Artists are Not Bullet-Proof

What really impressed me about Natalia Almada was how dedicated she is to the truth. In her film The General, she shows the Mexican ex-president, who is her great-grandfather, in a balanced way. He is both a man with good intentions but also someone who is seen as a dictator. It must have been difficult for her to handle the film in a neutral way, since she is writing about someone from her family, but she does it well. She also goes on to show the struggles of the poor, who try to cross the border in hopes of better opportunities. She is not shy about showing the violence, abuse and drug trafficking involved in the process. She says, “I am not the one to judge it. It’s time itself.” You can really see her passion toward truth and filmmaking in her film.


The honesty of her film is admirable. The General was made in 2007, but today the violence at the border has increased. Almada says the she will continue to show things as they are, which is one of the roles of an artist: to show the reality of a situation through their work, even if it is difficult or unpleasant. However, this made me realize the danger of being a filmmaker. People in dangerous areas do not always respect artists or the media. Artists can find themselves in dangerous situations, or even be killed as a result of pursuing their desires. The work of Almada, and many like her, is the result of a gamble with their own lives. This is both honorable and terrifying to think about, and reminds us that artists are heroes, who risk their lives to bring us what they have seen.

Shutter Island Trailer Editing

For this blog I chose the trailer for the movie “Shutter Island” by Martin Scorsese, because I think the editing made a huge contribution to the story telling in the advertisement. The way the shots are organized is to introduce the viewer to the story and build suspense from the beginning. The trailer is mostly made up of alternating close ups, long shots, and wide pans.


The first shot of the trailer is a ghost ship, which tells the viewer this is will be a scary movie, with a few quick flashes of hanging hooks and naked disturbed-looking people. Then, the camera pans through the gates of the asylum from the viewer’s point of view so it is as if we walk through the gate ourselves. Now, we are trapped on the island with DiCaprio. After that, the images become scarier, with multiple long shots of dark, leaky hallways, dramatic contrasts of light and dark in the lighting, and more close-ups of DiCaprio, where he looks stressed out, sweating, washing his face and panicking. There are alternating aerial pans of the island, with its jagged rocks and dark water, and shallow shots of drowned corpses or crazy inmates. The final shot is of a cliff, with DiCaprio’s hand barely hanging on.


In terms of composition, this trailer is excellent: even though the cuts are obvious, the viewer accepts them because of the story they tell. The long hallways, the dramatic contrasts, and the changes of the actor’s face all function to get the viewer interested in spending the $12 to see the rest of the movie. The trailer is edited specifically for this purpose, and it succeeds. It includes a narrative, builds suspense, and introduces a conflict, but gives no resolution. We want to know: will he pull himself up from that cliff? Will he get to the bottom of this mystery?


Click here to view "Shutter Island" video

Interactivity

The way I use media today is amazing and its accessibility and speed is unimaginable. Mostly, I enjoy the interactivity aspect of modern media. I use Yahoo to send mail to friends and family members and Skype to talk and see people who live far away. These types of media make it very easy to stay in touch with everyone; years ago, this kind of interaction took up a lot of time and money, but today it has gotten so easy and inexpensive! I also really like my cell phone. If the GPS in a car doesn’t work, I can look up directions on my phone, I can call and email people, I can listen to music, take pictures and videos, and it connects to the internet. On the internet, I also like to use search engines such as Google for everything from homework to movie show times, and look up information on Wikipedia. I also frequently visit news sites such as BBC, New York Times and the Associated Press. However, the type of media I use most often is television (CNN, Democracy Now).


Except for my blog, I don’t create web content, but I appreciate the fact that people can post information on the internet (such as the human-rights violation videos we talked about in class) because it gives regular people access to information that governments and corporations want to keep hidden. It really gives people a better opportunity to make decisions than we ever had in the past.


So, it looks like my relationship with media is mostly based on the idea of interactivity: I like to interact with the information available to me from media sources, and I like to be able to interact with people I care about using new media.

Darius Khondji

When I looked up information about Darius Khondji, I realized I had already seen many of his movies: The Beach, The Interpreter, Se7en, and The Ninth Gate. Actually, these are all movies that were memorable to me in some way, and now I know the man responsible for that. I found a quote from him that says, “filmmaking is the orchestration of emotions through light.” Now that I reflect on these films, I see that this is true.

What I like most about Khondji’s cinematography in these films is his use of wide pans, light, and how he captures details. He lets the camera pan over the beautiful or exotic scenery like the tropical island in The Beach or the mysterious European mansions in The Ninth Gate. I also noticed that he is not afraid to place the camera at unique angles, to enhance the mood of a scene. Se7en is a great example of this, since the camera slowly moves over each horrible crime scene that the killer left behind, making the viewer feel as sick as the detectives who found it. Also, the close-up of Brad Pitt’s face at the end of Se7en is absolutely unforgettable, with the clear blue sky behind him, and his eyes swelling with tears and rage, right before he shoots the killer in the head. The long shots of Nicole Kidman running in The Interpreter are so sharp and full of detail, and so are the scenes filmed inside the giant auditoriums of the UN where her character works.

The depth of field (the front to back range of focus in an image) in some of his scenes is filled with detail, yet they appears clear and sharp. Some examples are the UN auditoriums, or the many library-room scenes in The Ninth Gate where, if viewers take their focus off Johnny Depp’s actions, they can probably see each book individually. Khondji doesn’t miss anything! He must have the eye of an eagle to make sure all these details are included.

Out of Order 2 Exhibition

I saw all the short nonlinear pieces from the Hunter Integrated Media Arts Program graduate students in Brooklyn at Monkey Town. These stories and documentaries were very short and used multiple screens that displayed information in unique ways.

The first video was an Interactive Installation, Untitled by Laurie Sumiye Filiak. The film shows a forest but when people walked by in front of the four sensors installed under the screen, the video image changed to the death of nature. This experimental work was easy to understand because it uses only two screens. Another film Untitled by Julie Mazo was extremely overwhelming. There were four screens on each wall and the people in the film were talking at the same time and were moving around from screen to screen. One girl was talking about consumerism, another one was speaking Spanglish, a choreographer was talking about African dance, and a police officer was talking about dead bodies. It was difficult to focus because they were talking at the same time. t.b.i. by Kathy Conkwright and Victoria Estok shows the life of a man with Traumatic Brain Injury after a plane crash. For me, it was very difficult to really concentrate on one screen only because there were four screens running at the same time and everything that he was saying in each screen was important.

Don’t tell anyone by Caro Montalvo talks about confessions of adultery. The audio was confusing because the viewer heard different voices talking at the same time about “cheating”, “double life”, “laughing”, “fighting”, “love” and “secrets”. The four videos on black screens show these words in white for few seconds and then they change to another word related to adultery. I tried to see everything at the same time but it was impossible because it was all moving too fast.

Smoke and Mirrors by Jennifer Jacobs is an amazing artistic animation created with a kind of Japanese anime style that uses a lot of details. on each one of the four screens there were showing different dolls taking off a kind of scarf that disappeared in front of the doll’s body. I think it was cute and the animation was very creative, but I felt like I could not fully appreciate them because there were four and they were moving so fast that I could not look long enough at any one of them.

The last film that I saw was Breve Espacio by Cristina Herrera, about “holding on to a lost memory.” This black and white video uses only 2 screens showing the same image and sound at the same time. One of the shots that she record showing the faucet dripping water just made me feel that sense of loss (beautiful shot, lighting, sharp and clean). As a viewer, I felt the grief that she talks about when she mentions that she is missing her father who is no longer with her.

Overall, I know that these projects were experimental, but I could only suggest that for the audience it will be easier to view the four screens in a place that shows the projection in a more comfortable space, like a planetarium. This way, viewers can appreciate the students’ work more, because they would be able to see the multiple screens together, instead of missing information becoming confused by looking from wall to wall. This is what happened to me when I looked at most of these projects, with the exception of Breve Espacio, and Laurie Sumiye Filiak’s Untitled.

Reflections on Our Class

Film and Media in a Digital Age Fall 2009 at Hunter College has been a magnificent experience because it would have been impossible for me to learn all of this information by myself. When I started this course I knew nothing about blogging, HTML, CSS and Photoshop, and then my knowledge of it has grown tremendously. I could never imagine having my own webpage; now I see myself in the stamp that I designed and in the blog that we built.
On the internet and even in the class we are so close to each other but so distant at the same time. Each one of us worked in the labs with Cristina and it was like dreaming because she retrieved each one of our blogs. It was exciting to see everybody’s work!
This blogging business has shown me that there are even more ways of expressing myself; in media reaching this point in technology it is as rewarding as it is scary. I realize that if we put our information on the internet, anybody can have access to it, and this can be positive, but also very dangerous. So, this has taught me to be more careful about what information I provide.
We posted clips of movies, music, our own photos and the stamp. The stamps made by students in the last lecture were very creative. I think all of us were having fun in the Digital Age class. We learned things that, in this age, are necessary because technology is improving so rapidly and is so important to our education and careers. So, this class was a very valuable experience for me.
I would also like to say that it could not be possible for me to transfer to HTML videos, sites and picture without the technical support of Mr. Rashaan; hopefully next semester we can have his presence in the Labs because he an expert and we can learn a lot from him.

And speaking of new technology- google The Onion News "Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop with No Keyboard"
It seems pretty silly to us now, but you never know what technology will come out next...

“Design I like: Zeitgeist Movie Poster”

For more information about this film, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist,_the_Movie

Poster Design:
Alignment tells people what image is important, by presenting it in a way that attracts the eye’s attention. In the case of this poster, all we see is the large letters of the title, and a large but partly shaded image of the world. Zeitgeist means the “spirit of the era” in German. So, if we see this word in large letters, and then see the world trapped in a cage, we may imagine that the “spirit” of the era is negative, or that the movie has a critical view of modern times. In this way, the alignment of the words and image gives viewers a hint about the ideas in the film.

The poster does not really make use of the grid system, but there is an actual grid present in the poster. The world is in a cell. This seems like a pun because a grid system in Media Design is meant to organize an image and make it appear harmonious to our minds. However, in this image, the grid is bent and placed around the Earth, trapping it in a cage. This creates a feeling of discomfort in viewers: it sends the message that humanity is caught in a prison. This relates to the idea of psychological constraint, because it makes people think about the limitations of freedom on Earth- which is actually a key theme in the film. Thus, it prepares people for what the film is about.

The font of the movie title may also be significant to the meaning of the film. The font is Courier New, and “as a monospaced font, it has recently found renewed use in the electronic world in situations where columns of characters must be consistently aligned” (Wikipedia). So it is possible that using this font for the title of the movie is a hint that people are being organized and controlled, as this font is used to organize things and keep them neat and easy to see.


By using this specific alignment and font, and by playing with the idea of the grid system, this poster reveals to viewers the meaning of the movie it is advertising.