Tagged: fiction

Label jars not films?

According to Giannetti, for instance, “an essay is neither fiction nor fact, but a personal investigation involving both the passion and intellect of the author.”
Reading the Rascaroli reading this week, I found myself asking again if it is really that imperative to define terms such as ‘film essay’. The more we look at this type of writing, the more I think it’s completely useless and we should instead just make what we want to make and try to put the meaning we want into it – how it is received and judged and defined… I don’t really care for.
I think its essential for filmmakers to study film history in order to learn and be inspired and aspire to be, etc, but I’m getting more and more inclined to ignore labels altogether. If someone makes a great work that straddles fiction and non-fiction, I’m not going to sit here and write five pages about the “in-betweenness”. I really think it is more important what the work does than what the work quote unquote is.
Besides, didn’t we spend a whole semester unlearning what an essay or lecture is? This reading seems to argue the definition of a film essay and then gives a litany of others’ interpretations –> I’m confused what the relevance is, stating that there is a typology and then giving a number of definitions insinuating we can make our own definition? I don’t understand the exercise and I don’t understand the relevance of labels!

Ryan + Bogost

Ryan’s reading regarded the semantics of a narrative, with the suggested definition: “story is an event or sequence of events (the action), and narrative discourse is those events as represented.”

The following dimensions were also suggested to define what a narrative is:

I like to think about narrative and story because I enjoy reading and writing both fiction and non-fiction, so this reading is interesting to compare these two genres, but I’m unsure of the importance of this reading in regards to what we’ve studied so far in the course. Previously we have discussed in lectures that definitions by definition are inherently wrong and there are always exceptions to the rule, and that we shouldn’t waste time thinking about which box our work fits in to. On the other hand, I have felt strangely liberated by the constraints of the constraint tasks, so perhaps this reading can fit in to the course this way, but I’m still unsure. Ryan mentions the ‘do-it-yourself’ toolkit for definitions based on her eight conditions, so maybe we are able to satisfy ourselves with only a couple of these factors and ultimately define things individually.

Bogost’s reading about lists and literature made me ask myself if our sketch tasks are the film equivalent of a written list. For example, here is a ten second clip of things that define me: guitar, laptop, a candle, etc. It’s quite reminiscent of Barthes’ list of likes and dislikes mentioned in the article.

Why Today’s Inventors Need to Read More Science Fiction

“Fiction allows you to live more lives in the space-time of one lifetime than you would normally be able to.”

MIT researchers Dan Novy and Sophia Brueckner argue that the mind-bending worlds of authors such as Philip K. Dick and Arthur C. Clarke can help us not just come up with ideas for new gadgets, but anticipate their consequences.

How will police use a gun that immobilizes its target but does not kill? What would people do with a device that could provide them with any mood they desire? What are the consequences of a massive, instant global communications network?

Such questions are relevant to many technologies on the market today, but their first iterations appeared not in lab prototypes but in the pages of science fiction.

The Fluid Interfaces group’s “Flexpad” (MIT)

This fall, MIT Media Lab researchers Dan Novy and Sophia Brueckner are teaching “Science Fiction to Science Fabrication,” aka “Pulp to Prototype,” a course that mines these “fantastic imaginings of the future” for analysis of our very real present.

Read more here.