Travels, explorations, etc.

On April 17, the “Disaster Girl” NFT meme sold for $500,000. The NFT meme, which pictures a young girl mischievously grinning while a building is ablaze behind her, is stamped with a unique bit of digital code that marks its authenticity, and stored on blockchain. This sell represents a current trend in NFTs and increasingly higher value placed on their existence. These sold NFTs are expanding the definition of the core reality of an image. 

The film “Made You Look: A True Story about Fake Art” is a documentary about one of the largest art frauds in history. At the core of the story was the inability to validate the authenticity of many works of art. While there were many signs of fraud (i.e., lack of provenance, inconsistencies in construction), the art in question was able to be sold successfully by savvy dealers. NFTs on the other hand, will change fraud risk in art. Because NFT certification is on the blockchain platform, its authenticity is a public ledger that has a stored history. Authentication becomes a much easier, concrete conversation than previously the art world has experienced. 

“Battleship Potemkin” begins by informing the audience this film is about the spirit of revolution and the evolution of that spirit into the revolutionary elan. Director Sergei Eisenstein breaks up the film into chapters that provide structure for how this evolution happens: from the initial rage that sparked the rebellion on the ship (“Men and Maggots”) all the way to the bloody assault on the rebels (“The Odessa Steps”) and finally, a triumphant victory (“One Against All”). I found this film particularly strong in its use of raw, up close and personal displays of emotion. 

Firstly, I found the scenes of maggots on the meat on the battleship particularly powerful. Multiple times the film cutaway to close-ups of the maggots, leaving no doubt in the audience’s mind that this meat was not fit to eat. Close enough to leave the audience slightly nauseous. When the doctor comes to inspect the meat and declares one only needs to wash off the worms with brine, the audience understands the ridiculousness of this statement. Already, just in the first chapter of the film, I was already sympathizing strongly with the soldiers and their dire predicament and treatment. This feeling of support for the rebellion only grows throughout the film, peaking at the horrifying scene at the Odessa Steps. 

At the Odessa steps, I was shocked by the brutality of the troops shooting on innocent men, women and children. When a woman’s child falls behind on the steps, he is trampled and bloodied. She returns back to hold him, and walks back up to the firing soldiers to beg them to stop shooting. Her son’s face is covered in blood. Eisenstein makes sure to show the woman’s face clearly, especially when the soldiers decide to ignore her pleas and shoot her. The soldier’s faces are never shown; they are left nameless, cold, cruel. 

When I first began watching La Jetee, I felt gaps, breaks in my understanding of what was happening in the film. I found it initially difficult to become absorbed in cinema that felt choppy and seemed to halt with every new image. However, as I began to follow the storyline, I found that my mind could fill in the gaps where the images stopped and began again. I was reminded of a brain teaser that human brains can read any words as long as the first and last letter are in order—the letters in between can be completely out of order and the brain will still make sense if it. As I came to the close of this science fiction story, I considered two questions: would I classify this as a film? And did the still images allow me to focus more on the storyline? 

In Raymond Bellour’s The Film Stilled, he quotes cinema as “the system which reproduces movement as a function of any-instant-whatever; that is, a function of equidistant instants selected so as to create an impression of continuity.” Agreeing with this definition, I consider La Jetee to also be cinema, not only photography. While the film was only told in still images, I felt movement in them. At the end of La Jetee the pace of the images grows faster, there is strong continuity between the images. The moments before and after the protagonist's death feel seamless. All these signs point to cinema. 

James Baldwin used the tale of three characters, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., to frame his thoughts in “I am Not Your Negro”. All three were heroes and played a crucial role in moving forward the civil rights conversation in the U.S. and worldwide. However, in all of their cases, their heroism was marked by martyrdom. All were killed before the age of 40, their unfinished work a gaping hole that left me thinking: what would the race conversation look like today if these heroes were still alive, continuing their work and advocacy? I was struck by the amount of tragic heroes named in the film, and I was left thinking of all the other heroes lost that were lifted up during the Black Lives Matter movement: Breanna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and countless others. Baldwin states in the film that “we carry our history with us.” He shows that in life and film, black people continue to face violence and social terror, are oppressed by public and private institutions, and are denied the American dream. 

One small, but significant result of this is the lack of black heroes on the screen. Baldwin uses films such as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and others to show how black stereotypes were perpetuated and highlight the lack of black protagonists. One film that has recently changed the dynamic on black heroes is Marvel’s Black Panther. When Black Panther came out in 2018, it was one of the first films to have an African-American director and predominantly black cast. In “I am Not Your Negro”, Baldwin reflects on action movies such as King Kong with white hero Carl Denham; I can’t imagine how pleased Baldwin would be to watch Black Panther’s hero T’Challa (played by Chadwick Boseman) regain his rightful place on the throne. The representation of these black heroes in film is hugely important to inspire our current and next generation.