#cindyjie

The boom of digital images has increase an avenue toward privacy exploitation, as Trevor Paglen points out in Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You). The nature of digital images being inherently understandable to computers, unlike unprocessed film where it is neither understandable to humans nor computers, make them vulnerable to profiteering by system like the government and private companies built around collecting, analyzing, and selling data originating from the images. Even as people try to built things that circumvent the cameras and neural networks built to identify and extract information, because of the other sector’s desire to control and to profit, there will be continued developments in adversarial training and such to heighten the abilities of these hardware and software.

The film Daisies was made as a resistance to the state-controlled films in Czechoslovakia as part of the Czech New Wave of the 1960s. It’s use of two beautiful women to play characters who are living dolls then had their destructive nature lead into chaos goes to break the typical stereotypes for how feminine a women should be.

The synchronization of the clattering sound with the sharp jittery movements of the two women added to the effect of connecting their characters with dolls. The sound reminds me of vintage wooden dolls that have moving parts connect by string and when you lift the doll, the limbs hit each other making the clattering.

The usage of color in the film was also very intriguing. The switch between black and white to color, and the usage of monochromatic and duotone sections that switch super fast added to the intensity of the chaos felt through the film. It would be interesting to look into how and why Chyyilová chose certain colors, when to transition them, and the order they were in.

Through the reading, it was very interesting to think about how with montage, Deleuze calls the unit of time in movement images to be an action rather than how we typically segment time through defined number of minutes, hours, or days. Through the interplay of the placement of these actions, we can create contrast between the organic and the inorganic or for dialects between two sides of the montage, among other ways to create links between acts that lead from the start to the end that shows the development and resolution of the conflict. These come to be what Deleuze indicates as different schools of montage. Additionally, the set of the action can be close-up or far away, giving either room for the viewer to fill in the environment through their imagination or define the entirety of the scene, allows for the an intimate subjectivity to be felt in the objective set.

In the film, the procession of time was told fully through the jumping between action to action. Every scene, something was happening and not necessarily in sequential order or in the same spatial cadence of time. The conflict between the two sides of the working class and the authorities develops through the dialogue created with the slices of common people’s sources of anger and unrest with the poor delegation of resolution by the people in power.

The film The Battle of Algiers showcased exactly the type of cinema the creators of Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: Resolutions of the Third World Filmmakers Meeting worked to promote and characterized the type of decentralized tactical style of guerrilla warfare Multitude of War and Democracy in the Age of Empire: Resistance describes as the primal form of rebellion organization of the time.

In the film, neither the French nor the FLN were romanticized as this heroic figure that could do no wrong. The struggles of both sides were captured and the watcher develops empathy for both. The bombing of civilian area by the FLN really pierces the viewers as lives of many innocents were taken in this act of resistance, but the struggles of the Algiers as colonization oppressed them and disrupted their freedoms and culture make the viewers understand why they took this course of action. Similarly, the French were no saints either. Particularly disturbing was the police taking a journey to where he thought the head of the FLN lived and left a bomb there in the middle of the night, killing many innocent people, including children and elderly. The damage was almost worse because the buildings in the Algier’s part of society were tightly packed and decaying, making the impact of the bomb collapsing multiple families’ living quarters and killing all those within.

It is interesting to think about how injustice has been ingrained into the fundamentals of viewing, and how it has unknowingly just been accepted as normal. In The Racial Bias Built into Photography, Lewis goes into discussing how photography in the medium itself, a typically viewed as objective piece of material, started off on the foot of racial favoritism. Because the photographic film was developed for the best performance when capturing white skin, this promotes the underlying propaganda that white is “better.” To the unknowing mass public, they don’t think about these origins, and absorb what information photos have to give, developing a perception of racial bias, even without them perceiving their own tendencies. Just like how in the film I Am Not Your Negro, Baldwin believes that the general white population are able to interact and accept black people on a personal basis, but because of the constant media portrayal of white superiority and the lack of understanding of the living conditions of their black community friends, they hold onto rooted view that the people belong to the white race holds characteristics that place them above.

I find the ability of images to convey certain types of emotions through color and composition to be extremely fascinating, and for series of images to either intensify an emotion or create a story of an emotional roller-coaster to be astounding. Images are like a language that transcends lingual barriers, a form of communication that everyone can understand.

It would be really interesting to explore what aspects evoke certain types of emotions and if it is possible to create a series of images that tell a story that does not need an explanation. To achieve this, I think it would be beneficial to start reading about how color composition and emotions are tied together and how people interact with images. Later on, it would also be really useful to conduct a study of interviewing people for the person’s train of thought once presented with the same series of images and understand what pieces within these images impacted them in a specific way.