A New Direction In Film: The Avant-Garde

The art of film has progressed to a point where venturing back through the films of past years creates something of a vast difference in arrangement that is noticeable to even the most uneducated of persons. Avant-garde films track this history by taking the already established medium and expressing it in new ways. In Stan Brackage’s 1963 experimental film, “Mothlight”, what can and cannot be filmed is explored. By pressing dyed moths onto blank film, the viewer watches sped up frames with a lifeless object being presented in imitated motion. When truly thinking about it, Brackage plays on the idea of filming life. However, the motion he is imitating is that of a creature that is almost always in motion. Stilling this motion we are presented a different view on what is motion and how can this be filmed. Moths are also heavily attracted to light. The fact that it is the passing of bright light that causes the audience to see the image of this dyed moth is another depth to the art that goes into the film. No dialogue is being presented. No story is being told. but the art of the film is one that can stand with the big films with history. The audience is watching the motion that Brackage shows us. He takes this creature and presents it in a new light, even if the experimentation is one of the actual film reels. This form of avant-garde film allows the audience to see life that is dead and still create something from it.

Nowadays, the availability of the of videos and films throughout much of the internet has created a whole new viewing experience. Films used to be mostly watched by a selected audience who could pay to actually see them in the theatre. However, today anyone with availability to the internet can watch any video that was ever created. This helps to create a culture focused on visuals and how the world is portrayed. Anyone can be a filmmaker now as long as they post it on YouTube. Someone is always bound to watch it even if the video is of the worst quality. In this same facet, YouTube has also made these avant-garde films highly available to the vast audience. Most times people find themselves watching one of these videos because they just happened to stumble upon it. In this light, many times we don’t find ourselves actually thinking about the experimental qualities of the films. Instead, this generation finds themselves looking for more entertainment then anything else. Fortunately though, this entertainment perspective is also one of extracting meaning. Many people may travel YouTube and find videos that contain certain meanings or extrapolate a meaning from a video. In this way, our generation finds itself more in the line of focusing on meaning rather than actual practice.

Blog #4- The Style of The Hurt Locker

Black screen.
“The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”
The white letters fade to black leaving only “war is a drug” to linger in the corner, unintelligible screams escaping frantically into the ears of the audience to exemplify this concept. The screen flickers to life. The rushing sound of a motor can be heard along the barren ground in view. Pixels and camera flicker with the ground’s bumps. Mechanical voices and hums scrape across the gravel and garbage on the ground. It is here that the camera switches perspectives. Instead of being the mechanical noises, the camera shows the robot running across the ground. Noises still fill our ears. We see feet running past. The camera, mimicking our eyes, tilts to follow the rapid run of these people. Among panicked people, we get the words Baghdad flashed on the screen. The use of rapid editing jerks our attention to the screams then the robot. People running. Robot squealing. The screen encapsulates eye movement , on that is frantically running from an unknown danger. Distance changes with each frame, using an amateur zoom effect to get us closer to the subject. The shaky handheld camera joined with this zoom focus on the instrument of the camera for the audience, yet we still feel as though we are watching it. Our perspective now is a distance, watching a hurried army vehicle rove across the street. The camera jerks from soldiers to the vehicle, blurring our sight with mechanic sounds and screaming. Soldiers storm out of the truck, guns at the ready. Parallel editing cuts our eyes between the crowd, the soldiers and the robot. The screen flickers with every bump on the road. We are the robot again. Cut back to crowd running. Back to robot. A pile of garbage bags comes into view. Before reaching it, the camera cuts to a monitor where the robot is being manipulated. Two soldiers hover over the monitor, extreme close-ups used to show their eyes. Staring at the monitor. Using eyeline matching, the frame then cuts to his hands, flipping switches. The camera flickers once again. We are close to the bags, the sound of motor humming and gravel increasing our anxiety. Jerk back towards soldiers, the camera creates us as a soldier seeing what they see, yet looking to them for guidance. One of them, turns his head right, cut to see a building with people. He turns his head left, turn to see another building with same type of natives. Flickering of the screen brings us back to the robot. Rapidly cutting between robot and soldiers, we become afraid of what is inside this pile. Using different sized shots, we see the soldiers interact jokingly in what may be a dire situation. The laugh and switch places on the controls of the robot. The camera is slightly further during this exchange to suggest a more looser frame the constrictive tight frame during the action. Tilt back towards controls and cut to the robot, twisting and turning. Shift back to soldiers, hands tightly framed on the controls. Back to robot, lowering its arm to move the pile. Something dirty gray appears under the white bags. The soldiers’ expression realization: a bomb. Over the shoulder, we see the monitor focused on the swaddled bomb. Zooming in and out, we feel less apart of the group of soldiers as they discuss. Soon we watch as they point out, camera cutting to show the barren road ahead of them. Again our perspective changes to a side view, yet seemingly behind some obstruction, shaking. More rapid editing, to view the scene from any number of perspectives. From behind. To the side. In front. Anywhere and everywhere. We become many people at once looking with them, at them, or against them. Back to the robot, screeching towards the soldiers. We look at more soldiers pushing back a panicked crowd. Screaming, pushing, shoving. The camera flips back and forth to illustrate the action between soldier and man. From a high angle, we shift to see the original soldiers at work, through a perforated gate. Zooming and cutting we watch the soldiers prepare explosives. Jerk behind them to watch it leave. goats begin to run by, and immediately the camera switches to a low angle among the goats. We soon speed back to the robot. Wheels squeak from the wagon attached. Zoom into soldiers. He looks around: man on roof of building. Robot continues its path. Zoom to wagon. It breaks. Flip to soldiers irritated face. The camera, our eyes, pans between the three soldiers. Robot begins its return. One of the soldiers is dressed in a bomb suit. From all angles, we zoom in and out of the change in attire. The cuts are almost in a circular motion around the central figure of the bomb suit. With each new movement to secure the suit, our vision cuts to different angles to watch all of it get put on. Now we watch him leave, switching between a various amount of perspectives. First from behind. Now we are in front of him, tilting to view the entirety of the suit. Now we are inside with him, vision partially covered by the shape of the mask, watching a helicopter fly by. Back to soldiers, where a man comes to talk to them. The camera cuts even more frequently as the tension grows and guns are used as threats. Shifting between the vehicle and the bomb suit solider, we watch through our many different eyes as each of them completes their job. Everything seems ok once the bomb is set, but our perspective from the outside-in increases. Camera shakes with rapid editing looking at a man with a phone. Then the soldiers running. Bomb suit running away. Man with phone. Soldiers running. Bomb suit running. Man. Soldiers. Bomb suit. All this time our perspective is either of the soldier or man. We almost want to run with them to do something: anything. But its too late. Bomb explodes. Time slows to show the gravel slowly jumping from a shockwave off the ground. A cars roof slowly bends, the dirt raising from its roof in unison. The soldier in the bomb suit running from the cloud of destruction slowly spreading behind him. Gravel jumps further. Then the frame comes back to real time, jettisoning the soldier in the bomb suit to the ground.
Screaming. Falling. Dead.

This opening scene exemplifies the use of the camera in filmmaking. Throughout the duration of the scene, the perspective of the camera is constantly changing to reveal something new to the audience. These different angles and shot locations give the audience a specific point of view in which the director can call attention. This same technique in creation of different point-of-views is used in the sniper scene where the team of Sanburn, Eldrige, and James along with a group of British contractors are under attack from snipers in the middle of the Iraqi desert. As this scene progresses, Katherine Bigelow, the director of The Hurt Locker, presents the camera between two dynamic point-of-view shots. The first is the point-of-view of the enemy sniper. In these shots we see the gun held out the window of a building, carefully waiting its precise moment to fire. The latter, however, is searching, with most of the screen blacked out besides the circular scope. This view is obstructed from the enemy due to the drastic thermals arising from the desert. To me, these perspectives are not to instill guilt within the audience, as it did in Full Metal Jacket. Instead the change in perspectives back and forth like this help to convey the urgency while still allowing the scene to remain a somber one once the panic has settled. Bigelow plays with these changes in views not only to give the audience more than just a state of agency, but also to keep the film grounded in reality and the thematic element of war, even though the fast paced editing calls attention to the fact that we are watching a movie. These intricate techniques with a handheld camera keep the audience within the diegesis, allowing us to capture for ourselves what frantic nature of battle and the immediate nature of death.

Blog Assignment #2- Mise-En-Scene in Shark in the Head

With a movie such as Shark in the Head, it is hard to find a specific scene in which the setting play an important role in the mise-en-scéne because each set helps to elaborate on the this. However the scene I choose stuck out, as I believe it did for many. The camera is focused in on the face of our main character, Mr. Seaman (a name only said once throughout the entirety of the movie). The palette of gray colors on the walls behind him. A voice, which many of us assume to be that of a doctor and unseen by the audience, diagnoses the man with “the disease of the chicken butts”. With these words, the camera begins to slowly rotate around the incessant staring Seaman. Almost no shadow comes from the windows that appear to be whited out with a blinding white light. As the camera goes to a point-of-view shot, we see that he is not in a doctor’s office as the outside voice may have led us to believe. Instead we begin to focus in on a dryer, whose noise of tossing clothes resembles the ocean sounds that have played in his head throughout the movie. Within this dryer, we see the reflection of Seaman in the dryer, blurred out except for the colors of his hat. The tumbling dryer continues as we are forced to look inside the dryer full of long-sleeve button down shirts and dress pants. Cut to next scene.

Within this scene the, many things are revealed slowly to the audience as the camera moves towards the point of view of Seaman. At the very beginning of the film, the use of blinding white light from the windows created a seclusion from the outside world for him. With the movie being about a schizophrenic man, it can be pulled out that this use of lighting means that the audience is within the his mind, almost trapped there as he is. Within the room itself, the use of high-key lighting allows no shadow to intrude on the white/grayness of his mind. This gray palette used throughout the film yet specifically prominent in this scene also contributes to the idea of a blank/dull slate of his mind. Immediately preceding this scene, the motif of obsession has overwhelmed Seaman with the pictures of chickens to the point that he must clear his mind of that. With this in mind, we can see how the blank nature of the room portrays an outward interpretation of his mental state at that exact moment in the movie. Also the actors own expression is filled with an almost painful yet neutral gaze towards the dryer, which contains the objects of his new obsession: formal attire. This blank quality is furthered when we see his reflection in the circular frame of the dryer. His face is completely blurred, yet his silhouette is noticeable along with the colors and shape of his hat. As we look at this minute detail within the scene, it is fair to extrapolate that his identity is similarly black. Furthering on this concept, the idea of obsession presented earlier in the film can be translated as a creation of identity, which with his obsession gone, his identity is blank. All these different aspects of this one scene contribute tremendously to the mise-en-scéne of the film.

With all these details in mind, it is hard to elaborate on whether this over-stylized film has more manner than style. Some may argue that the way in which the story of Shark in the Head is told in a such an overly stylized that it must be heavily affected by manner, the way in which to tell it. However, I believe that any single scene in this movie can be extracted from context and still be drawn upon for meaning. Each use of mise-en-scéne contains a specific purpose and meaning on its own. Although the movie may have no narrative to follow per se, the film as a whole achieves style through the meaning of the specific uses of mise-en-scéne, which can be seen especially in the scene I choose.

Full Metal Jacket - How it is Seen By Others

Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket", on Vietnam

In the New York Times, I found the Vincent Canby’s article “Kubrick's 'Full Metal Jacket,' on Vietnam”. Canby sets the article off by praising the visions of Stanley Kubrick as a great filmmaker. With this as the mindset of the author, the reader can begin reading the article with an idea of what Canby may have to say about the article.

Before delving into the actual film, “Full Metal Jacket”, Canby begins praising other works by Kubrick, establishing the fact that all of his previous movies follow an “off-putting”, “eccentric” scheme. Throughout the review, Canby focuses on these particular aspects of the film, only speaking of the plot when emphasis is needed to talk about the structure. Canby is quick to express how “disorder is virtually the order” of Kubrick’s vision. The speech Canby uses seems to be written for a reader who is literate in the art of creating film or at least familiar with other Kubrick works. However all in all, Vincent Canby expresses an interesting view on “Full Metal Jacket” which intrigues the reader in to wanting to watch the movie to some extent.