Jonathan Lorbachs Film 201 blog

Week 14-Videos

2008-04-23T10:04:00.000-07:00

This week I have chose to discuss the heavily modified Mexican porno screened in discussion. The first thing that immediately stood out was how the female form in all of the videos had been whited out, I believe most of my classmates came to that conclusion also. The reason for this being I believe is that, for one thing the video had to be somewhat tasteful if it was to be presented as art. But it also brought up some interesting ideas about the typical pornographic movie watcher, most don't watch these videos for their story lines or people's acting ability; (as evident by the actors in todays film) the key element of the porno was removed from this video, which seemed to be poking fun at the viewers or maybe taunting them. The movie still showed the mustached greasy men, so I found this to be a bit funny. Its like the filmmaker took the concept and turned it completely upside down by removing just one thing. Another side note to the movie, I also noticed that it wasn't always just the women that were whited out, but sometimes there would be other sections of the film with white blotches for no apparent reason. This seemed to only happen when the whited out female form was on screen so I guess this could be accredited to an unsteady hand while editing the film reel, but maybe it could have another reason. Whether it does or not is the question. That is all for this week.

Week 12-Negativland

2008-04-14T16:43:00.000-07:00

For this week i have chosen to discuss the band negativland and elaborate on the three points we are assigned to. 1) When it comes to what constitutes for their practice, they are sound collage artist where they mix different sound bites together to produce a finished musical "piece". From my research and videos i've watched they seem to mix more traditional approaches to performing music with less orthodox ideas. For example in some videos they would be playing guitars and singing, and in other videos they would be at keyboards and mixing boards altering sound clips. There was always an electronic element to it. Even when they were performing music with their own instruments there was usually some background white noise. 2) The goal of negativlands practice never seemed to be clearly stated on any the sources i checked, but it seems to me that are trying to broadcast different messages in non-traditional ways. It seems that almost all of their songs have an ideal behind them, some seem to be more serious about chastising religion or politics, while others are just poking fun, like at Kasey Kasem for example. Overall i just think they are trying to tell a message in the ways that they are best suited to. 3) Here is an example of Negativland in a live performance. That is all for this week.

Week 11-Quantitive Analysis

2008-04-07T18:12:00.000-07:00

Frampton's Quantitive Analysis process to determine the meaning of a movie is a very interesting concept to say the least. It seems to me that he is correct and wrong all at the same time. Most, if not all people would say that the meaning of a movie is based on the story and the characters which makes sense. But Frampton is saying that it can be based on whatever is most prevalent in the film, which also makes sense. Frampton's idea seems like a possibility that nobody ever thinks about. I guess alot of it depends on the context it is taken in. If there is a national geographic or nature program based on bees, bees are probably going to be the most prevalent theme in the film in terms of sound and picture. That would prove Frampton to be correct. But say we were talking about the computer animated film "Bee Movie" with Jerry Seinfeld. Bees are the most re-occuring theme in the movie, yet the story is dealing with the life of a single bee, not necessarily on the fact that he is a bee but his story. therefore the quantitive qualities of this movie would not agree with Framptons idea. It is a complex idea that does not seem to be fully explored as it could be. That is all for this week.

Week 9-Spiral Jetty

2008-03-24T17:19:00.000-07:00

The part about "Spiral Jetty" that i found most interesting was the end of the film. It was really neat how the camera zoomed out and showed the entire spiral jetty from inside of the helicopter and then went to showing a picture of the editing room with a big picture of the spiral. I guess it related to the rest of the film by fitting in with the arbitrary fashion which clips were just shown in juxtaposition to each other. The whole video seemed to be compiled of random clips until the end when it showed a lot of views of spiral jetty from the air and i wasn't quite sure of the author's intention by using this technique. I did find the end to be the most interesting because it seemed like he was making the connection between the video being a man made creation as well as spiral jetty. It seemed to highlight the contrast between the two by showing the video being done indoors while spiral jetty was outdoors. Yet they are both man made. There may have been some sort of deeper meaning to this, maybe to show the contrast of man versus nature or something. I'm not entirely sure. That is all for this week.

Week 7-Tabletop Videos

2008-03-14T10:10:00.000-07:00

1) My artist statement for my tabletop video is pretty self explanatory. I stated that I think homemade cards (Christmas, birthday, valentines day, etc) are better than store bought cards. I emphasized my point by putting a pile of homemade cards next to a pile of store bought cards and went through them all by opening them up. The homemade cards seemed much more personal and funny. The store bought cards usually just had some "inspirational" picture or some cliche poem singed, "Love, (someone's name)" 2) When it comes to a consideration of my performance I was a little disappointed with how the filming went. The camera was too far zoomed in and therefore some of the cards got a little pushed out of the frame. On the other hand I think my music I made on garage band added to the performance because it was quirky and fit the theme. I also noticed that the other's people's videos often didn't have any audio tracks to augment the video. So I think the music may have improved the quality of my video. One more thing that surprised me was how fast the two and half minutes really went. it seemed like an eternity when i was planning out my video but it felt like it went too fast. i didn't even get to display all of my cards. It was an interesting project overall. That is all for this week.

Week 6-Scavenger Hunt

2008-03-03T19:27:00.000-08:00

I chose this video because I find it to be remarkably similar to Alex Bags “Untitled Fall ’95 Video” They are similar in the sense that they are both young women, talking about college, and all of the problems they encounter. Not only is the concept the same of a person talking about college and life in general, it is also shot almost exactly the same. Both of them are sitting in front of a camera, the view about from their torso up, and they are pouring their hearts out. The only things that really seemed different were the girl on the youtube video wasn’t smoking a cigarette, and the content of each person’s message was slightly different. While they both shared the whole theme of being in college and being depressed, in the end, the girl on the youtube video ended up telling a message of hope while Alex Bags video kind of left some open ends. I think this video is pretty self-explanatory. Just one more note I found to be interesting, when the girl on the youtube video was talking about her cousin committing suicide she seemed completely devoid of emotion; especially since she said it happened that day and that’s why she was recording that video. Could this be fake? It’s always possible. That is all for this week.

Week 5-Authorship

2008-02-26T15:31:00.000-08:00

For this week my blog post will deal with authorship in the videos we watched in class, and on "Learning to Love You More". When it comes to "Learning to Love You More" it seems to me that there is a sort of co-authorship between the July/Fletcher, and the person who actually created the works. I say this because it seems like July and Fletcher come up with the core idea or concept and asked others to proliferate the idea. It seems to me that they both have their input on the subject, therefore it is co-authored. The video in particular that really stood out to me as an authorship issue was "One Black/One White". This seemed more to me to be the authorship of the dogs. They decided unwittingly what happened in this video. Hung-Chih Peng, aka the person who filmed the dogs had minimal effects on the movie. Peng knew what he/she was doing by putting the two food dishes out and knew what the dogs were going to do. But it was still the dogs that actually made the film what it was. Hung Chih Peng was merely a device to assist them. Peng really did not have much influence on the film besides filming it and putting the dishes out. Unless Peng trained the dogs to act as they did, I would say it was the dogs authorship throughout the film.

Week 4-Guest Artist

2008-02-18T11:47:00.001-08:00

For this week the piece of work I chose to discuss was the guest artists movie with the singer songwriters performing their songs in the “music videos”. What I found troubling dealt with the setting of the videos. Since all of the videos we watched had the songwriters out in the middle of nature singing their particular songs; I felt as if it gave a skewed perspective of their music. Every artist was wearing a long flowing dress of skirt and dancing around to their music, and the video’s had very earth orientated feel. It just seems to me that the artists were trying to fit into the nature vibe. Even though it shouldn’t matter it’s hard not to generalize and I was thinking if the musical artists directed their own videos they would have a much different aesthetic to them. None of the artists seemed to look to natural in their nature environment, for example the last video we watched the artist just seemed to be dancing awkwardly and I felt that kind of detracted from the music. I also felt like I was watching the same video four different times because none of the artists really seemed like they know what to do. The hand gestures were similar between all of them and they all did very similar dances. Therefore I believe the setting distorted the music and how the artist would want their music to be interpreted.

Week 3-Step Piece

2008-02-13T15:46:00.001-08:00

The particular aspect of this weeks class i chose to discuss is the step piece by Vito Acconci because I found it to be more interesting than the minimalist movies that we watched. At first glance I did not find his artwork at all engaging or interesting in any fashion. I took it for exactly what it was: A man stepping up and down on a stool every morning until he got tired of it. I finished the paper accompanied with the picture and watched the performance at lecture on Monday and I still was not impressed or interested. But upon further thinking about it it all started to make sense that to me it seems Acconci did help change the way people thought about the dichotomy between the studio and the performance hall by making them one for his piece. Also the fact that he would promote his art by sending out flyers and writing sort of a walk though for what he would be doing all seemed very out of place for what he was doing but still somehow managed to add a new realm to his art. Because not only did he have his piece, but he had these other things that complimented it in their own arbitrary manner and sort of pulled the whole project together to make it much more than it actually was. So after learning more about him and his piece i gained a new respect for what he was doing and what he did. That is all for this week.

Week 2-Play as content

2008-02-13T15:45:00.001-08:00

for this week we watched 4 short films and 2 readings.
Regarding the readings i particularily enjoyed Maya Deren's "creating movies with a new dimension: time". since i read her piece before i saw the film it was excitingto read about all her cutting edge techniques circa mid-1940's. particularily the passage where she spoke of the main character of At Land walking up and down the sand dunes and stopping the camera after she dissapeared from sight and restart it as she reappeard, only much further away to create a longer sense of time and place. i visualised the whole scene in my mind and thought it would make for a great scene. When i actually saw the scene i was a little dissapointed because i was expecting it to have a distancing feel to it but the actress seemed to be in a hurried walk and the film splices were more than evident. I guess it was still pretty good for the forties though. it was just a little anti-climatic.
Another thing i would like to discuss is the music in Lead Shoes. Afterall it was a film so the emphasis should be put on... the film. Not only was the music abrasive and unpleaseant. it was also extrememly distracting. I found it incredibly difficult to focus on the seemingly non-sensical plot of the film because of the off tune singing accompanied by the random bouts of trumpet. I came to the conslusion that the movie was merely a movie for the sake of showing off recording techniques via use of a fish eye lense and reveresed film, but the music was totally unnecesary. I guess it may have been artsy music for 1949 but i think the filmmaker should have had better discretion than to put a score to the film that detracts from the film.
That is all for this week.

Film 201 Blog

2008-02-13T15:44:00.001-08:00

For This Week in class we watched a film by Miranda July called the amateurist and read some essays by Freud and Henry Bergson. When it comes to the readings by Freud and bergson they both made some interesting points about brevity being wit. despite it being somewhat of a cliche they were backed up with arguments and good facts. i found the films more engaging however. one aspect of the film "the amateurist" i found very interesting dealt with the premise of a "professional" watching the "amateur" on the screen. seeing how the professional seemed as nearly as clueless as the amateur, it got me wondering if this was Miranda's own way of perhaps saying how hollywood doesn't know what they're doing, since the professional did not seem to be entirely organized. furthermore the content of the surveillance video being of poor quality maybe could have been a metaphor for hollywood professionals poor taste in movies. Another thought that crossed my mind was maybe this video was a way of Miranda personally saying as an independent film maker that she's just unsure and doesn't know if she's ready for major pictures. the reason i thought that was because how she acted out both the professional and the amateur. neither character seemed to know what they were doing and seemed generally resentful of their situations. but after further thought, and seeing how pretentious some filmmakers can be, i disregarded this theory. that is all for this week.