Week 5.
I’m only going to discuss the lecture this week, because I don’t have time to do the reading. Sorry!
My favourite part of the week 5 lecture was Jasmine’s description of her childhood game of pretending to be an alien seeing the world for the very first time (noticing the musical quality of the muffled chatting downstairs, the red colour of her bedspread, etc.). I can relate to this. I notice beauty in ordinary things everyday. One of my favourite things is the window(s) of my apartment. Each day is extraordinary. If it’s overcast and raining, the windows glisten with silver specks of water, framing a sky that is awesomely enveloped in a white expanse of endless cloud.
If it’s nighttime and raining, the windows sparkle with brilliantly gold water droplets lit by bright orange streetlights against a blanket of black.
If it’s a sunny afternoon, the sun will project blinding, gold light into the room, illuminating every wall. Let me stress the word blinding. It is as if the apartment is being engulfed by the sun and any second will explode in fire.
And the sunsets. The sunsets change every single time. Sometimes you think the apocalypse has come and the world is going to end. The rest of my family are used to it. But I’ll never get used to it. And I never want to get used to it.
That’s just one example of how much appreciation I get from minor, everyday things. Another example is on train rides – travelling through dilapidated, graffitied areas are my favourite <3 (especially when there are two worlds combined – a dilapidated area under massive construction in the shadow of the grand, imposing city skyscrapers).
The same thing happens every time a watch a film. It’s usually the cinematography which gets me, but sometimes it can be the sound. I can’t help it. I appreciate. I feel like my brain releases an unhealthy amount of dopamine in response to these things. I remember my mum always pointing things out in awe and exclaiming how amazing they were on road trips or walks or whatnot – an intricately twisted tree-trunk, a simple grassy hill, etc. And I remember being irritated at this because I would have to turn my head every few seconds to look at something ordinary that I did not care in the least about. She used to be an artist. I now understand the feeling. The overwhelming awe and appreciation for a storyline, an image, a soundscape. Or just for things in everyday life. It’s like a drug.
Anyway, Jasmine went on to explain how her game worked by taking the familiar and making it unfamiliar. Shedding new light onto it.
And this is also what Korsakow does. Korsakow asks us to think differently about film and narrative. It asks us to see them in a new light. It forces us into self-interrogation about what we think film and narrative are and why. It puts pressure on us to re-evaluate everything we know about film and narrative. To rethink our assumptions. To rethink our role as ‘makers’.
This is what I believe this subject to be about. This is why I think this subject is so valuable. It is the only subject that forces us to question and rethink everything we are being taught in the other subjects. We are not just being passed down information in this subject. We are being forced to reevaluate the information that has been passed down to us, to rethink its validity, and then to think further than it. We are learning to think (and create), rather than learning to know.
Adrian discussed how the filmmaker role is different for Korsakow. The filmmaker is not a filmmaker. They are an experience designer. They are not a “heroic architect director” (?). They don’t get to make decisions that grant absolute ends. Instead, they work with audiences to build experiences. Audience participation suspends authority.
As media students, our current vision of our future profession is industry-focused. We want to work somewhere established that makes money. Production companies, publishing agencies, etc. We don’t want to make experimental stuff because of concerns like no audience and no money. But, then again, we pirate content. Why do we expect that our future audience won’t do the same? Why do we expect that we will even have a salary? And then there are other questions. Why do we assume our audience is like us? Why do we assume that they’ll watch our stuff from beginning to end with rapt attention? The industry we assume we are going into is crumbling. Well, maybe not crumbling. But it is changing. Audiences are going to mess up our work. They’re not going to watch it as we want them to. They’ll watch parts, skip others, mess it all up, take it, change it into something else. Korsakow provides a platform to explore this changing medium of video.