Some change at once went through them all, as if this had really happened, and they were all conscious of making a party together…; had their common cause against that fluidity out there… and now the same effect was got by the many candles in the sparely furnished room, and the uncurtained windows, and the bright mask-like look of faces seen by candlelight. Some weight was taken off them; anything might happen… Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Jan 28, 2013 | Categories: Cinematics | Tags: Collected Works | Comments Off on making a party together…
with film the lens of the camera becomes phenomenologically the eye of the spectator
the auteur of cinema constructs a perceiving consciousness whose perception whose gaze in the language of film theory holds film actors –and scene— as images of that consciousness that consciousness is reified in the experience of the spectator the perception of the auteur whose eye becomes the eye of the camera
the eye of the spectator creates an intensified image of subjectivity
the creation of a heightened subjectivity positions cinema as the medium of modernism
as film and video exchange techniques in a reflexive dialogue of images this distinction between film as modernist video as postmodernist can only function as a general scheme a framework not an accurate description
You are ugly when you love her,
you are beautiful and fresh,
vital and free,
modern and poetic when you don’t…
you are more beautiful as an orphan than as your mother’s son.
Witold Gombrowicz
It is true that we learned our trade because there were no better offers but we learned it in the magic heaped on the hills of San Francisco. And you know what it is? It’s a golden handcuff with the key thrown away. Ask anyone about San Francisco and the odds are that he’ll tell you about himself and his eyes will be warm and inward – remembering. John Steinbeck, Pictorial Living supplement in the 11/23/58 edition of San Francisco Examiner
audiences are accustomed to witnessing an actor’s body in three media: theatre – where we share a physical space with the actor cinema video
I process the image of the actor’s body differently in each media the postmodern live performance often plays with those differences playing with the differences in aesthetic consumption cinema and video fuel a public hunger for visual images including human bodies and narrative
theatre cannot compete successfully in attracting audiences whose access to these media is inexpensive unlimited
at the close of the 19th century the new medium of cinema promised or perhaps threatened to revolutionize theatre
early in the 20th century Robert Edmund Jones a remarkable and innovative American stage designer predicted film would provide the fundamental mise en scéne for theatre
Jones’ prediction did not come true film did not establish itself as a dominant component in live theatre it came to function instead as a new and competing medium for the presentation of narrative
in competition with live theater cinema extended and developed the mode of realism
this phenomenon freed theatre to experiment beyond realism simultaneously sustain and extend expectations of mass audiences whose aesthetic sense has been trained by the verisimilitude possible in cinema
audiences trained in film expect theatre like film to concentrate upon the representation of “lifelike” behavior the extension of the conventions of late 19th century realism in film this may explain the hold in which the realistic mode grasps American theatre
video is the medium of postmodernism in many ways Fredric Jameson argued that literature and film have lost their place as “the richest allegorical and hermeneutic vehicles for some new description of the system itself.” that place has been taken by video operating in two forms: as a relentless flow of images in commercial television and as the experiments of “video art.”
for the most part film maintains a narrative structure forming itself on the basis of a determined progression through images that build a cohesive experience
what spectators perceive as individual segments or programs on video may imitate that kind of structure but the segmentation and the omnipresent availability and the anonymity of video force us to perceive it as a continuous flow of images a viewer can move readily and arbitrarily among different channels shifting from one source of the flow to another amplifying the disjunctive aspect of that flow the segmentation becomes – arbitrary
segmentation amplified by the shift from channel to channel breaks any notion of rational progression provides the sense of a ceaseless play of images and sounds a flow made up of kaleidoscopic images a cacophony of sound
video replaced text as the instrument through which we access information as Kanye said… “Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book’s autograph. I am a proud non-reader of books.”aKanye, Reuters, February 2009
my sense of the world itself has become mediatized the world is what appears on the screen a ceaseless flow of images a ceaseless kaleidoscopic cacophonous display enabled framed fueled by a hyper market place that invests objects with value
Big Sur is the California that men dreamed of years ago, this is the Pacific that Balboa looked at from the Peak of Darien, this is the face of the earth as the Creator intended it to look. Henry Miller
[Duration is] the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former state. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will
I didn’t want any new clothes at all; because if I had to look ugly anyway, I wanted to at least be comfortable. I let the awful clothes affect even my posture, walked around with my back bowed, my shoulders drooping, my hands and arms all over the place. I was afraid of mirrors, because they showed an inescapable ugliness. Franz Kafka, Diaries of Franz Kafka
Dec 01, 2012 | Categories: Solipsism | Comments Off on Mirror
the Sonoma Mission Indian Memorial honors the more than 800 native people (including 200+ children) who died while living and working at Mission San Francisco de Solano between. European diseases (measles and smallpox) for which Native Americans had no inherited resistance, with the overcrowded and unhealthful living conditions at all the California missions contributed to the high death rate.a
Lightfoot, Kent G. (2008). Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants: The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers. University of California Press.
Lightfoot, Kent G. (2008). Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants: The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers. University of California Press.
Nov 18, 2012 | Categories: Wanderlust | Tags: Missions | Comments Off on Mission San Francisco de Solano
I don’t give a shit what happens. I want you all to stonewall—plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up, or anything else. If that will save it, save the plan. President Richard Nixon to his subordinates in the White House during Watergate
Wanderlust on the road outside the town of Pescadero
I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
Oct 16, 2012 | Categories: Essentiality | Comments Off on like an old dream
