PHOTOGRAPHY Soulcatcherstudio.com
This page, which is not the homepage, has the represented artisists, in which there is a mass of wonderful photographs.
FILM Showing what can’t be filmed {post by David Borwell}
From Film Studies For Free:
Observations on film and Film Art: showing what can’t be filmed.
David Borwell, 4 March 2009, on David Borwell’s website on cinema.
PHOTOGRAPHY Typology {2}
There has been a insistent and persistent question from the beginning of my serious video-filming. Why do some people object to being filmed? (Or photographed). Most don’t but a few do. What is it? The most surprising is those who themselves photograph who do not like being photographed or filmed.
Both film and photograph can show the classic response: the raised arm, obscuring the face, arm pushing forward, palm up, asking and demanding: why and stop: synecdochic connotation.
Without really knowing why, a brief look at typology hinted the answer was somehow there. By that I do not mean simply classifying the response to being photographed will in some way give an answer to why some resist. But a rational set of typologies is a prerequisite to recognising the question has to be tailored to individual response: no one arm up asking not to be photographed means the same thing. Luckily everyone knows about this topic and has a wealth of examples from the simplest image management (my hair’s not right) to some deeper psychological reasons which are often never fathomed. The archives are full of tantalising images of long-dead people putting arms up, or clamping hands to faces, as the camera clicks, which we will probably never know the reason for.
The iconic examples are those like Grace Kelly’s beach photos, where she runs onto the beach from the sea stretching her arm forward, but still smiling. It is part of some publicity shoot, but she is not ready. This is not the image she wishes to create. There was a TV documentary a few years ago which dealt in part with the management of her image.
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Now I have some sort of an answer to resistance to being photographed from The Handbook of Visual Communication by Kenneth Louis Smith: a weighty tome costing about £/$ 120. Luckily a few chapters are largely intact in GoogleBooks.
Section 10 Ethics: Chapter 28: Studying Visual Ethics by Applying a Typology of Visual behavior by Julianne H. Newton, starting page 459.
FILM music
I’ve chosen these four from Film Studies for Free‘s selection of music and film related essays and books.
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What the music is saying in Bertolucci
from Bright Lights
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The Sound of Sentiment: Popular Music, Film, and Emotion
by
Murray Smith
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Music in Films: A Critical review of Literature, 1980-1996
{pdf}
by
Robynn J. Stilwell
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Film Music and Narrative Agency pp. 248-82, Ch. 12 of
Post-theory: Reconstructing Film Studies editied by David Bordwell and Noel Carroll.
by
Jerrold Levinson
which looks pretty o.k. as a whole.
Missing pages in this review:
252-53
259-60
273-74
279
281
The last two are in the end notes.
PHOTOGRAPHY typology {1}
Typology is the study of types, and a photographic typology is a suite of images or related forms, shot in a consistent, repetitive manner; to be fully understood, the images must be viewed as a complete series.
Kristine McKenna, “Photo Visions”, Los Angeles Times, 29 Dec 1991.
While there are many great bodies of work employing this method, there is also a lot of crap. Let’s be honest, for people who have no real conceptual thinking in their work, the typology can become an easy trick. It gives work the illusion of cohesion and intellectual rigor.
Cara Philips in her blog Ground Glass : Typology [12 May 2008]
Visual Consumption By Jonathan E. Schroeder page 56 {GoogleBook}
If you can’t quite read the snip above, use CNTRL + roll mouse wheel
Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) : Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature)
Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography page 1546
Tate Magazine Issue 1 :
The Long Look: Michael Collins on Bernd and Hilla Becher
Bernd and Hilla Becher
Interview with Bernd and Hilla Becher (2002)
Salman Rushdie on screenplays based on books
A film director once told Salman Rushdie that all movies made from novels are rubbish. With so many screenplays based on books triumphing at the Oscars this week and Slumdog Millionaire stealing the show, he asks is there such a thing as a good adaptation
Guardian, Saturday 28 February 2009
FILM ESSAY TRUFFAULT A certain tendency of the French cinema
Catherine Grant does Truffault in her latest post in Film Studies for Free. This link to Truffault’s essay, A Certain tendency in French cinema [pdf file], comes from there. A footnote in the essay mentions it was first published in Cahiers du Cinema in 1954.
FILM Psychoanalysis and Cinema
Another GoogleBook. The introduction and the first two chapters of Endless Night by Janet Bergstrom are pretty much intact.
A Review by Joan Hawkins helps to explain what the book is about. The title should give it away but if, like me, you aren’t much wiser you need a little more help.
FILM DIRECTOR Aki Kaurismäki
Aki Kaurismaki – Interview 1990
Filmreference.com : Aki Kaurismäki
The Finnish Touch by Gabriella Coslovich in The Age
Interview with Aki Kaurismäki : French TV show “Cinema Cinemas”
YouTube extracts:
La Vie de Bohème [1992]
Lights in the Dusk (trailer)
MUSIC Bach cantata BWV 82 – “Ich habe genung”
Maira Kalman ~ Ich Habe genung
{1}, {2 : long, funny, clever and v. enjoyable to listen to}
Bach cantata BWV 82 – “Ich habe genung”
I have this Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau on cassette. It’s nice to be able to link to another version to make it a bit easier to play! If you are still on dinky little speakers on your PC, go out and buy the most expensive HiFi speakers you can afford – three with a good base box is good: better still a 4-speaker system – and really get the full benefit of online music.
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Re-listening to music seems to have its cycles like re-watching films. Do our emotions run in looping underground currents without us knowing they are about to bubble to the surface? It can’t just be triggered a new event or some remembrance of an old one. Why do our favourites pop into consciousness at such regular intervals, as if without any observable prompting?
Even if it is happenstance, how nice to come across a favourite at just the right moment, and derive optimal plasure. And often more understanding of some music you thought you had the full measure of.
Though the words of Ich habe genung were not familar to me ( I usually re-check what the phrase means each time I re-listen, here is a translation: Cantata for the purification of Mary.
There is a mention in one place of Ich habe genung translating as “it is enough”.
If you don’t know German you can still make your own meaning from the emotional response to the sounds. I’m slightly disappointed the words don’t quite mean what I hoped they would.
With the aid of Babelfish translator it is possible to play with it a bit. Ist est genung? Est is genung.
Ich habe genug,
Sie habe genug,
Wir habe genug.
I have enough,
you have enough,
we have enough.
Ist es überhaupt genug?
Is it ever enough?
Wann ist genügend genug?
When is enough enough?
Ich kann genug nicht erhalten.
I can’ get enough.
Ich kann keine Zufriedenheit nicht erhalten.
I can’t get no…satisfaction.
Genug bereits! Genung. Bereits!
Enough already! Enough. Already?
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Post development: Bach, translation, playing with the shape of words in a foreign language you don’t understand, the serependipituous discovery of a great cartoonist. Because the cartoonist begins, it might seem otherwise.
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There is a cornucopia of similar song-stuff from this point in Youtube.
Consciousness studies
Well of course it does!
Wikipedia does Wikibooks as well as Wiki (entries).
There is a very useful 235 page .pdf titled Consciousness Studies
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