parindamai

More to come on 3D shapes and video-based medium, using clothes from childhood, playing with personal narrative and “time” as a theme to explore ;)

and thought it was a such a good resource for studying 

1) editing techniques: wow, so many.

There’re also many lessons mentioned on various sites to learn from such as:

http://www.filmclub.org/assets/pdf/manwithamovie.pdf

https://stevenbrantley.wordpress.com/2012/04/23/dziga-vertovs-modern-film-techniques/

Double exposure, juxtapositions of shots that may or may not belong in the same scene, fast motion and slow motion, Dutch angle (Dutch angle is a technique used in photography to create or convey dramatic effects or portray a psychological uneasiness or tension in the subject being filmed.), stop motion, freeze frame, etc. Also, so many beautiful and mesmerizing shots and superimpositions of shots to learn from! 

In particular, I love the effect of fading in an object or a part of something else that’s not there in the preceding frames. E.g. the pouring beer into a cup and the man with a movie camera appears. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z97Pa0ICpn8) It looks like magic. :)

I found it hilarious that the NYTimes review of the movie at the time said that Dziga didn’t take into consideration the duration of shots required for to hold the audience’s attention. That’s in 1929. Look at music videos and commercials today... This seems like a case for mainstream media taking things from experimental art that’s originally of art-historical significance and too hard for the mainstream to gobble. 

2) The matching of such realism-style scenes of everyday life and the orchestral music. I LOVE this. One, I don’t think, normally matches the mood of the everyday industrial urban grunge with a grandiose, exquisite orchestral music. It creates an interesting effect at least in me. It’s not completely surreal, but does put me in an unusual head-space.

 The pacing of the music ties closely with the pacing of the film/the mood of the audience.

3) I think the claim that the camera sees what the eyes don’t see shouldn’t be taken literally. I think the break from a conventional narrative -- conventional up to the time this film was made -- is to be appreciated. The camera lies, too, meaning the actions captured on camera isn’t necessarily “more-real” than the otherwise-not-captured, which I think seems to be what Dziga was romanticizing a bit with the innovative use of camera and editing techniques of this film. Today I am of the school of thought that doesn’t think Objectivity exists, but Dziga seems to almost proclaim that his Kino-Eye can capture that/Absolute Truth. 

It is empowering though to be reminded that filmmakers get to show the world what the filmmakers see, and the world see it accordingly. It’s a privileged position to be...

4) I love the fact that we see a camera man in the documentary, documenting the process of documenting.

5) Always interesting deconstructive viewpoint from Robert Ebert review:

Most movies strive for what John Ford called "invisible editing" -- edits that are at the service at the storytelling, and do not call attention to themselves. Even with a shock cut in a horror film, we are focused on the subject of the shot, not the shot itself. Considered as a visual object, "Man With a Movie Camera" deconstructs this process. It assembles itself in plain view. It is about itself, and folds into and out of itself like origami. It was in 1912 that Marcel Duchamp shocked the art world with his painting "Nude Descending a Staircase." It wasn't shocked by nudity--the painting was too abstract to show any. They were shocked that he depicted the descent in a series of steps taking place all at the same time. In a way, he had invented the freeze frame.

By filming in three cities and not naming any of them, Vertov had a wider focus: His film was about The City, and The Cinema, and The Man With a Movie Camera. It was about the act of seeing, being seen, preparing to see, processing what had been seen, and finally seeing it. It made explicit and poetic the astonishing gift the cinema made possible, of arranging what we see, ordering it, imposing a rhythm and language on it, and transcending it. Godard once said "The cinema is life at 24 frames per second." Wrong. That's what life is. The Cinema only starts with the 24 frames -- and besides, in the silent era it was closer to 18 fps. It's what you doafteryou have your frames that makes it Cinema.

Basically if I’m ever in need of something to shake my brain or give me some ideas/inspiration when editing a video, this movie is a go-to. So many effects and techniques to pick and choose from!

This might be the best-written, most intedisciplinary summary I’ve ever read on the debate on consciousness throughout history.

Written by the female scientist-artist who I now greatly admire, Margaret Wertheim.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-and-why-exactly-did-consciousness-become-a-problem

How exactly did consciousness become a problem? And why, after years off the table, is it a hot research subject now?

Some quotes:

“Just as art became literal rather than iconic with the advent of modern science, our concept of a moral universe became subject to homogenisation, and finally to a kind of erasure.

Once we take our universe to be a mathematical arena, a question arises as to where in this scheme the realm of the soul might be found”

“For while Descartes championed mathematical science as a way forward for understanding the physical world, as a Catholic, he also insisted on the reality of the Christian soul. Hence his famous dualism, with its two domains of being: the res extensa (the extended realm of matter in motion), and the res cogitans (the realm of thoughts, feelings, emotions and moral action).” 

“Henry James, Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka propel us into the unique sensibilities of their protagonists. James, whose writing has been likened to a literary version of impressionism, was deeply interested in representing the consciousness of his characters, while his brother, the psychologist and philosopher William James, gave us the term ‘stream of consciousness’ to describe the flow of thoughts, feelings and ideas that ramble through our minds. James coined this term in his book The Principles of Psychology (1890), and in the early decades of the 20th century it came to be associated with such quintessentially modernist writers as James Joyce.”

“With the advent of quantum mechanics they found that, in order to make sense of what their theories were saying about the subatomic world, they had to posit that the scientist-observer was actively involved in constructing reality. At the subatomic level, reality appeared to be a subjective flow in which objects sometimes behave like particles and other times like waves. Which facet is manifest depends on how the human observer is looking at the situation.”

“Forty years ago, the American theoretical physicist John Wheeler proposed a series of thought experiments to test if an observer could affect whether light behaved as a particle or a wave and, in 2007, the French physicist Alain Aspect proved that they could. Just this April, Nature Physics reported on a set of experiments showing a similar effect using helium atoms. Andrew Truscott, the Australian scientist who spearheaded the helium work, noted in Physics Today that ‘99.999 per cent of physicists would say that the measurement… brings the observable into reality’. In other words, human subjectivity is drawing forth the world.”

“This is all thrilling science, yet a question remains: will any of it explainsubjective experience? Chalmers, the philosopher, claims that the problem of experience is not mechanistically reducible and he argues that it will ‘persist even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained’. In other words, he says, no amount of detail about neuronal potentials and interconnection is going to get us to the essence of subjectivity.Plenty of neuroscientists, physicists and philosophers disagree with him, but I’m on his side”

http://fusion.net/story/123618/is-there-any-such-thing-as-a-career-in-digital-journalism/

Michael Bierut

Also this:

Ben Fry

Note for myself - another technique for selecting and compiling interesting snippets, editing, and eventually putting it all back together as an interesting piece of media to consume. Source: lifehacker.

Ira Glass, on lav mic for documentary style interview.