“Here’s a good thing to do if you go to a party and you don’t know anybody: First take out the garbage. Then go around and collect any extra garbage that people might have, like a crumpled napkin, and take that out too. Pretty soon people will want to meet the busy garbage guy. ”
-Jack Handy
For the past week and a bit I’ve been chipping away at a bit of a review/summary of a film I saw with Michael and Berk at the Melbourne International Film festival. Whenever I go to write some more I get distracted or give up so here’s the trailer plus a semblance of what I managed to write. I would highly recommend it if you’re in to long Russian films filled with gore, public urination and crazy medieval people.
Going into a film knowledgeable of it’s mammoth 3 hour running length does influence your reading of it but I feel that if I didn’t know this I would have felt even more confined by the world presented in Hard To Be A God. For anyone who witnessed Aleksei Yuryevich German’s swan song at MIFF without the knowledge of it’s running time must have felt completely imprisoned in the claustrophobia of the film unaware it would ever reach a conclusion. Like the films protagonist Don Rumata a human scientist sent to a far away planet to study it’s transition from medieval life into prosperity, we the audience felt far from earth, longing for comfort.
The film drudged through long takes of sheer brutality, the camera situation amongst the bustling panicked scenes. Dialogue was delivered alongside grunts, wails and screams directly to the face of the listener so as not to be lost amongst the din of its medieval setting. The film kept the audience at a constant state of unease as characters struggles in confined locations.
Every single monochromatic shot was dripping with mud, the medieval setting of the film was purely horrific. This film made even the most stark and brutal representation of this age look glossy and romanticised. Each shot features some form of rotting food or carcass covered in mud. Black Blood mixed with mud and water, becoming just another layer of grime the characters existed within.
The film took the audience in a vicious head and did not relent. So often the camera was shoved in the face of grotesque looking beings before swinging wildly to follow the action. Scene would draw on without a cut, every setting rich with characters, the camera just another bewildered onlooker. This style was incredibly alienating and blurred the distinction between omniscience and whether we were watching the film through the eyes of bewildered character. Chills went through my spine almost every time a character looked directly into the camera chuckling or staring blankly. It was truly as if like the Don we had come to this planet and were stuck there observing helplessly as vile and violent life carried on.
Due to the films brutal honesty moments of comedy were bizarre and cruel. I did not find myself alone chuckling, as the Don was attack with a giant fish upon entry into a rival’s keep. Even in the most horrific scenes of battle, failing arms became pantomimic.
Don Rumata’s longing for Earth was evident in moments of silence, juxtaposing the frantic and confonting scenes. The camera draws back no longer another character in these confrontations. These scenes usually focus on Don as he sits in a rare moment of peace ,clearly longing for home, planet Earth. The audience share his feelings of alienation and longing for home. Once again we are one of Don’s colleagues longing to return to a world where poverty and disease does not lurk around every corner of crumbling stone. At the conclusion of the film we the audience are given our freedom, unlike Don Rumata whose only connection to the Earth he loves is the smooth jazz he plays on his primitive saxophone as he drudges on….
In this image is my car and my great neighbour Arie.
This image is also one that I took for Writing Media Texts last semester.
In it I was attempting to channel the work of Gregory Crewdson, who creates highly constructed cinematic images. I find his work really quite eerie and alienating. The fact that his images are almost always set in suburbia they have a nostalgic feeling, almost as if you remember the scene walking home from school or in a trashy 90s film. A friend of mine also said that my image reminded her of Google Maps which gives it another creepy sort of voyeuristic element.
Looking back I feel that I could have stage the image a whole lot better. The body was far to close to the car and any yuppy with half a brain can tell that the dry patch of the road reveals where my car was parked moments before. I feel that I could have also enhanced the mood of the piece if I had spent more time adjusting the camera settings.
Thanks Arie for being a great model.
Like the past 5 symposiums I drifted between an avid listener and abuser of social media. One second I would enjoying the banter between Betty and Adrian (making sure to keep an eye on Elliot) and then a split second later I would be giggle at Kenton’s wit in a facebook message. I made this admission because I feel somewhat guilty but also because it’s networked media and I feel that there could be some future potential in linking the two things together. I’m aware that many other students blog during the symposium and I wonder what would happen if were all to share our questions and information on Mediafactory. Adrian could be live posting links to particular articles or examples of hypertexts instead of just showing them on the projector. Whilst Elliot elaborates upon an idea, Betty could link everyone to a blog post she saw earlier in the week that was particularly relevant (whilst we were obviously still listening to Elliot).
For the sake of this post I hope that this doesn’t already happen and I look like a fool. For my own sake I hope that it does and come week 7 Symposium I’ll be part of the Mediafactory party (instead of laughing at Kenton’s message).
Any idea that seems to be undercurrent in all of the symposiums is that culturally we demand our narratives to conclude or to end. This goes hand in hand with the media form. It isn’t possible to have a book without a last page or a film without a final shot. This is an issue of the medium itself as opposed to the story or content. When thinking about this in film I always remember the Falls Festival 2012/13 where Sampology mixed video and music together for his set. DJs in a sense re propagate music to create something new, songs purely becoming chunks of a greater piece. This notion is overtly simplistic but reminiscent of hypertext with a piece being constructed of numerous parts that viewed on their own would be contained works. What I guess I’m getting at is that if we started to think of video in a similar sense it would be a step towards a media that did not have to have a final shot. Instead of editing video we thought of it as mixing, bringing in footage from differing works as a means to convey an idea or mood. This thought was also inspired by the discussion of hyper videos and being able to view different aspects of a video on demand, the viewer dictating its structure.
Just imagine that every creative commons stock footage clip was linked to another/multiple clip(s) that created some form of meaning or narrative.
In anticipation of their concert this Thursday evening I watched a live set of Neurosis, a band known for their progressive outlook on sludgy post metal. In a sense they are sort of Pink Floyd for ‘metal’. Before I descend into a million pitchfork-esque sentence describing sub-genres, I’m just going to say it’s heavy and primal. They’re a band with an ever growing and expansive sound that has inspired the work of countless bands. There is something quite cinematic about their modulating chord structures hidden amongst a wall of distortion.
Better late than never. I hope.
When first hearing of our blogging exercise I harboured both dread and excitement. Excitement at being able to produce something tangible and interact but dreading that this product was public and I was going to have to face my own technophobia. Both my excitement and dread were fuelled by Adrian Mile’s piece Blogs in Media education. The piece revelled the full potential of what I could create but also highlight how easy it is for others to view. However what excited me was the notion of blogs being something (ironically) organic that is always growing, changing and dependent upon its interaction with other blogs. The more we share between blogs and other places on the World Wide Web the more our blogs grow. The more we write, the more we find tonal variation as we shift between lengthy and more succinct posts.
As Adrian delved back into the discussion of books having a definite beginning and ending my mind wandered. More specifically it wandered back to the days when I read the dog-eared Doctor Who Make Your Own Adventure Books. Every time I sent K-9 to some morbid robotic demise it was under different circumstances at a different place in the novel. In that sense the book didn’t end where the yellowing pages finished, it could have easily jumped back to section 14. You could bounce between sections, stuck within a cycle of actions that always lead you back to being captured by Daleks. If you were stupid enough to try and escape immediately you would be captured once again. It’s just like when you keep finding yourself back on Slayer’s Wikipedia page due to some convoluted hyperlink trail (A friend told me this happens).
After writing all this I remember that even in this sense the Make Your own Adventure, story itself contains a beginning middle and an end…. the end being your own death.
Yes, I am fully aware that it is week three of the semester and I’m yet to post on my blog….I’m now going to proceed to make pathetic excuses that attempt to hide my own laziness. By acknowledging this character pitfall, I’m halfway to addressing its detrimental effect on my life, right?
My technophobia and inability to control a computer has played somewhat of a role in my online inactivity, this is not really an excuse though seeing as though I could spend a mere few hours fiddling and I would be an expert at this stuff. On the other hand I have also had to come to terms with the fact that this is public which feeds my fear of failure. Once overcoming this fear, I will be resound to the fact there probably won’t be a grammar Nazi keen to destroy my happiness by critiquing a poorly structure sentence (similar to this one).
I hope that by posting this I may overcome my fear and that I might feel inclined to change my habits towards technology and so with that I shall start my binge blogging.
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