My favorite out of the two we watched was "Le Voyage la lune." I'm just a sucker for old movies, the clothes, the misconceptions of the time, the architecture and the way they are filmed and produced. The best part is when they just 'fell' off the 'edge' of the moon. I'm not positive of technology at the time, but I'm sure they knew gravity wasn't in space. Well, whose knows. The camera never moved, it makes sense. The camera is frequentlt called an 'eye.' Which makes sense since it records what our eyes see. So naturally when recording somthing in the early 1900's they were going to record it the same way they had been viewing it, straight on from a chair, no close ups or movement or cut and pasted scenes. Despite the fixed position I still enjoyed watching the work of a pioneer of film.
The other video, the mash-up of other's works, whose title escapes me, was a little less enjoyable to me, probably because it was a little closer to home that the much older film was. To me the effects appeared cliche, but I know that at the time those were mind blowing effectss... just grossly overused. The theme though of global television, and this oncrop of mass media was well predicted. The chinese woman dancing in front of obvious United States icons came across more easily than other scenes. There was also a lot of dancing, I guessed they loved dancing at the time. Or were they identifying it as a uniting factor? The colors were very groovy as was the music. Nam June Paik, one of the first world famous artist, created a lot of very strange, thought-provoking commentaries on mass media, from sculptures of Budha sitting watching TV, to a TV cello that sounds horrible. I liked parts of the piece, especially those that made two different songs one in the same. It was cool. period.
No comments:
Post a Comment