Matheus Siqueira
Action-Image vs Energy-Image
Notes from one of my classes on Critic History of Cinema with Fran Benavente.
First the definition of Energy-Image: A image that furthermore than explaining and defining the story it prioritizes the sensation. An example of image action is the cinema of Philippe Grandieux.
Un Lac
Philippe Grandieux
In Grandieux we can see clearly what is an energy-image, the concept of an image that purely transmits the primitive forces that drive the human being.
From this concept we go with Thoret and his book Le cinema américain des amnées 70. París: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2006
Thoret proposes that the base of American Cinema is not the image-action but the one of image-energy, and that action and violence is only one of the ways that american cinema found to express this energy.
The theory gets more interesting when he starts analyzing that in the New Hollywood Cinema of the 70's we can start analyzing a reflex of a society that reach a point where there was no more "acceptable" ways of expressing violence and when confroted with this impossibility what we see is that violence shows itself as a social patalogy.
After having conquered the west, fought the WW2 and not having an outlet anymore violence turns from being an act against others to be a patology against itself.
Some examples of films that we can observer this.
The Wild Bunch
Sam Peckinpah
The Big Shave
Martin Scorcese
In one of his first shorts we can analyze the seeds of repressed violence that continue througaout Scorcese career.
The Shooting
Monte Hellman
The desconruction of western genre and super sensorial ending of this Hellman classic movie.
Starts at 1:15:00
Gimme Shelter
Albert and David Maysles
What happens with this repressed energy after the counter culture has been emptied.
Rhythm & Trance in images
Snippets of a brief history of Rhythm & Trance in images. Same concepts in different cultures?
La Vie Nouvelle
Philippe Grandieux
Jathilan
Vincent Moon
Les Maîtres Fous
Jean Rouch
La Question Humaine
Nicolas Klotz
Windows, Hipertext, cinema & videogame
What has been the influence of internet and new technologies in cinema is one of the main topics that interest me when sutdying film aesthetics. Here we can see a short comparations between Russian Ark with a concept of the hipertexted viewer and the idea of multiple stories that are left by the side and Bioshock Infinity.
Russian Ark
Aleksander Sokurov
Bioshock Infinity
Irrational Games
Starting at 7:35
Redacted
Brian de Palma
A more literal view on the window hipertext idea where multiple views are presented through literal computer windows.
Colin Turnbull
Sometimes in my life I get quite lost thinking on what to do next. Appearently nowadays the need to focus on your career and to everything within your grasp to grow dwarfs the possibility of exploration in life.
Some of my favorite artists and writers had such a windy path in life that looking up to these people kind of make my life feel better. Two brief examples are Roberto Bolaño and George Orwell. I personally relate to these two because I worked in positions similar to those that they once worked.
Bolaño for instance was a night security guard in a camping close to Barcelona and Orwell in his letters described his work as the lowest ranking employee of a dirty restaurant in Paris.
Having worked in Dunkin Donuts, Subway and recently as a night receptionist in a hostel I like to think that maybe I have something in common with these two authors.
Researching for my thesis I found the biography of the antropologist and it really called my attention for the range of things he had done, from constructings boats, to being a gold miner and after a professor, writer and song recordist.
His CV would look like this:
Colin Turnbull
{}
Home Address:
33 Union Street,
Bletchley Park,
B6 3AE.
Tel. (0161) 351 4039
Nationality: British
EDUCATION AND QUALIFICATIONS
Magdalen College, Oxford Politics and Philosophy
1942 - 1946
Banaras Hindu University, India MA in Indian Religion and Philosophy
1946 - 1948
University of Oxford, Oxford PhD in Anthropology
1954-1964
WORK EXPERIENCE
1951 - Congo Studied the Mbuti pygmies.
1951 - Sam Spiegel Boat construction and transportation for the hollywood film African Queen
1953 - Yellowknife, Canada Gold Miner and geologist
1959 - American Museum of Natural History Curator in charge of African Ethnology
1960s - Virginia Staff in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Virginia Commonwealth University.
1961 - Virginia Writer of the book The Forest People
1961 - Lyrichord Discs Recordings for the cd Music of the Rainforest Pygmies
1972 - Virginia Writer of the book The The Mountain People
1980s - Peter Brook Theatrical adaptation of The Mountain People
The not-inocent object
I recently found this old but very interesting interview with Cronemberg where one particular paragraph called my attention:
...there are no innocent objects. They're all guilty by definition. Most of the objects we're talking about are created by people anyway. They're not natural objects. Part of what I'm talking about is the way in which reality is created by us. We are the only reality we have. It's a scary thought, but it's also my version of existentialism; that all the technology that's so invisible—this room, for instance, the air conditioning, the light—is just not natural and is, therefore, an expression of our will and our sexuality and everything else. All those objects have these things latent in them.
High-heeled shoes are obviously a great fetish object. Think of what they're for. They're a thing that deforms the way a woman's body stands, and the way her pelvis moves, and they're meant to be sexual, and why not focus on that? So much has gone into making this table, your tape recorder—all of our will and our creative ability for thousands of years has gone into making them. And so they are not innocent objects, they're full of powerful meanings of all kinds.
The interview instigated me to further analyze a brief history of the relationship of objects and people throughout cinema. To do this I utilized the concept of fetishism in its primitive anthropological way and further more in the freudian way of usage.
The maltese Falcon
The anthropology fetishism
Marnie
Freudian Fetishism
Videodrome
"I'm not so innocent"
The digital actor and the emptiness of being
With the possibility of endless repetition also came the possibility to react the same scene over and over until a non-actor can empty his being and fully embody the character for the camera.
10
Abbas Kiarostami
No Quarto da Vanda
Pedro Costa
The same idea but this time applied to the subject of the documentary.
Teen Mom
MTV USA
The reality show as the apogee of the digital actor.
The Snow Melancholy Reflexive Ride
The melancholy of snow and an infinite point of view where your gaze is drawn