble the famous artist, himself, to preserve their pristine impression of his genius.
Why do we deify people? Individually, I see it as a beautiful justification for the variety of personalities and personal attributes we find in a world of people who are, indeed, not just like us. Culturally though, why do we zombies choose a lord? Why do we imbue a real person with the entire catalog of personal virtues in order to worship them? While plausible that a real person can be gifted with equal measures of some contrapuntal and even contradictory virtues (supreme perfection and supreme speed, for instance), its unrealistic and unfair to practice deification on human beings. But this is how folklore is borne.
As a filmmaker, I find that filmmakers often seek to do the opposite. A historical figure is so bound up in his tall-tale icon, it takes a certain measure of defamation on the part of the filmmaker to bring the genius "down to our level." However, the genius, depending on the nature and sturdiness of his fame can often be reduced to some cheating, swindling ne'er-do-well, and we lose our respect for either the figure or the filmmaker, depending on who we see as the least honest. Because he's dead, does it make it safe to deify the soul of the artist? As a culture, are we simply setting ourselves up for failure? And if that artist was still alive, are we more likely setting him up for failure.
I find in my own personal form of feminism the same problems of deification found in the art historical realm. Culturally if women are or were raised by the romantic and idealistic, upon a pedestal like vestal virgins carved into Michaelangeo's masterfully chosen marble, then there they must rest, frozen in mid-animation and essentially dead to be allowed to continue to exist. A pedestal is no place for a living being. There, under splendid shafts of light, they become stiff in an attempt just to continue living. But once the deity leaves his or her alter-cage, we the idealizers, the cruel romantics, unjustly feel lied to. Who were you that you tricked us so long?! You are nothing but an impostor, a fake and whore whose sole intention is to pretend to be something we will worship!
As woman, we unbound our feet, walked right up to these ignorant romantics and said "enough is enough!" But to avoid a sexist judgment, there are also women who idealize men by created gender roles emphasizing ideas like physical strength, guardianship, etc. there is a something about the discovery of someone who is in touch with the parts of ourselves that we are not, that encourages idealism from the latter. We see sensitivity in artists and assume the possessor of this quality was simply born special. But art is not a medium's occupation. It simply takes a practiced degree of spiritual searching and self reflection, both at our ugliest primal expressions, and at how ugly our individual egos are until we can lose our faces in making. Perhaps spectators are secretly as afraid to lose their egos as the artist who becomes lost in his/her work.
But perhaps it's just this ironic tension that has us making and spectating in the first place.
In his critique of modernity and his romanticism of Archaic Greek "tragic culture," Nietzsche speaks about the 'immediacy' of the cultural relationship to God(s)/spirituality. People could feel the presence of god directly through a painted vase. That ornamental image WAS God, and you knew because you could experience it with your senses, right now, in the present. What Socrates introduced with his rationalism and logic paved the way for the Martin Luther's and Calvin's Reformation. The Word is God, not the image. The image is of the heathen. This jives specifically with Socrates' ideas, passed on through his student Plato, of virtue. Through the rational and methodical Socratic method, we should all come to the same conclusions. That conclusion somehow, because we came to respect Socrates' groundbreaking suggestions, would need to come to the individual separately of their physical body. That is to say, the body is a fetter and a stumbling block from enlightenment. Therefore the enlightenment of knowing God could naturally no longer come from the experience of our visual sense.
So the Word is law now. And I'm an artist/philosopher, not an Art Historian, but I think it's Barthes whose Death of the Author finally exposed and de-deified Socratic rationalism. Nietzsche would say we had become alienated from our world, first and foremost because we had become estranged from our own bodies. We were not meant to trust our senses as they were physical barriers from our metaphysical ability to discover and understand God. Somehow reading text appears to transcend the bodily fetter with which we experience images. Nevermind how written language developed from glyphs. Like Socrates' universal logic by which we should naturally all of us come to the right and good and moral conclusions we need to live this present, but transient mortal coil of a life, a system of glyphs becomes abstracted, checked for efficiency, aestheticized, and catalogued as a law. The Word is a system of glyphs-turned-icons that we practice and memorize until we forget where they began. Gutenberg prints, with mathematical perfection, each letter in each word of a doctrine, and we suddenly have forgotten that our minds are looking at a system of images which each hold individual history and personal meaning. Now we are looking at Words.
The printed page lends itself to a new kind of immediacy that is firmly married to the industrial revolution. Machines become the new God as they are fashioned from the rational paths of modern science, the religious pinnacle of the beginning of modernity. I probably need to read Death of the Author again - but I concern myself in part with graphic design and with Letterforms. There is a mathematical preciseness to each letter of a font, which most people take for granted. Each letter in a font is not simply a letter in the alphabet but an architectural structure as meaningful to us in our time as was the Parthenon.
As far as making and meaning, we have been preoccupied with universal systems to unite us. We have abstracted images to the point that they no longer can allow us to experience personal meaning; that immediacy which the Archaic Greeks experienced when they used their senses to experience God. Somehow we still make art out of words. Artists are determined to find and make images that can give that experience and immediacy that we long for as mortals.
