Blog 8: Multimedia Genre - Narrative

First of all: when I saw The Way Things Go video, I was immediately reminded of the Honda Accord Commercial that I saw from an email. The text of the email is as follows:

If you thought that the people who set up a room full of dominoes to have them knocked over later was amazing, you haven't seen anything yet. There are no computer graphics or digital tricks in these images. Everything that you see happened in real time exactly as you see it.

The recording required 606 takes and in the first 605 takes there always was something, usually of minor importance, that didn't work. It was necessary for the recording team to install the set-up time after time and it took several weeks working day and night to achieve this effect. The recording cost 6 million dollars and it took 3 months to finish,
including the engineering design of the sequence. The duration of the video is only 2 minutes, but every time that Honda shows the commercial on British television, they make enough money to support any of us for the rest of our lives. However, this commercial has turned out to be the most displayed in the history of the Internet. Honda execs think that it will pay for itself simply because of the free showings (Honda is not paying one cent for you to see it) When Honda senior execs viewed it, they immediately approved it without hesitation-including costs.

There are only six Honda Accords built by hand in the whole world, and to the horror of Honda engineers, the recording team disassembled two of them for the recording. Everything you see in the sequence (besides the walls, floor, ramp and untouched Honda Accord) is part of those two automobiles. The voice is that of Garrison Keiller. The commercial was so well received by Honda execs when they saw it, that their first comment was how amazing the computer graphics were. They almost fell out of their chairs when told that the recording was real without any graphics manipulation

By the way, about the wind shield wipers in the new Honda Accords, they are sensitive to water and designed to start working as soon as they get wet.

Here’s the link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyN9y0BEMqc

I have seen various other movies before in which inanimate objects independently affect each other in order to create another response that repeatedly triggers action, as seen in the Honda Accord commercial and in The Way Things Go. Perhaps it is because I do not know the maker’s intent in The Way Things Go, but the Honda commercial seems to have a greater purpose and limitations that the engineers overcame, making me more in awe of the footage. Perhaps it’s also because I know the other background facts about the Honda commercial (606 takes, 6 million dollars to film, etc). It seems like there is greater creativity in the Honda commercial, because they were limited to using the car they were promoting (similar to the film style in Leth and von Trier’s film, The Five Obstructions). The narrative seemed self-explanatory; the objects were acting upon each other to prompt the motion of the next.

While I didn’t fully understand the narrative in The Way Things Go, Soft Cinema seemed to have more of a point behind it. Practically all cultures have symbols and colors that have specific meanings. Colors, for example, indicate seasons, teams, and even emotions. The combination of colors, images, text, and sound form what seems to be a more realistic representation of how our brains recall memories. Humans don’t have a perfect memory; details are often left out in exchange for emotions. Soft Cinema was confusing to watch at first, but made more sense as I adjusted to watching it. It’s one thing to think of one’s brain processing and recording memories in the manner Soft Cinema does, but it’s another to watch it on a screen. Watching the video seemed to almost require a passive viewer who didn’t concentrate too hard on the separate pieces of the movie, rather digested it as a whole.

Blog 7: Scientific Visual Culture

The goal of each of the “artists” from the Critical Art Ensemble website seems be to generate dialogue about the subject they are discussing. Some of the artists go so far as to create a “cult” as the “Cult of the New Eve” does. They “worship” the New Eve by parodying text from the Bible, using the same font and graphics as medieval versions of the Bible did, etc. They even manipulate actual pictures from the Renaissance and other art periods in order to insert people with their cult’s garb (red cloaks and dark glasses) as seen in this picture:


Flesh Projet by BioCom seems to support biotechnology as it discusses biotechnology as a means to grow new organs and tissues. It also talks about discovering the secrets of the code that programs the DNA – the proteins A, C, T, and G. “This recombinant DNA is essential for the redesign of the body for specific, goal-oriented tasks that better complement its interface with technology within the real space of production. Human characteristics must also be rationally designed and engineered in order to eliminate body functions and psychological characteristics that refuse ideological inscription.” (http://www.critical-art.net/biotech/biocom/biocomWeb/dnatest.html)

While most of the projects seem to have a definite opinion on whether biotechnology is ethical or whether it should be pursued, it seems like that message matters less than the result of getting people to discuss whether it is or not. They just want to bring it into public attention.

Biotechnology and deciphering the human DNA relates to scientific visual culture as we discussed in class because by discovering which parts of the DNA modify our phenotypic traits. These traits include eye color, height, skin color, or the shape of your nose. By completely understanding DNA and genetics, scientists will also be able to decide whether people are defined by “nature” or “nurture.” With this technology, it will also allow us to project what future generations will look like as cultures become more connected and overlapping. In other words, as the world becomes more of a monoculture and interbreeds, scientists will be able to forecast what affects it will have on humans. If scientists know exactly how the DNA correlates to all aspects of the body, they will be able to predict whether an unborn baby will have learning disabilities or exceptional athletic ability. Scientists will be able to catalogue traits before they have been developed as opposed to after they were developed as Eadweard Muybridge found with his Motion Studies in the 1880s.

Blog 6: An Inconvenient Truth

The message trying to be argued in Davis Guggenheim’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, is that global warming is occurring and that the general populous needs to change their consumption and conservation habits.

Al Gore traveled the world giving a power point presentation reflecting this message and the movie shows his presentation, follows some of his travels while he narrates the whole thing. Most laypeople would have been extremely bored had they just chosen to record his presentation. Instead, the moviemakers decided to put Al Gore’s personal (and sometimes only vaguely relevant) anecdotes in amongst the footage of the presentation. Another key tactic they use to keep viewers engaged is making references to popular culture or at least by using metaphors. For example, toward the beginning of the film, they show a short, dumbed-down version of global warming presented by an newscaster in Simpson’s style cartooning. They also relate the Earth and its atmosphere to a globe with a coat of varnish. I think it’s also critical when analyzing how the stance is developed to notice that most of the “current” pictures shown of the environment all have red, smoky backgrounds. The color red also has the connotation of having to do with violence, blood, and forbidden or negative things, which affects subconscious readings of the pictures.

Mr. Gore and Mr. Guggenheim are trying to portray their film as presenting the truth by referencing “scientists” all the time. They also seem to want to show Mr. Gore as a scholarly, reliable common-man type. They paint his childhood as atypical, but he still supposedly kept his roots by living 4 months of the year on a farm. When Mr. Gore isn’t shown giving a presentation in the movie, he is on his laptop. It seems impossible that he would be making changes to the presentation every spare moment he had; even while other people on the plane are sleeping, he is vigilantly working on his laptop. An Inconvenient Truth seems to have a personal aspect to it, like Brzeski’s film, but it seems more scientific and factual, like Faden’s film (despite the fact that Faden’s film ends up being a fake old movie). Both Brzeski’s film and Guggenheim’s employ the use of metaphors, though in different manners, in order to give more substance to their argument.

Gore and Guggenheim want the audience to realize that global warming is occurring at a rate that must be slowed down as soon as possible. In the movie, Gore asks questions that seem to prompt action, “Future generations may well have occasion to ask themselves, "What were our parents thinking? Why didn't they wake up when they had a chance?" We have to hear that question from them, now.”



As a side note:
I have to admit, I am slightly biased against this movie due to previous articles I have read:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/house.asp
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/feb/28/film.usa2
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=64734
http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/sendler.asp
http://www.eyeblast.tv/public/checker.aspx?v=Q4prVr4z

Those are a few. I also had heard about his “carbon credits” and found these articles on that:

http://riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2007/03/al_gores_inconv.html
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=54528
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-08-09-gore-green_x.htm

The last paragraph of the last article asks a question that I find pertinent to the matter:
“The issue here is not simply Gore's hypocrisy; it's a question of credibility. If he genuinely believes the apocalyptic vision he has put forth and calls for radical changes in the way other people live, why hasn't he made any radical change in his life?”

Blog 5: Brzeski & Faden

“Certain subjects… may be termed ‘cinematic’ because they seem to exert a peculiar attraction on the medium. It is as if the medium were predestined (and eager) to exhibit them.” – Sigfried Kracauer, Theory of Film

This quote prefaces Tracking Theory: The Synthetic Philosophy of The Glance, By Eric S. Faden. In both his movie and Eva Ilona Brzeski’s film, This Unfamiliar Place, they introduce their main plot by using a story or an anecdote to capture the readers’ attention. Brzeski’s story of being “intrigued by disaster” as a little girl seems to flow easier into the main story about her father. Faden’s whole film covers a much broader topic; he sets up his film by showing the three movies that inspired him, Wong Kar Wai's 2046, Lars Von Trier's Europa, and Gustavo Mosquera's Moebius, describing their themes, and his interpretation of them.

Brzeski’s film seems to be a personal exploration of her family. The narrator seems to be speaking from Brzeski’s point of view and the whole film has a dreamlike quality about it. The footage is mostly smooth and slow with audio playing on top of the images. Usually during an interview or the narration, there is music or whistling or nature sounds. Even the happy clip of her parents dancing at the end is slowed down. The visual imagery of that clip, though, is contrasted with the father’s words being spoken over it: “some of those things I don’t even think about. You know, I don’t even want to remember.” His life now seems to be a dream after the nightmare of Nazi occupation. There are a few clips of “destruction” – literal interpretations of the narrator’s words at the beginning—but even these seem to be slowed down and have music or narration over them, making them not seem quite as scary. They seem more to be a memory than an actual event taking place.

In my micro-seminar I took during Welcome Week with Michael Renov, we read two chapters of the book Collecting Visible Evidence. (I just found out that he was a co-editor of this book.) One of the strategies we discussed was that of “coimplication,” which was defined as “a kind of supplementary autobiographical practice; it functions as a vehicle of self-examination, a means through which to construct self-knowledge through recourse to the familial other.” This idea is visible in Brzeski’s film; she learns more about herself through exploring her father’s past. At one point in the film, you can tell that he is speaking directly to his daughter who is filming him. He says, “I would like to talk about other things if I have a choice, do I?” This part refers to Renov’s theory of “textual authority,” in which the “filial obligation outpaces directorial control.” She probably wasn’t expecting her father to turn around the interview and ask her questions. This exchange wouldn’t be possible if he was someone she didn’t know very well, but because he is her father, that usurpation of power is possible.

Faden begins his story with a different sort of personal anecdote. It definitely doesn’t feel as intimate as the story from Brzeski’s childhood, but his film isn’t as personal as hers seems to be. The whole introduction seemed a collage of words, video and audio clips. While the narrator was speaking, you could also hear other clips of audio as well as see words float across the screen. This modern compilation of media segued into an old time looking movie. At first, I was convinced I was looking at an authentic old piece of film, especially because the narrator had said, “By coincidence, when doing archival research last year, I stumbled upon the very movie that I had dreamed.” But after I heard one of the people in the film speak, I was pretty sure it wasn’t; I don’t think they had the technology to produce sound with the visuals when that type of filming was being done. I thought it was interesting how the narration preceding the old movie exactly described it.

“I thought about a long ago time when movies did more than just tell stories. A time when exhibitors edited fragments together and lecturers supplemented the visual spectacle with details and knowledge.”

I also really liked the ending, where it jolts the viewer back to the present with a SUV driving across the screen and going from black and white, grainy film to colored, smooth-looking, modern film.

Both movies had references to trains, although Faden’s examples of them were much more direct. In Brzeski’s film, a train is shown when she is talking about her trip as a twelve year old to the alps while her father wrote his memoirs. Both movies use film clips as metaphors to further the meaning of their words. In Faden’s film, he uses abstract images along with the narration. They don’t necessarily seem to be metaphors as much of the time as literal representation of what he is saying. He shows people working with the footage while discussing finding the archival footage and clips of old movies while talking about them. One instance where it does seem to be a metaphor is when he says he “stumbled upon the very movie” and the clip being shown is of two trains crashing into each other. It makes it seem like he has “crashed” head-on to the conclusion he is making about film. Brzeski uses clips of rain and the sound of rain, which seems to be a sign of renewal. Her father’s life is new and the old parts are washed away; he has forgotten about his old life because he’s so involved with his life now. There is also a clip of empty carnival rides that has the audio over it saying she was “anticipating a reaction that never came.” I think using the visual clips in addition to the narration is an extremely effective way to saturate the viewer with the desired meaning.