#stillimages

Technology moves fast… but what slows the mind enough to truly connect?... We can meet people across the world with a click...but a real connection? It lives in the pauses. In the time we take to linger with an image… to feel someone through a voice… To sense their energy before a single word is spoken. That’s how we begin to touch the essence.

I was always interested in photography since I was a little girl. My parents always told me that I took a lot of photographs by using the camera they bought to capture and document my memories.

That is why, after I watched both “La Jetée” and “Boogie Woogie Daddy”, I was very affected and influenced by them in a positive way. Both of them are mostly constructed from still photos and turned from a film by using editing techniques. Shortly, they tell the story by using mostly photographs.

The editing techniques in “La Jetée” is more varied comparing to “Boogie Woogie Daddy”. They both have a voice narrating the story. In “La Jetée”, straight cuts are used for short time passes, and dissolves cuts & fade ins/outs used for showing long time passes. The dissolves cuts are used for generally combining two shots visually in “La Jetée”. Some people think that the editing techniques in “La Jetée” is ‘simply poetic’. Since the movie contains photographs, the only continuous variable is the sound and it is used for narrating the story. “La Jetée” was more different than “Boogie Woogie Daddy” to me in terms of its topic. I think that the photographs are also very poetic in “La Jetée” in terms of their usage of light.

The topic of “Boogie Woogie Daddy” is more personal, I believe. So, that’s why, the photographs are also personal. I guess, Erik Bafving used real photographs that his father took at that time. So even that thing makes the movie more personal. Generally, straight cuts are used in “Boogie Woogie Daddy”. However, the sound and the photographs are suitable for narrating the story.

La Jetée is a classic sci-fi french film that based on how nobody can escape time. It’s about a boy who witnesses a death at an airport and soon after when he grows up and all the civilisation is destroyed, he is chosen by a group of scientists to experiment upon. They wanted him to go into the future and the past to ask for aid for the present circumstances. After they are done experimenting they plan to kill him, he tried to escape but theres a twist I will tell you about in the end.

I was asked to make notes on how I analysed the movie and I’m gonna talk about them here. La Jetée is the first film I have seen that has depicted its story through only pictures and incredible sound effects that make us imagine the scene like it’s moving. The black white vibrating pictures show how the people in the movie are stuck, stuck in that period of time unable to escape that particular moment. The still images also for me depict a sense of sadness, sort of emptiness that everybody is feeling at that time. The dramatic music and sound helps me in visualising the feeling and potential movement of the images.

Even when the narrator was talking, there were whispering sounds in the background of some images probably meaning to show that there were people in the back end planning something sort of secretive that they don’t want the audience to know about. But still I am a little confused on how that played a role in the movie.

I wanted to talk about the love story that the man had when they experimenters sent him into the past. It was depicted quite interestingly, I liked how each time both of them met it was just in a moment of flashes for example: a flash of both of them walking in the garden would abruptly cut to a flash of them walking in a museum. He did not know if his equation with her was real or imaginative which made me even more curious as if any of it was real at all. There after he was sent to the future to get the necessary aid to save the present. He found a group of scientists that were good and that helped him escape the present to go into the past to seek the woman he loved. 

The ending is what caught hold of me. As he was running toward the woman at the airport, a person from the present followed him to the past and shot him. The interesting part being that the boy who witnessed the shooting at the airport was essentially of himself. As a small boy he obsessed over that small memory not knowing that he watched himself die already. 

Today we created 3 still images which has a theme of Artuadian. By doing this myself and the group managed to make more of an understanding about Artaud and his way of creating traumatic pieces.

To evaluate on this we focused on our expressions and body positions to give the impression and theme of anger, shock and twisted.