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Blogpost 10

The boom of digital images has increase an avenue toward privacy exploitation, as Trevor Paglen points out in Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You). The nature of digital images being inherently understandable to computers, unlike unprocessed film where it is neither understandable to humans nor computers, make them vulnerable to profiteering by system like the government and private companies built around collecting, analyzing, and selling data originating from the images. Even as people try to built things that circumvent the cameras and neural networks built to identify and extract information, because of the other sector’s desire to control and to profit, there will be continued developments in adversarial training and such to heighten the abilities of these hardware and software.

In addition to privacy exploits, there’s also an issue of trusting sources, as raised by Francesca Panetta’s In Event of a Moon Disaster. As digital processing power increased over the years, digital footage and images are no long guaranteed to be truthful. Deep fakes particular show how someone can be portrayed doing and saying something they never meant for. In doing so, it has been a great model to raise awareness of needing for more research into different sources to be done before taking what is heard as the truth. Even after research, it is also beneficial to still hold a grain of salt.

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Blogpost 9b: What will be the last image before the end of the world?

In a more abstract sense, an image is just the imprint of something through the means of light. I imagine that as the world ends, whether that be due to an apocalypse, our sun exploding, or a black hole sucking us up, there will be a change of how light interacts with what we call our world. Rather than necessarily imprinting on some sort of paper or flat surface, the universe will be our canvas. In addition to the changes in light, the residues of what was our world will forever linger somewhere in space, leaving a trace of what we are today.

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Blogpost 9

La Jetée by Chris Marker uses a series of images to tell the story of a man who is taken prisoner after WWIII, used to explore the past and future for ways to amend the war’s aftermath, and realizes the experience on the airport’s observation platform that strung him in as a child was the viewing of his own death. With the use of still and repeating images as almost the entirety of the film, Marker challenges the conventions of film-making as part of the Left Bank of the French New Wave in 1962. The rhythm and transitions between the photographs in the photomontage, along with the soundtrack made to go along with it, created the unsettling nature and the build up of intensity in the film. Although the only real movement capture was the woman blinking in bed, the frames that followed one another and the cut-ins and fade-outs used allowed for the viewer to fill in the action in between. Raymond Bellour in The Film Stilled comments that the overly stilled images in La Jetée creates a “far too visible suspension in time” which adds to the feeling of the unavoidable loss and death at the end. The drawn out moments of the freeze-frames contrasts with the quickened time of the in-between, and this stop and go feeling of the time within the film plays a large part in developing the intensity, making every movement frozen by the frame so much more powerful.

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Blogpost 8: Daisies

The film Daisies was made as a resistance to the state-controlled films in Czechoslovakia as part of the Czech New Wave of the 1960s. It’s use of two beautiful women to play characters who are living dolls then had their destructive nature lead into chaos goes to break the typical stereotypes for how feminine a women should be.

The synchronization of the clattering sound with the sharp jittery movements of the two women added to the effect of connecting their characters with dolls. The sound reminds me of vintage wooden dolls that have moving parts connect by string and when you lift the doll, the limbs hit each other making the clattering.

The usage of color in the film was also very intriguing. The switch between black and white to color, and the usage of monochromatic and duotone sections that switch super fast added to the intensity of the chaos felt through the film. It would be interesting to look into how and why Chyyilová chose certain colors, when to transition them, and the order they were in.

The use of collage in the section where Marie 1 and 2 starts to snip at each other added to the pure destructive nature of the protagonists. I have never seen this done in a film before but the match between the scissors and the ripped and rearranged parts of the frame complemented one another in the effect.

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Blogpost 9: Battleship Potemkin

Through the reading, it was very interesting to think about how with montage, Deleuze calls the unit of time in movement images to be an action rather than how we typically segment time through defined number of minutes, hours, or days. Through the interplay of the placement of these actions, we can create contrast between the organic and the inorganic or for dialects between two sides of the montage, among other ways to create links between acts that lead from the start to the end that shows the development and resolution of the conflict. These come to be what Deleuze indicates as different schools of montage. Additionally, the set of the action can be close-up or far away, giving either room for the viewer to fill in the environment through their imagination or define the entirety of the scene, allows for the an intimate subjectivity to be felt in the objective set.

In the film, the procession of time was told fully through the jumping between action to action. Every scene, something was happening and not necessarily in sequential order or in the same spatial cadence of time. The conflict between the two sides of the working class and the authorities develops through the dialogue created with the slices of common people’s sources of anger and unrest with the poor delegation of resolution by the people in power.

Another thing I found impactful in the film was the hand coloring of the flag to be red. Red I feel like is the symbolism of communism and the equal treatment of the people in the case of this flag, and the raising of it being the victory of the people. At the end where the Tsar’s ships allow the battleship to pass due to the victory of revolts on those battleships too, make the red even more vibrant with the joy of the people.

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Blogpost 4: Guerrilla Cinema

The film The Battle of Algiers showcased exactly the type of cinema the creators of Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: Resolutions of the Third World Filmmakers Meeting worked to promote and characterized the type of decentralized tactical style of guerrilla warfare Multitude of War and Democracy in the Age of Empire: Resistance describes as the primal form of rebellion organization of the time.

In the film, neither the French nor the FLN were romanticized as this heroic figure that could do no wrong. The struggles of both sides were captured and the watcher develops empathy for both. The bombing of civilian area by the FLN really pierces the viewers as lives of many innocents were taken in this act of resistance, but the struggles of the Algiers as colonization oppressed them and disrupted their freedoms and culture make the viewers understand why they took this course of action. Similarly, the French were no saints either. Particularly disturbing was the police taking a journey to where he thought the head of the FLN lived and left a bomb there in the middle of the night, killing many innocent people, including children and elderly. The damage was almost worse because the buildings in the Algier’s part of society were tightly packed and decaying, making the impact of the bomb collapsing multiple families’ living quarters and killing all those within.

The film also highlights the guerrilla organization aspect of the FLN in comparison the the traditional authoritarian structure of the French military. Instead of having a strict vertical line of commands, the FLN has multiple clusters of powers, where one functions almost independently of one another, but strategizing together to form a powerful group. This sort of decentralized power allowed for the FLN to blend in to the people, making it almost impossible to determine whether someone was a bystander or in the action of completing a mission. Even for members themselves, they would not always know who else belonged to another branch of the organization, which also proved helpful in keeping the secrecy of the members and prevent leakage of important information. And even if one branch falls, the others can still operate and the cause is not lost. Women and children also provided to be important members of these guerrilla movements, providing to be critical undercover agents, further helping them disguise themselves among society.

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Blogpost 5: Vision & Justice

It is interesting to think about how injustice has been ingrained into the fundamentals of viewing, and how it has unknowingly just been accepted as normal. In The Racial Bias Built into Photography, Lewis goes into discussing how photography in the medium itself, a typically viewed as objective piece of material, started off on the foot of racial favoritism. Because the photographic film was developed for the best performance when capturing white skin, this promotes the underlying propaganda that white is “better.” To the unknowing mass public, they don’t think about these origins, and absorb what information photos have to give, developing a perception of racial bias, even without them perceiving their own tendencies. Just like how in the film I Am Not Your Negro, Baldwin believes that the general white population are able to interact and accept black people on a personal basis, but because of the constant media portrayal of white superiority and the lack of understanding of the living conditions of their black community friends, they hold onto rooted view that the people belong to the white race holds characteristics that place them above.

The unfair conditions instilled onto these people which feed into the skewed portrayal is vividly demonstrated in Walking While Back and Notes of a Native Son. Because of the existence of the racist leanings of media, which then contributes to the continuation of society conditioned to act within these unfair presuppositions and stereotypes, tensions and unrest, even anger, boils inside those who are unjustly mistreated. Then, instead of working to resolve the tensions between the pieces of the American people, media then just feeds on the explosions of actions resulting from these pent up emotions, creating the unending loop of injustice.

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Blogpost 3: Prospectus

I find the ability of images to convey certain types of emotions through color and composition to be extremely fascinating, and for series of images to either intensify an emotion or create a story of an emotional roller-coaster to be astounding. Images are like a language that transcends lingual barriers, a form of communication that everyone can understand.

It would be really interesting to explore what aspects evoke certain types of emotions and if it is possible to create a series of images that tell a story that does not need an explanation. To achieve this, I think it would be beneficial to start reading about how color composition and emotions are tied together and how people interact with images. Later on, it would also be really useful to conduct a study of interviewing people for the person’s train of thought once presented with the same series of images and understand what pieces within these images impacted them in a specific way.

A different direction that this could go is to build a database of photos that are highly associated with a certain adjective. With this database developed, then a survey could be sent out that first asks the taker to pick one (or a few) adjectives to describe themselves. Given this input, then a set of images would then be shown to the taker: one of which is the image with the highest association with the adjective they used to describe themselves, while the others are randomly generated images that do not have to do with that adjective. The taker would then be prompted to pick their favorite photo and describe what made them choose that one. (If the survey were to ask for more adjectives, this would be done separately for each, and it would be made sure that every round would only contain one image that reflected an adjective the taker chose.) It would be extremely fascinating to see if there is any correlation between words people associate and identify with, and the type of photography media they like and why they are attracted to it.