Back to Proust...Be sure to engage the text well before Tuesday, as it takes a while to get the flow of his singular writing style. Remember that I have already noted that in the passage "nothing happens," so you don't have to anticipate any sort of "story" to get rolling. But, rather than mere ephemeral Franco-babble, the text does have an interesting narrative frame. And, the connection with the film I am going to make in class concerns the specific socio-cultural moment of early part of 20th century (an era loosely called modernism). The notes on the webpage point to the specifics here. Don't give up when reading In Search... It just might end up being one of the coolest things you've read; but, you've got to give yourself over to it for this to happen.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
There are notes on the webpage that outline the conversation we will have concerning Man With A Movie Camera and Proust's text, In Search of Lost Time. These notes are sort of longish, so be sure to print them before class. Moreover, read Proust and reveal you've read him by specifically pointing to the text (whether in class discussions or in blog entries). Talking in class (ie, not in our discussions), texting, and sleeping are all really bad indications of your engagement with the material (specifically) and the class (generally). These indiscretions bother other students, are disrespectful to the class, and are blatantly obvious to all around you. There was far too much of that stuff going on last Tuesday.
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Quick cuts symbolize frantic overtones and represent the dispair of the days to come under Stalin's rule. Bertov makes connections between the mechanized world and the human body in several scenes.
ReplyDeleteIt's like the third time I watched the film and still... the title describes the film... it's really just a man with a movie camera filming various things.. I always found it interesting how he looked down on fictional film but he uses severe manipulation to create a certain world.. the jump cutting, staging, and my personal favorite superimposing...cameraman in beer
ReplyDeleteSo this I've also seen this film 3 times, but I've never viewed it with the sound on. It was interesting to see how the sound played with the movements giving the innate objects life, this is a theme that is played with over and over throughout the film. There is the birth of a city intercut with the birth of a human, the folding chairs moving on their own almost as if they were dancing, and the camera moving around the screen without human help. This may be a statement on how humans interact with their environment or even how technology is developing so quickly we are giving unhuman objects humanlike characteristics.
ReplyDeleteProust is definitely a different read, as I found it difficult to fall into the pattern of diction. It seems as though that there is not a story taking place, but rather the narrator, obsessed with his mother, is having a psychological episode in relation to a Freudian slip. There is a nostalgic longing embedded within the text, deeply targeted at his mother. Still the writer draws attention to her text because it is a reaction against traditional writing patterns. Which in turn relates to Man With A Movie Camera as it uses non traditional technique. The footage shown throughout the course of the film is that of an actual man and/or woman creating the construction of the piece, as in the vail is constantly lifted and our traditional escapism is taken away. In film it is not a traditional method for the magician to reveal his tricks as apart of the narrative. The audience becomes aware of things like: editing tricks that strips away the bliss of ignorance in what is supposed to be escapism. However, like Proust, Vertov maintains the audiences’ attention because new and different is always intriguing.
ReplyDeleteJust a comment: I have to say even though an actual birth is shown; the children scare me more—especially with the music. The children are representations of the constructed future. Ironic…
Swann's Way seems very similar in its relation of various scenes through "verbal montage" as Vertov does visually, however, Proust's tale provides the reader with an actual character to relate to, especially in the sense that he has specific personal events from his past to recall to the reader. Vertov's film is much more detached from any particular individual's inner psychology (except for possibly Vertov's himself, which seems more like a community consciousness), and there aren't any specific characters to relate to, just anonymous faces passing by. This notion reflects on each text respectively in that whereas Man With a Movie Camera relates the individual sights encountered by our cameraman, Swann's Way refers to specific memories from the main character's past. Proust is more freely able to flow through various jumps of time, while usually in context of what he was previously explaining. One thought may lead to another, but with a goal of filling in details to make the memories more complete. Vertov, on the other hand, uses editing to eliminate distance, as the concept of time seems insignificant in the context of the film. The viewer is whisked from one scenario to another, with no real connection except for visual metaphors.
ReplyDelete-Kyle King
Okay, I'm feeling wicked uninsightful (insightless? insight-free?) about this stuff, but I'll see if I can't contribute something anyway.
ReplyDeleteBoth works seem to show a preoccupation with the way technology--in Vertov's case the camera, obviously, and in Proust's case print, although that might be a bit of a stretch--has changed the way we perceive reality, space, and time. The latter in particular is bent and distorted throughout both works, with Vertov's formal sense of play making "Man with a Movie Camera" far more engaging than many similarly plotless films.
Similarly, both works seem to ground themselves in signifiers of the modern world rather than in story: there are myriad examples of this in "MwaMC," but the specific instances that come to mind in "Swann's Way" are the digressions that typically seem to end with the narrator being disrupted by "technology" of some kind (be it his bed, the train, lights, or what have you).
Although the film was just an experiment and wasn't meant to tell a story it still seemed to for me. The story was a story of the man with the camera. It starts with the end of the story, showing scenes of a theatre. Then it reaches inside a community that sleeps and all is silent until the train rolls in. That signals a new day has begun. The busy life of everyone and everything wakes up and moves around. It also describes how the human body is really just a machine.
ReplyDeleteThese connections may just be the mind trying to find some connection with the images it was processing, but it still seemed interesting.