open and title a new project in Photoshop, dimensions 66 cm (width) and 11cm (height), 72 or 150 pi, transparent background; the title should include your name and the name of the piece
digitalize and/or open all the images you’ve collected for the project and manipulate as you want
size them to fit into the image file you’ve opened (i.e. 11 cm on the vertical axis and the same pi as the frame)
The Cinéma Vérité MovementCinéma Vérité was a television-style technique of recording life and people as they really are, using hand-held cameras, natural sound and the minimum of rehearsal and editing.
Cinéma Vérité literally means ‘film truth’ in French and was a style of film making developed by film directors in the 1960s. The film directors of the Cinéma Vérité movement strove for immediacy, spontaneity and authenticity in their films, primarily through the use of portable and unobtrusive equipment, such as small, hand-held cameras and the avoidance of any preconceived narrative line. Cinéma Vérité was characterised by the use of real people, as opposed to actors, in unrehearsed situations. Sets and props were never used and everything was shot on location.
The term cinéma vérité was coined by Jean Rouch to describe the film he made with Edgar Morin, Chronique d’un Eté (1960), which is considered the first of these works. Some other examples of films which fit into the Cinéma Vérité movement are Le Joli Mai (1962) by Chris Marker and the documentaries of Richard Leacock and the Maysles brothers. (http://www.filmeducation.org/secondary/cinverite.html)
We are meeting at the Museum of Fine Arts this week for a tour of the Warhol Live show. The group entrance is on 2200 Crescent Street. The fee is $6.00 per student. Please bring cash! See below for meeting times. PLEASE ARRIVE EARLY!
This week we will be visiting the Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal (185, rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest -angle Jeanne-Mance) to see the Sympathy for the Devil exhibition. Attendance is mandatory. The tour starts at 12:00/noon. Please come a few minutes in advance. Cost: $3.00
Tracey Berkowitz, 15, a self-described normal girl, loses her 9-year old brother, Sonny. In flashbacks and fragments, we meet her overbearing parents and the sweet, clueless Sonny. We watch Tracey navigate high school, friendless, picked on and teased. She develops a thing for Billy Zero, a new student, imagining he’s her boyfriend. We see the day she loses Sonny and we watch her try to find him. In bits and pieces, we see what leads up to her riding in the back of a city bus wrapped in a shower curtain. Coming of age, or just surviving?
Postmodernism
When it becomes possible for a people to describe as ‘postmodern’ the décor of a room, the design of a building, the diegesis of a film, the construction of a record, or a ‘scratch’ video, a television commercial, or an arts documentary, or the ‘intertextual’ relations between them, the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or critical journal, an anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, the attack on the ‘metaphysics of presence’ a general attenuation of feeling, the collective chagrin and morbid projections of a post-War generation of baby boomers confronting disillusioned middle-age, the ‘predicament of reflexitivity, a group of rhetorical tropes, a proliferation of surfaces, a new phase in commodity fetishism, a fascination for images, codes and styles, a process of cultural, political or existential fragmentation and/or crisis, the ‘de-centring’ of the subject, an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’, the replacement of unitary power axes by a plurality of power/discourse formations, the ‘implosion of meaning’, the collapse of cultural hierarchies, the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear self-destruction, the decline of the university, the functioning and effects of the new miniaturised technologies, broad societal and economic shifts into a ‘media’, ‘consumer’ or ‘multinational’ phase, a sense (depending on who you read) of ‘placelessness’ or the abandonment of ‘placelessness’ (critical regionalism) or (even) a generalised substitution of spatial for temporal coordinates: when it becomes possible to describe all these things as ‘postmodern’ (or more simply using a current abbreviation as ‘post’ or ‘very post’) then it’s clear we are in the presence of a buzzword . Dick Hebdige Hiding in the Light (1988)
Postmodernist film describes the articulation of ideas of postmodernism through the cinematic medium. Postmodernist film upsets the mainstream conventions of narrative structure and characterization and destroys (or, at least, toys with) the audience’s suspension of disbelief to create a work in which a less-recognizable internal logic forms the film’s means of expression.
Among the earliest and most significante events in postmodern film was th advent of the French New Wave in the 1950s and 1960s. Proponents of postmodernism as a movement cite such films as Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (deeply indebted to Bertolt Brecht’s modernist epic theatre with its Verfremdungseffekt or ‘defamiliarization effect’); and in Italy with Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960) and Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963). Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s 1928 surrealist short Un Chien Andalou provides an important modernist precursor, although its extreme deconstruction of structure and character make its meaning almost entirely arbitrary. In order to convey some desired meaning, postmodernist films continue to maintain conventional elements in order for the audience to grasp them. Two such examples are Jane Campion’s Two Friends, in which the story of two school girls is showed in episodic segments arranged in reverse order; and Karel Reisz’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, in which the story being played out on the screen is mirrored in the private lives of the actors playing it, which we also see.Wikipedia
Before addressing the postmodern features of individual films-by far the more common approach to the post-modern in film that scholars have employed-one should take note of the postmodern nature of technology and distribution in the film industry today. In Hollywood’s golden age, a typical film was shot on 35mm celluloid by one of a handful of studios. The cast and crew were under contract to that studio. When the film was finished, prints were copied and sent out to cinemas, which then projected the film for customers who paid a fixed price to see it, typically as part of a larger program. Today the situation is much different. Films are often shot on a digital format by the major studios (now subsidiaries of multinational corporations), but also by independent studios, independent filmmakers, or even amateurs (The Blair Witch Project [1999]). Stars are no longer bound to long-term contracts with the major studios. They, and also most of a film’s cast and crew, have agents who negotiate rates per feature, not to mention publicists who try to generate press for them so as to elevate their prestige among fans and in the industry and thereby their salaries. Today studios bombard cinemas with prints according to saturation-release strategies. Star Wars: Episode III-Revenge of the Sith (2005) opened with a staggering 18,700 prints around the world, including 9,700 in 3,700 North American theaters. Some studios will only provide prints to multiplexes who agree to show the film a certain number of times per day. With the transfer to digital technology, it has been predicted that in the near future “prints” will be e-mailed or beamed via encoded satellite channels directly to cinemas-assuming cinemas will exist in the future. It is now much more likely that one will watch a given film on DVD, video, TV, in an airplane, or downloaded (legally or illegally) via the Internet. Films are now shown with a number of advertisements before the film and, increasingly, in the film itself. The famous sequence from Wayne’s World (1992), when Wayne overtly holds a Pepsi and intones that it is the “choice of a new generation” with a wink and a nod, is doubly postmodern. First, it is an example of product placement-the (usually) discreet integration of a name, product, packaging, or logo into a film-advertising, entertainment, and “art” are merged. Second, it cannily responds to the increasing cynicism vis-à-vis such marketing ploys, letting the audience in on the joke even while the film still benefits financially from it.
This portrait of the current film industry provides several entry points into a discussion of the postmodern, including the transition from celluloid to digital filmmaking. In classic film theory, the ontological basis for cinema-that is, how many film theorists accounted for its existence-was the celluloid format: light (and actors, trees, a set, or whatever stands before the camera) hits the film stock filtered through a lens and is recorded on the celluloid. André Bazin called this process the unveiling potential of film, the possibility to depict reality. For Siegfried Kracauer, another realism theorist, by recording and exploring physical reality, film “redeems” reality. What then, does the digital format, which depends on the transformation of light information received through the lens into combinations of 0s and 1s and can be recorded and copied without data loss, mean? For Baudrillard, this new configuration would surely serve as an example of how film has become pure simulacra: the distinction between original and copy is lost. The digital age of cinema represents its introduction into hyperreality. For theorist Paul Virilio, the digital revolution signals the further substitution or displacement of reality, in which a technological or virtual reality replaces the human one and the distinction between factual and virtual becomes meaningless.
In addition to the postmodern features of film as an industry and medium, how might individual films themselves be postmodern? Intertextuality, self-referentiality, parody, pastiche, and a recourse to various past forms, genres, and styles are the most commonly identified characteristics of postmodern cinema. These features may be found in a film’s form, story, technical vocabulary, casting, mise-en-scène, or some combination of these. POSTMODERNISM AND FILM
What do you think of when you hear the term ‘arts + culture‘? What is the difference between a work of art and a cultural artifact? Between high and low culture? Fine art and popular culture? What value do you place on the objects produced in each arena? What social value do art and popular cultural artifacts possess? What do we mean when we talk about counter culture?
Film>TV
