film studies at the university of colorado boulder.
Historical and material approaches to the reuse, reformation and reconstitution of existing sources from Cubism to PostModernism. Originality, appropriation, authorship, intellectual property, found footage, home movies, readymades, remixes, copyleft and free culture.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
After Thought
I, personally, have nothing to say about these films...
ps. if you have no way to evaluate these works then your job as a student of art is to stick with descriptions of how the works are organized as complete compositions. Critique can be broken down into a) description b)analysis c) interpretation d) evaluation. Some skills you might use : formal elements of the work, techincial qualities of the work, subject matter, analogy and metaphor, historical context. So try that again OK?
It's not that I don't know how to critique films, It's that criticism is an obviously flawed process, so the practice of said criticism is entirely unappealling to me, without first developing a higher form of criticism. However, if you really want me to write something using your archetype, than consider this to be it...
Of the three films we watched on Tuesday (which included A. Curtis' In the Wake, Harry Smith's Early Abstractions, Pt. 1, and Joel Scholemowitz's Abrasions), I consider Scholemowitz's work to have been the most enjoyable. The work it's self felt more mature than the other's screened, mainly because of the difference in form. Consider, for example the use of scratching implemented by A. Curtis, which was generally used for the essential purpose of writing on the film, and lacking any other depth beyond this, is of an entirely different form than that of Scholemowitz's, who used scratching to be reflective of not only the destruction of the image, but of the destruction of his own self percieved image, providing an emotional depth to the scratches beyond which the use of words is inadequete. This is not to say, however, that the act of writing on film is a simple process which bears no emotional depth. Rather, the act of scratching on the film was secondary to A Curtis' film. I felt, instead, that the footage and text where the primary motivators of the film, and the use of scratching was merely incidental, which does not reflect at all the aesthetic nature of the film. Because of this, the form of the scratching, as well, was entirely incidental, and therefore, makes my comparisson to Scholemowitz's film entirely unfair. However, incidental or not, we cannot deny that this did in fact alter the form of the film itself. Yet because the film's were of completely different aesthetic, we most than argue for the sake of the film's essential forms, rather than break into the use of comparrison, and in this respect, A Curtis's scratching produces a form proportional to the motivating drive behind the film. Yet, even in this sense, any statement about the film would be entirely nonsensical. Yes, the scratching added to the essential filmic form of "In the Wake", but form is, in the long run, inadvertantley intertwined with the existance of the film itself. In other words, form, or rather aesthetics, is of itself existance. Now, if we wanted to talk about the nature of existence, than all we can talk about is our relationship to the universe, i.e. existance is derieved from relationship. One can even use film as an analogy for this. Each frame is similiar to an atom, in that they act as single unit's. When we discuss how film works, we discuss persistance of vision, which allows us to percieve the film in a specific form, rather than a jumble of frames. Atoms construct themselves in similiar ways, so that we percieve bodies oppossed to thousands and thousands of atoms. However, this does not deny the fact that all anything is is a jumble of atoms, just like we cannot deny that film is anything but a bunch of frames. the only way they exist is through their relationship to one another. And if we try to seperate them and quantify the single unit, than we discover that they do not exist. The atom for example cannot be qualified by itself. As we continue to get closer and closer to seperate it by itself, we begin to discover that they are nothing but negative space. And that is all a frame is by itself. So because I most critique these films, than I must qualify my relationship to the film's, and of the film's to other film's, and to the universe, indeed. but qualifying is relative, and therefore, In the long run, the question criticism poses to the world is a question of existence. Does this universe exist? And if the answer isn't already obvious, than you've already have discovered the answer.
3 comments:
maybe now that you've slept on it you can try that one again...there is always something to say about one's experiences...
ps. if you have no way to evaluate these works then your job as a student of art is to stick with descriptions of how the works are organized as complete compositions. Critique can be broken down into a) description b)analysis c) interpretation d) evaluation. Some skills you might use : formal elements of the work, techincial qualities of the work, subject matter, analogy and metaphor, historical context. So try that again OK?
It's not that I don't know how to critique films, It's that criticism is an obviously flawed process, so the practice of said criticism is entirely unappealling to me, without first developing a higher form of criticism.
However, if you really want me to write something using your archetype, than consider this to be it...
Of the three films we watched on Tuesday (which included A. Curtis' In the Wake, Harry Smith's Early Abstractions, Pt. 1, and Joel Scholemowitz's Abrasions), I consider Scholemowitz's work to have been the most enjoyable. The work it's self felt more mature than the other's screened, mainly because of the difference in form. Consider, for example the use of scratching implemented by A. Curtis, which was generally used for the essential purpose of writing on the film, and lacking any other depth beyond this, is of an entirely different form than that of Scholemowitz's, who used scratching to be reflective of not only the destruction of the image, but of the destruction of his own self percieved image, providing an emotional depth to the scratches beyond which the use of words is inadequete. This is not to say, however, that the act of writing on film is a simple process which bears no emotional depth. Rather, the act of scratching on the film was secondary to A Curtis' film. I felt, instead, that the footage and text where the primary motivators of the film, and the use of scratching was merely incidental, which does not reflect at all the aesthetic nature of the film. Because of this, the form of the scratching, as well, was entirely incidental, and therefore, makes my comparisson to Scholemowitz's film entirely unfair. However, incidental or not, we cannot deny that this did in fact alter the form of the film itself. Yet because the film's were of completely different aesthetic, we most than argue for the sake of the film's essential forms, rather than break into the use of comparrison, and in this respect, A Curtis's scratching produces a form proportional to the motivating drive behind the film. Yet, even in this sense, any statement about the film would be entirely nonsensical. Yes, the scratching added to the essential filmic form of "In the Wake", but form is, in the long run, inadvertantley intertwined with the existance of the film itself. In other words, form, or rather aesthetics, is of itself existance. Now, if we wanted to talk about the nature of existence, than all we can talk about is our relationship to the universe, i.e. existance is derieved from relationship. One can even use film as an analogy for this.
Each frame is similiar to an atom, in that they act as single unit's. When we discuss how film works, we discuss persistance of vision, which allows us to percieve the film in a specific form, rather than a jumble of frames. Atoms construct themselves in similiar ways, so that we percieve bodies oppossed to thousands and thousands of atoms. However, this does not deny the fact that all anything is is a jumble of atoms, just like we cannot deny that film is anything but a bunch of frames. the only way they exist is through their relationship to one another. And if we try to seperate them and quantify the single unit, than we discover that they do not exist. The atom for example cannot be qualified by itself. As we continue to get closer and closer to seperate it by itself, we begin to discover that they are nothing but negative space. And that is all a frame is by itself.
So because I most critique these films, than I must qualify my relationship to the film's, and of the film's to other film's, and to the universe, indeed. but qualifying is relative, and therefore, In the long run, the question criticism poses to the world is a question of existence. Does this universe exist? And if the answer isn't already obvious, than you've already have discovered the answer.
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