Tuesday 24th October: Another Analysis

Creative Project Development and Realisation - Class Session

Me again! With a much shorter post for you this time. This post is a little less active but hopefully just as enthusiastic! And it's about a lecture I had a little while ago. By which I mean today. In today's session, we sat down as a class and consumed a whole bunch of odd media, both in the audible and visual sense. We looked at film makers like Michael Snow and John Smith, and despite having one of the most generic names in the world, the film was pretty interesting! This is what I'll be talking about! For like, the next 300 words or so! Just a heads up.

Go on then!

In 1976 a man called John Smith created a film he named "The Girl Chewing Gum", named after one of the "Cast" members. I say this in quotations because the whole film is actually a pseudo-behind-the-scenes one-shot piece of media. I'll give you an idea:

This is a shot from the film, and is actually most of what you see for the whole duration of the 11 minutes 38 seconds it goes on for. It very much looks like the process of making the film went something like this:

- John Smith films a long shot of a street and pans the camera around a little in silence
- John then watches the footage back and creates a script, predicting everything that happens just before it happens
- He then records his lines as if they were stage directions, telling someone with a cane and a hat to cross the street, seconds before that actually happens

The result is the illusion that you're watching a very carefully crafted scene with actors playing pedestrians and drivers. However this doesn't keep up for the entirety of the film. While I was watching it, I started to catch on when he predicted a couple of birds flying across the screen. And with the sudden epiphany that birds cannot be directed by a film director in most cases, I realised what the film really was. As it goes on, it gets more and more self aware, at one point John points out he's actually just standing in a field. He also starts to claim things which seem to be false, saying at one point a man in a turban with a briefcase needs to pass by. I personally never saw a man of that description after he mentioned him. Spooky.

The film itself was quite entertaining for a while, watching everything John says happen without flaw for the first few minutes, hearing him describe things or people, closely followed by the things or people in question appearing on-screen. There's the continuous question whether he's really directing these people for the first half of the film. The Truman Show comes to mind. It's almost like John has created his own custom world where everything seems normal but he directs every detail.

I will say, some parts of the film do drag on, I almost felt like saying "Okay, you made that point, we've got it, now what?"And the same thing continues for a while anyway. It was interesting, but not without it's flaws for me personally. Along with most of the rest of the human race, I tend to prefer things which seem to hold a purpose. Or at least things which I can look at and create a purpose for myself. This film held purpose in that it was interesting enough to inspire, to create creativity in the audience. There was however one film we watched, which I was not a fan of.

Michael snow is another experimental film maker. He created the film you can see above, called Solar Breath. A film running exactly 5 minutes released in 2002. And when I say you can see the film above, I mean this was the one shot of the entire film. The curtains waves back and forth, hitting the window and billowing out again, and again and again. Over and over. When it came to this film, let's just say I was not entertained. Actually I described it as monotonous, simplistic, repetitive, with a lack of purpose and inspiration, see:

As I said above, I am okay with experimental film as long as it has a purpose. Of course, experimental films seem to always only have a vague sense of purpose, but for the most part, they aim to inspire! This film was something I could go home and do by opening my window and watching the curtains. For me personally, I don't tend to be a fan of the so-called "Geniuses of film", yes they may have changed the genre of experimental film, but if it just took a couple of curtain flips to do that, it can't have been a particularly stable genre in the first place. I enjoy films which inspire, films which invoke thought, films that tell a story. When it comes to experimental film, you can always find a lesson in the creation process, but when watching it back, it doesn't always hold relevance to anything. Sometimes they're just bad. Maybe some people would enjoy Solar Breath, but I can't say I'd understand their reasoning.

Another media segment we looked into was Meat Factory Ear Worms. An iconic piece. Once you've listened to it, you won't soon forget it. It was released in 2008 by Rishie Berne, and it follows an Irish man, who worked in a meat factory for a large portion of his life. He managed to get through it with songs he calls ear worms. Songs which get stuck in your head. I personally quite enjoyed this piece. Don't get me wrong it was horrific the things he had to become numb to, but the way the audio piece is presented, with the songs going alongside the sounds of the factory, knives sharpening, gear turning. It created a unique immersive atmosphere I found myself getting lost in. I could have listened to the guy all day, despite the uncomfortable topics he was talking about. Not only did it create a unique atmosphere, but it painted a very vivid picture of what it was like to work in a place like he'd described. You could picture it very easily, which I can imagine not many would want to picture it, but it did it's job all the same! 

Overall, we watched and listened to some very diverse pieces. There were more of course, some less memorable than others, but I won't cover every single one. Experimental film is a genre that I feel doesn't really have a structure to it. As a result, it's almost in it's own category that may as well be named miscellaneous. That's all for this post, thanks for reading!