I was absent from this week’s class on Thursday, but after looking through the readings and lecture slides, I’ve had a few thoughts spring to mind ~

Thinking about movement, ‘In the Mood for Love’ was definitely a more engaging film for me, and not only because it wasn’t as lengthy as L’Aventura, but it was the use of movement that did it – as Dan said, the film is like a dance. I have an appreciation for the still image, but ITMFL moved so continuously across the nooks and crannies and doors of the apartment that it gave a kind of voyeuristic feeling – like the audience is moving along in the scene as the characters are.

‘Toward a new aesthetic’ was a tough reading this week, but what interested me was the example of the scene from ‘The Matrix’ as an example of moving through bullet time by splicing images together. It messes around with the temporal qualities to establish the narrative timing rather than real time. I’m still trying to wrap my head around this, but I didn’t previously considering how movement affects perception of time and how it can be manipulated to change perception. In the opening scene of ITMFL, it seems like framing the show within these narrow hallways/door frames and then using the continuous editing gives off this atmosphere that everything and everyone is moving at a quicker pace, whereas in The Matrix, movement is manipulated to seem lengthy and slowed down so as to give off a computerised/non human look of the characters. I’m not sure if this is making sense, but I’m looking to explore more of this talk about movement in my essay this week – hopefully I will get the hold of the movement then! However, the point being that this examples of movement in the frame are helping me to understand how temporal qualities are effected.

References 

Bruce Isaacs, ‘The Ontology of Bullet-Time’, In Towards a New Film Aesthetic(2008), Continuum, pp. 142-147.

What I found particularly interesting from this week’s reading was that Sontag identified the notion that the photograph is objective, where the drawing or painting may not be. The transparency of the photograph or frame is however not that simple, because, as she put it, photographs are still interpretations which are often drafted and thoroughly composed. This is further reiterated when discussing how the frame operates regarding perspective and focus and how the elements (lighting colour, composition etc.) work to define the way someone observing the frame sees it.

Not a lot is really transparent because the photographer has so much control – for example one of my fifty frames was of a treetop with the sky in the background. I had framed the image in such a way that the power lines were omitted from view. The photograph isn’t really comparable at all to what my eye could actually see, as I could just look downwards and see the power lines – the photograph was a complete construction.

The concept of Plato’s cave is fascinating to me – the artist can obviously manipulate the frame as to what they wish observers to see. This means that could either idealise the frame – on a small scale, by omitting the power lines I made my frame more ideal – or they can present only the negative, a less ideal point of view. The frame is very much a portal into not only what the image contains but also the artist’s perspective and their motivations. In this way I can see how photography, and artwork in general, is an ethics of seeing.

References 

Susan Sontag, ‘In Plato’s Cave’, In On Photography (1979), Penguin, pp. 3-13.

Prior to the first studio session today I still had a relatively vague understanding of what the On The Frame studio would entail – the single word ‘cinematography’ came to mind. However after brainstorming some of the terms relative to what’s in the frame it’s starting to come together. What particularly interests me are composition, colour, staging, lighting and repetition. Admittedly, I am very much so a story person but I think it will be a welcome (though a somewhat daunting) challenge to delve deeper into more of the aesthetic/design intricacies of ‘the frame’. Colour and semiotics associated with colours always grab my attention in the frame and that is something I can easily warm to. However, I chose lighting as this has always challenged me as it’s a technical component I find hard to grasp – hopefully when I take my fifty frames I’ll get more comfortable with exploring lighting and it’s possibilities.