#liamcook

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Blogpost #8

Daisies is put together very physically - more than any other film we have watched this semester, I felt that it was actually cut together. It was chopped, filtered, and montaged. Chytilova later noted that although the film is critical of its two protagonists - the pointedly named Marie 1 and Marie 2 - she also made clear the anger she felt as the only female film director in the Czech New Wave. And so the destruction of the film’s format echoes both the self-destruction of the hedonistic characters, as well as the destruction of a male-dominated society and artistic environment. Marie falls from one scene into the next, and into the next. Scenes jump between monotone filters, black and white, and full technicolor. A changing body intercuts with the texture of butterflies. In some scenes, the technique of filmmaking fully communicates disruption. In one scene, heads float, and in another, the Maries are shattered into triangles as they dance on the bed. 

Even when the Maries are bored, as they feel in the a lot the film - nothing really matters - it is often paired with something more jarring or discontinuous.  Watermelon appears like flesh. So do the pickles and sausages that are cut with scissors, mocking the male body. The older men they date don’t appear to be able to tell the difference between the two. Marie 1 and 2 express themselves through a somewhat flat, inquisitive tone, with very little variation. Lim argues that they are presented through the allegory of the doll, of the overly feminized and beautified. Yet that fakeness also appears to come from agency and a place of self-determined ennui.

Blogpost #8

Daisies is put together very physically - more than any other film we have watched this semester, I felt that it was actually cut together. It was chopped, filtered, and montaged. Chytilova later noted that although the film is critical of its two protagonists - the pointedly named Marie 1 and Marie 2 - she also made clear the anger she felt as the only female film director in the Czech New Wave. And so the destruction of the film’s format echoes both the self-destruction of the hedonistic characters, as well as the destruction of a male-dominated society and artistic environment. Marie falls from one scene into the next, and into the next. Scenes jump between monotone filters, black and white, and full technicolor. A changing body intercuts with the texture of butterflies. In some scenes, the technique of filmmaking fully communicates disruption. In one scene, heads float, and in another, the Maries are shattered into triangles as they dance on the bed. 

Even when the Maries are bored, as they feel in the a lot the film - nothing really matters - it is often paired with something more jarring or discontinuous.  Watermelon appears like flesh. So do the pickles and sausages that are cut with scissors, mocking the male body. The older men they date don’t appear to be able to tell the difference between the two. Marie 1 and 2 express themselves through a somewhat flat, inquisitive tone, with very little variation. Lim argues that they are presented through the allegory of the doll, of the overly feminized and beautified. Yet that fakeness also appears to come from agency and a place of self-determined ennui.

#Feminist_Cinema  #LiamCook

(If anybody is wondering why I have uploaded these all at the same time, I have been making the same two embarrassing tumblr mistakes over the semester. I did not watch and respond to 15+ hrs of films in the last week.)

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Blogpost #5

Towards the end of Walking While Black, Garnette Cadogan writes about how walking as a black man has made him both removed and resonant with cities that require his constant attention. This description of seeing the violence that is a part of Black life in the U.S. echoes Baldwin’s writings on truly seeing the perpetrators of racist violence: “And furthermore, you give me a terrifying advantage; you never had to look at me. I had to look at you. I know more about you than you know about me. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can change until it is faced.” Simply moving yourself through the world, by walking or living or filming, reflects the world. They are all a kind of camera, recording the Black experience.  

I Am Not Your Negro is interspersed with slow clips of empty cityscapes and landscapes deliberately moving by, as if shot by somebody staring out of the window of a rolling car or train. There isn’t a lot in these scenes, but with Baldwin’s incisive texts, they resonate with Cadogan’s truth that “monotony is a luxury”. They feel like a stroll, full of vigilance and observation.  

Time is a slow moment in these pieces, but it also jumps and folds. Peck took the prophecy of Baldwin’s writing and made it into a flowing document of Blackness across American history. The Watts Protests cut to Oakland during the Holy Week Rising cut to Ferguson. Samuel L. Jackson’s bass narration, recorded in 2015, feels like a historical document, while clips of Baldwin, gesturing with his cigarette, his eyebrows raising theatrically, feel contemporary. The two Baldwins exist together and trade places. 

[photographyatmit]

Blogpost #4

The Battle of Algiers comes down on the side of the Algerians, but it takes care to flesh out both the French and Algerian stories. City and soundtrack are both used to illustrate this

The city itself is a character in The Battle of Algiers. Radically for its time, the film begins with a torture scene, followed by Ali La Pointe's imprisonment, both inditements of French colonialism. As Ali looks out of his cell, he sees an execution. Yet the prison itself also looks on, the windows looming over the scene like eyes, ever surveying, never looking away. The Kasbah’s architectural complexity is a part of the FLN’s success. They understand it, and use it. Yet it is also a site of internal conflict; in the scene where Algerian children harass a drunk man, they drag him down the stairs as he cries for help. In the French quarter, with its broad boulevards and modernist shops, life is portrayed as well. There is a powerful moment in the bar, right before the freedom fighter is about to leave a bomb. She looks around and takes in all the lives she is about to take. And of course, the mobility of people between the old and colonial cities becomes a symbol of occupation and control. Crossing that line is resistance. 

The music, too, is orchestrated with a degree of balance. The french theme, all snare drums and trumpets, is contrasted with Ali La Pointe’s theme, a lilting panpipe melody. The two combined and blurred briefly when the French military are trying to force the Algerians to turn. A third motif, a funeral march, is played both when the French quarter is bombed, and when the Algerians are tortured. The tragedies are held in the same musical space. In the soundtrack, grief has no hierarchy. 

[photographyatmit]

Blogpost #3

I am still searching, but here are some leads I am following. They are proclivities I have hashed together: 

1) Object lessons, and the knowledge that is contained in objects. The examples I have chosen come from museums, or exhibits. But perhaps they don't have to. How does the materiality of the object impact these lessons? There are digital reproductions that become objects. And then we access the objects through images.  

2) How those objects are made. Making, and physical traces of the hand. In architecture, the first maxim you learn in school is that architects don't build, they draw. Making can reveal traces. In 2017, I visited the Mori Ogai Museum, in Tokyo. There was a set of stairs leading to the basement with a wooden handrail on one side, and a metal one on the other. I think about that difference all the time.  

3) Mundanity, and how surreal it can be. I'm thinking Jacques Tati, in Playtime, or Chris Steele-Perkins' fly on the wall photograph.  

4) Spaces of making. How are those spaces are documented.  

5) It's important to me that I find a narrative I can follow. Traces of historical memory in objects and spaces. "The Parthenon of Books", or "Monument for the Living"  

[photographyatmit]

Blogpost #2

I watched this film almost 10 years ago, and the thing that struck me on rewatching, other than how beautifully and at times strangely shot it is, is its atmosphere and style. The pacing is measured, like a piece of music. The film expresses itself through the passion and fury of 90s French hip hop. The city and film create a lot of the sounds off screen - Edith Piaf and NTM (and other French hip-hop that I don’t recognise) coming from cars and stereos. Gunshots, sirens, and percussion scrape under the scenes. And the film begins with real footage of riots, but set to Bob Marley’s Burnin’ and Lootin’. Although this is formally distinct from the rest of the feature, it does bring positivity and humor to the protest, which runs throughout. 

In Donald Glover’s video for This is America, hip hop and politics are blended in a very different setting - although the theme of police brutality has not ended. To me, there is one more layer of self consciousness than in La Haine. Glover is folding the violence against Black life in the U.S. over onto Black cultural power in the U.S. The images are a choreography of scenes that are frightening, triggering, bizarre, stereotypical, and familiar. Without the sound, it would be impossible to tell that for weeks, people were enjoying this track in their cars all across the country. But because these images are in a Childish Gambino video, they bring the protest to the art form itself. 

[photographyatmit]

Blogpost #1

For me, the argument from Azoulay's text that continues to sit with is that photography and photographs are actions as well as objects. They do not have a beginning, middle, and end; they don't end. This borrows Arendt's definition of work as something that ends. Is there something that makes photography different from, say, architecture, which is also something that can continue to speak to some truth after it is put into the world? Is there something about images that operate through a different ontology? 

I am thinking about the layers of citizenship and statehood in photography. I am drawn to Azoulay's claim that even stateless people enter into a declared citizenry of photography when they participate in an action. And yet what is the nature of that citizenry? It is certainly not in control. The examples Azoulay gives show photography as a controlled surface that actions exist on. The citizenry has a "public edge". Photography controls visibility; in the some of the passages I read, it creates the image of the female body and never shows assaults on individual bodies, it sterilizes the Gulf War, it Is an instrument of torture masquerading as a truth in Palestine. The description of the photograph of Palestinian man with the blindfold on his forehead, and the Israeli state maintaining the power to hide his vision, plunging him into darkness again (and inviting the photograph itself from the collaborating journalist), still sticks with me. I can still see this idea, this image of a photograph that I have never seen.