This semester, at least at this early date, I am very interested in ‘natural laws’ and the ideas and presentations of both time and light, particularly how we can represent these ideas using the cinematic and narrative techniques that depend upon them in their essence. Film uses both time and light to explore narrative, humanity and truth, but can we use the thing itself to explore and represent the idea in a fashion that doesn’t misrepresent the scientific and emotional truths that lie at the heart of our human understanding of the concept?
So much of film depends on light. The correct use of exposure, white balance, lighting, colour all affect the final result, but how can we explore light as a concept without losing its essence or surrounding it with a narrative? Or, conversely, how can we create a narrative that supports and communicates a meaning or shape that isn’t necessarily anthropic?
Importantly, human life depends on light. Our eyes are the most important sense we have, and we construct our world, media and industries around the processing and consumption of visual forms. Ironically, light is invisible, but it also enables vision. Taking this to an even bigger scale, light, from the sun, powers everything on earth. Most biospheres depend on sunlight at some level, but even those that subside on the energy from the Earth’s core require energy formed from processes put into play when the sun and solar system were formed. Even oil and coal come from biological material which depended on the sun in its time, and other forms of power, like nuclear power comes from heavy metals formed during the birth of the sun and their distribution about the solar system.
The physics of light is also fascinating. Photons and their properties are key to so many processes, and the speed of light is as fast as any object is able to achieve in the known universe. As a side point, putting this alongside time is particularly interesting,. Relatively proves that the faster you go, the slower time appears to go for the traveller, and film often applies principles of time dilation. Scenes often happen more slowly for the participants than actually takes place in the world/reality of the film and to throw further confusion into the mix, the laws of drama have their own influence on the world of the film.
Clearly, investigating concepts of natural law and how film applies them to the construction of cinematic arguments, narratives and representations of ideas could be a very fruitful way to spend the semester, as well as the subsequent collisions with the requirements or industrial forms of drama. After all, humans are made from the fabric of the universe, and it is only natural that the creation, production and viewing of our art-forms will at some level follow the same laws that make up the laws of physics and mathematics. Applying these natural laws after research and experimentation may also result in new forms and new was to approach the semester and media in the future.
This synthesis of natural law and human mindset may result in a personal ‘3rd way’ for me to explore and apply to my life and the post-modern navigation of my future. As the world becomes commodified and datafied, with fragmentation occurring all around us, a revisitation of natural principles and the laws of the universe could provide a set of guiding principles for exploring media, work and life; aiding me in expressing ideas in a way that helps them express their essence and narrative without losing the purity of the idea itself.
I understand that these ideas of ‘natural law’ are just human attempts to draw a truth, and we cannot observe without changing, but maybe we can minimise our impact to an extent that we cannot tell a human made the film, as though the universe itself birthed a piece of media that expresses the truth of something in a way that is inviolable.