Film/Text/Culture Autoblog -Summer 07

While Reading Portrait of Jennie I came across a quote which immediately struck me: “Art should belong to the masses.”…”Art can have meaning only to the creative spirit itself.”(50) I am concurrently doing a study of Pablo Nerudas Odas Elementales which in their very nature seem to coincide with the “Art should belong to the masses” idea. They are a collection of Odes to every day things, but through metaphor they transcend the very things they are describing. It is fascinating to see Arne Kunstler seemingly contradict himself in the same way that Morris’ interviewees do in Gates of Heaven. Personally I believe that art is both personal and for the masses. It is hard to imagine that anyone will ever react the same way from, or draw the same emotion from a piece of art. Our experiences are too different. As we […]

Original post by onda

Do you have any idea how boring painting doors and door jams can be? Let me tell you, very boring. I just spent the last few hours of my life painting doors. The bad news is I will never get those three hours back. The good news is I have taken in so much information the last few days that I was able to convert three tedious hours into brain “processing time”. I’m still overloaded, but I feel a little better.
Errol Morris…who is this guy and why haven’t I heard of him before this class? Beats me, but thanks to Dr. C I’ve had nothing but strange (yet fascinating) movies on the brain for a week now. I loved “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control”. I want to watch it again very much, but to be honest I don’t know that I […]

Original post by kcannon

I would like to start this post off by thanking Dr. C For putting me in a depressed mood for the rest of the day. Just kidding. But no, that ending made me so sad and made me think about a lot of things. And the way class ended was just… I don’t know… very moving. It was so interesting to see what this movie was really about. When the movie started I put on my ENGL 345 eyes and looked and listened to everything. My initial thought on the movie was that it was about domination and control and how everything is controlled by something. I also thought about how all the stories were related, and how Errol Morris blended stories together so perfectly, like talking about the behavior of the mole rats, and showing a picture of the audience at the circus, […]

Original post by khusband

Let’s just say I had a total Matrix moment during our FTC day talking about reality and portraying what was real and what reality really is. Maybe we are all just imagining this world and we are really being controlled by robots? Oh wait, that also feeds in to Fast, Cheap and Out of Control as well.
So is a movie reality? Is it free from bias? Free from the hands of a human since it is a machine recording it? A movie is reality. Well, it was. In my view, we see people, we see the settings, we see scenes. Maybe the scenes were set up, the clothing picked out on purpose, the acting rehearsed. It is still reality. We see actual people and nature. That was true up until CGI however. Movies are no longer reality and can’t […]

Original post by khusband

Let me put this in perspective for you all. I am so fascinated and intrigued by Errol Morris, that I have struck an accord with my Dad: hassle-free (and highly skillful, I might add) lawn care for the rest of the summer without charge – in exchange for the DVDs Fast, Cheap and Out of Control and Fog of War. Cha-ching!
I don’t even know where to begin. FTC day yesterday we spoke a lot about reality. I buy the whole concept that it is difficult to tell what is real when you are looking at a photo, or film. What is staged, what isn’t – I get it. All I can keep thinking, though, is what I know is real – my reaction from the films, especially Fast, Cheap and Out of Control. Not […]

Original post by malbrooks

While we were talking about the rationality of Mole-rat behavior in class today, I couldn’t help but think back to an article I read a few months ago concerning a new mine-clearing robot being developed for the DoD. Interestingly enough, it appears to bear a striking resemblance to the robots being developed by Rodney Brooks.
This part of the article gave me pause:
The most effective way to find and destroy a land mine is to step on it.
This has bad results, of course, if you’re a human. But not so much if you’re a robot and have as many legs as a centipede sticking out from your body. That’s why Mark Tilden, a robotics physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, built something like that. At the Yuma Test Grounds in Arizona, the autonomous robot, 5 feet long and modeled on a stick-insect, strutted out for a live-fire test […]

Original post by crain2mn

Okay…let’s try this again. I think I’ve spent most of my awake hours today in a fog of intellectual confusion, which is great. The movie didn’t help either–talk about beauty, depth, meaning–Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control is art. At least as I view it. What does it mean when a documentary meets my definition of art?
Okay, let’s calm down. I had a point earlier that I made very badly: that film does have a narrative responsibility (that perhaps is on the decline; I think an argument could be made for that but it’s not really the point) that excessive realism interferes with, and that excessive realism destroys the escapist experience that is why many people to go the theater to view films at all. However, this narrative responsibility-escapism connection is by no means the entire purpose of film. I realized after I made that statement that in doing so […]

Original post by anniek

Reality is defined as the state or quality of being real; a real thing or fact. The term reality, in its widest sense, includes everything that is, whether or not it is observable or comprehensible. Reality in this sense may include both being and nothingness, whereas existence is often restricted to being.
Perceived reality, on the other hand, is the “reality” that we perceive directly around us with our senses. Perceived reality is not the same for everyone, it is based on the explicit information received and processed by the person. As explicit information is received, it is processed in order to integrate it with the information that your other senses are gathering.
Unfortunately, mental illnesses can give a person an altered sense of reality, their perceived reality is not an actual reality. People that suffer from anorexia typically do not see themselves as harming their body, […]

Original post by Amanda

After our FTC yesterday I am especially grateful for the blog. I feel perhaps I may now be able to better articulate my thoughts. I make no guarantees.
I feel I must have sounded somewhat like “Debbie Downer” yesterday saying things like “you can’t trust anything”. Let me say, I don’t think that is the case. However, there are so many different opinions in the world, I don’t know that anything replicated ever can be 100% the exact way in which things occurred. I guess I’m saying that I don’t buy Kraucaur’s argument. I was glad when we started talking about CGI and how so many things can be manipulated through film now. I suppose I feel that I need to think for myself and not blindly believe just anything somebody happens to tell me. With that being said, there are many […]

Original post by kcannon

So…FTC day was, once again, extremely exciting. I guess it’s been awhile since I’ve had a class where the response to debate wasn’t…total apathy. I was kind of surprised to find myself actually getting involved in the issues at hand, and even getting a little angry and freaked out at some of the opinions put forth by the authors. It was also hard to find a camp that I agreed with.
I mean, I think film definitely has responsibilities. For me, those responsibilities are primarily narrative: film for me is a storytelling medium, with the director responsible for telling the story in the most evocative and smooth way possible (for this reason I can’t agree with the realists simply on the basis that Paris factory workers, and even films like The Bicylce Thief don’t exactly have the best storyline going for them. They are boring). Now, also simply in my […]

Original post by anniek