Month: April 2015

The snake charmer

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Film theory via camera operators, this is amazing stuff from Anthony Bourdain’s man behind the lens.

Transfixed on this future-past, the operator’s mind is split between now and later. The Present is displaced by near-present. The operator filmed the event, but is left with a peculiar feeling of not fully being there. Something has been lost. What? The act of recording blocks an operator’s access to adirectly-experienced present. Life experienced through the lens is not the same as life without it. They are not fully here. The situation appears dangerous.

Some connections to a book I reviewed for Cinej Cinema Journal last year. Really, really interesting ways to start thinking through cinema in the age of the digital.

Writing

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I haven’t written for a very long time.

That seems a strange thing to say, given that I bill myself as a ‘writer, producer, and researcher’. But it’s true. In terms of actually setting mind to page without the baggage of scholarly rigour, it’s been an age.

Given I now work for an institution that lauds, encourages, creative practice as research, I’m wondering if there’s an element of writing that needs a punch in the face. Or — maybe I just need to write, and figure the rest out afterwards.

I surround myself with people who I know have outstanding skills in their respective fields, whether living or dead. But I’ve not opened a screenwriting program in some three or four years. There’s something there.

There’s always something there.

I just have to go find it, capture it, and ensure I can type it out in Courier New 12pt.

Re-framing the frame

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Blow Up, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966.
Blow Up, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966.

‘Framing is a position of thinking.’

– Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy, p. 125.

As previously alluded to, I’m in the very strange process of having to think through my own comprehension of the cinematic medium. In a way, I’m taking baby steps towards my own theory of film. I’ll be taking these initial explorations to a couple of conferences in New Zealand in a couple of months, and I’m also running a studio around the same topic in the second half of the year.

The basis of this new research is that throughout film history, film theory, the notion of the ‘frame’ is never questioned. So much of this is due to the fact that up until very recently, the frame itself was a tangible thing: there’s little need to theorise or philosophise about something you can cut up and hold in your hand. While my research goes out on multiple tangents, the ones we’ll be looking at in the studio have to do with our framing of the world, and how we can link this notion of framing to our conception of self, and our own thought process. It sounds pretentious, I’m well aware, but I’m hoping that through exploring what a cinematic frame is in 2015, we can move towards a comprehension of digital cinema that is either entirely new or, at best, a – ahem – reframing of older theories of film form and philosophy.

7 February 2010

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Thoughts from the elder Moleskine:

‘When I was a child, I thought as a child acted as a child, spoke as a child… but when I became a man, I turned my back on childish things.’ [1 Corinthians 13:11]

The church expects that every person should grow up. Why? There is no harm, no danger, no inherent negative effect in striving to hold on to childish notions, to innocence, to a wonder at the world, to a genuine and pure interest in others. If everyone held to these, maybe the world would be a better place.

A Thursday

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She’s laughing at an in-joke with herself about everyone on board;
She’s engrossed in her book;
He has his headphones in, openly staring at each commuter in turn;
All the other men are suited, reading their papers or fumbling with technology that was crafted much later than their fingers stopped working;
There is an amicably animated conversation in French – naturally the phrase “I’m entering the City Loop, I’ll call you back” needs no translation for eavesdroppers.

[originally put here, photo by me, original here]