Wolf and Pig

Carousel: A Cinema 21:9 Production

Rachel showed us this advertisment for Phillips' new 21:9 television yesterday, The ratio 21:9 is common of many films seen in theatres nowdays. So in tune with the idea of being a cinematic tv, Adam Berg (Stink Digital) wanted to create something which reflected this idea. In 'Carousel' I think there is a strong sense of distortion of time... It deals with a narrative story whose motion is frozen into stillness, then layers movement on top as we as viewers are propelled through and around this stillness. Kind of like moving through a three dimensional photograph of a captured action. If that makes sense.
It is also mentioned in behind-the-scenes that the 21:9 ratio works with your peripheral vision, so we get the whole story.

When you watch it here at the Phillips website it becomes an interactive experience.
You can move through the looped sequence at your own speed, stopping at embedded hotspots to see a bit of behind-the-scenes stuff. You can also watch the beginning credits which are quite Sin City-ish...
aaaand you can see for yourself whether or not real people are used!! So so awesome.

The Battleship Potemkin // Odessa Steps

Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 silent film The Battleship Potemkin presents a dramatized version of the naval mutiny on the Russian battleship Potemkin in 1905, and still stands as a fundamental film in the exploration of Soviet montage and political influence. It is perhaps most well known for it's 'Odessa Steps' sequence in which a bunch of innocent civillians are massacred by a heavily armoured tirade of Tsarist soldiers. The whole scene takes about 7 minutes, and through various cuts and layered action,tension and emotion build as the scene decends an seemingly endless set of steps....

While this particular scene is fictional and never actually happened by any account of the Potemkin mutiny, it IS representative of attacks which did happen, and it has been said that Eisenstein's intention was to provoke response and emotion by condensing events into one dramatised incident. Baring in mind that this type of scene was unfamiliar and quite shocking for the time, the juxtaposition of violence against innocence, predator against prey effectively does this.
It's here that I see some potential in exploring this further. The manipulating of real-time events in order to create heightened emotion fascinates me, in the same way many constructed narrative photographs have done.

Also, the way the scene is constructed through many different quick cuts, building and embedding individual battles within the overall attack, it gives the impression that the actual timespan last much longer. Time is not completely linear anymore and it really does appear drawn out, as I mentioned before, it takes FOREVER for them to descend the steps.
So I have a couple of ideas, but we will see how these pan out...

Lyndon Wade

Room 107 Twelve stories on the ground level.
This is where people come and leave; leave wet towels on the bathroom floor, leave half-full beers on the nightstand, leave the bed unmade, leave hair on the toilet seat, stains on the ceiling, glitter on the carpet, holes in the wall, leave their wives, their lives, a mess for the morning maid. And after an hour, a day, a month, they all leave that they have left.

And you check in.

'Cinematic'???

After the seminar last thursday on Cinematic Undertones and Overtones, all I wanted to do was go have a nice big glass of wine and forget all about it. The thing is, I was completely overwhelmed by everything, trying to make sense of the not only the relationship between cinema and photography, but what each of these actually are.
Up until then, I think my understanding of what 'cinematic' meant was being tied to what is narrative. And while I believe that there can be a strong connection between the cinematic and narrative, I don't think they're strictly synonymous with one another.
In her lecture, Rachel loosely described

photography=documentary

while cinema=narrative

then still photos that are narrative in style

are viewed and understood as cinematic

Ive just been having a massive discussion with someone about whether or not this statement is true, and after much debate we decided it was. my previous understanding was that cinema did not need to be narrative; it could be structural, non-sensical and abstract... but then I realized maybe I was thinking of all moving image as cinema.. some of which is not narrative. But perhaps what makes a moving image 'cinematic' is narrativity (even if it non-conventional and non-linear, it just has to engage with the concept of narrative time).
Viewing it in that way essentially means that other works (photographs, music etc) could be more cinematic than some moving image.
Then there's cinematic aesthetic qualities such as lighting which can also allude to the idea of cinematic.. so something which lacks narrativity but has some aesthetically cinematic values could in essense also be cinematic...? maybe.
Blah, so confused, but i think my mind is slowly sorting itself out. Here's some of my mind's scribbles on paper...

Dick Laurent is dead

I watched David Lynch's Lost Highway last weekend. . I think the film is about the psychological transformation of a man whose jealousy leads him to kill his wife, though this could all be in his mind, i THINK.



The only way I manage to even make sense of the story now is to let go of conventional narrative, and think of it as a dreamlike sequence or nightmare you might have. Just snippets of time, places and people who transform into other people for no apparent reason. Its insane, brilliant, and noisy! While I was prepared for the visual masterpiece it demonstrated,(the lighting, the darkness, the colour), I was surprised by the intensity of the sound; it heightened the whole feeling of uneasiness in the film, and put you on edge right down to the last minute.



It is surreal, and wrong and confusing to say the least,
The first lynch film I've seen, and definitely not the last.

Julia Fullerton-Batten

beach houses, 2005

underwear, 2005

broken eggs, 2005

images from her series Teenage Stories..
themes of suburban nightmare, broken childhood dreams and lost innocence

http://www.juliafullerton-batten.com/

Noah Kalina

I am inspired by Kalina's use of lighting to provoke tension. It appears as though a car is coming, or a person is standing outside the frame and shining a spotlight into the image. There's just something compelling you to look deeper and to find a story.
The top image I think works extremely well, like a portrait with the subject absent, it seems to make for a stronger suggested narrative.

More amazing photos on his website: http://www.noahkalina.com/

Eadweard Muybridge

Commonsensual: The Works of Rut Blees Luxemburg (2009)

Works from a new book. Exploring the public spaces of cities, sheading light on the dark.
The use of water reflection of lights is awesome...

Cary Dolan

Some of his 'artificial twilight' images.. I love them! ...but can't find much else out about them. The artificial lighting juxtaposed against the small amount of sunlight (dawn or dusk) is beautiful.
Dolan's website- http://www.carydolan.com/home.html

Bell Soto

The Hunger (left) and Father Figure (right) by Bell Soto

Each of these is actually a montage of images used for multi-page spreads for fashion editorial StyleMonteCarlo, though I do like them arranged in this way shown here. It appears almost like a movie storyboard and emphaisizes the cinematic quality (staged action, artificial lighting, doll-like subject, disturbed quality etc).
I guess it could be described as aesthetically very 'Lynchian'*,
but I feel as if everything I see these days likes to hide under the David Lynch blanket a bit.
Soto's website under the 'film' page is quite interesting- there's a few short films which I think demonstrate the collision between art/fashion as well as cinema/photography.
http://www.bellsoto.com/

*Visit 'The City of Absurdity' for the definition of Lynchian, apparently!

Dieter Appelt

Image de la vie et de la mort 1979
(between life and death)

Max's Speed of Light lecture today included the multimedia artist Dieter Appelt, whose work I thought tied in quite nicely with the Matrix scans I played with the other day. Appelt explores the movement of time through use of multiple images. The aesthetic of the film itself becomes part of the work too (sprockets and time codes visible), emphasizing the use of still video frames.

First draft Proposal

At the moment I'm working on getting back into a conceptual mindset after a long break, and revisiting my final exhibited work last year. I was overall very pleased with what I created, and while I believe the result was a resolved piece of artwork, I find myself wanting to explore the collision between photography and cinema in more in depth. In retrospective critique of my work last year, I think that the final concept wasn’t realized until near the end, and I didn’t necessarily have time to explore the different levels of subtlety. The Plot Thickens (http://emilyhlavac.blogspot.com/2008/11/plot-thickens-final-images.html) was an effective comment on the cinematic cliché in an obvious, almost comical way. While I am still thoroughly interested in the constructing of scenes and staging of action, perhaps I will see if I can create something more representative of the subtleties of cinema.

At the moment conceptually I am focusing on finding out more about the relationship between cinema and photography, and how one another influence each other.
Technically I am exploring the use of film, manipulating the camera and the image within the viewfinder (what we see, what we know). The idea of panoramic imagery also fascinates me, we are seeing more than the span of our peripheral vision in one go, which automatically disrupts the idea that a photograph is a single moment in time caught on camera.

So a few ideas that pop up..

-Symbology and iconography in cinema
-Moving image can be STILL, while a still image can suggest motion.
-Film stills as fragments of a whole?

-structural film, the film itself

-TIME/DURATION.. Non linearity

A couple of favourite photographers at the moment...

SAM TAYLOR-WOOD: FIVE REVOLUTIONARY SECONDS X, 1997, 106,7x 500 cm

Sam Taylor-Wood

I am drawn to the panoramic style of her five revolutionary seconds firstly, but I also think that Taylor-Wood has managed to get across a sense of subtlety without dulling down the action.

Gregory Crewdson

Narrative photographer. His books Twilight and Beneath The Roses vary quite widely in content, but all have this crazy surreal aspect. The lighting, combined with the strange positioning of figures and random props gives an eerie feeling.