"Take Time" - The Books

This is a video made by a band called The Books. This band has a very cinematic way of making music and if I ever made an experimental film I'd ask this band to score it. The band is a mixture of the two band members' instrumentation (guitar, vocals, etc) with sampled sound clips. The orchestrate each and every song in an inventive interesting way and their music would be classified (if it were up to me) as montage-rock. This video proves my point in saying their music is very cinematic. Watch this video and think about how the music compliments the video and vise versa. Also think about the realtion between judgement and experince. Here it is...

"Take Time" - The Books

What I found most interesting

I find the idea of taking an ancient technology like a camera obscura and recreating it in modern scenarios fascinating. Ethan Jackson constructed this whole project himself. He combined hard work and construction/architecture with a cinematic view of an old trick. Projecting the outside world into an enclosed room is a beatiful idea. One could almost feel the weather and the brisk winter breeze. Seeing this with an audience made me think of how all this different media we experienced in class necesitates discussion and contemplation. Talking with a group of people helps me to straighten out my thoughts and realize what it was I enjoyed or didn't enjoy in class. Something like a camera obscura in modern times needs to be discussed with fellow film students. Each and every person has their own idea of how this instillation applied to modern media and hearing all of this made me appreciate the fact that Ethan Jackson's project was appreciated by all.

Along with this project comes a film we watched called "The Dark Room" by Minyong Jang. This also fascinated me but in a ver different way. We watched it as a class but I think it could be watched by oneself and still enjoyed. This film documented Jang's camera obscura in new ways by tilting the camera and editing. This film was a documentation of one space meeting with another and find that beautiful.

Internet Media

The media we watched in class had something blatantly simple about it. Media is a digital art form bores me. Yes, I do understand that it may be the future of media as we know it but there is something too common in all the videos we watched. Not that all this media is simple but the fact that it can be made on a computer without lifting anything but a series of fingers shows me that the passion of cinema has been demeaned to a simple, easy state. I enjoy the idea of editing together found footage and adding a meaningful score to it to make it more madernly relevant but there have been too many spoof videos that I have experienced on the world wide web that show me there is no knowledge of the history of cinema necessary to make a popular video. YouTube has mage this from of media banal and pointless. It has reverted back to a state where any bored fourteen year old can make a video in Quicktime Pro and post it online and be credited for creating the newest popular swill. There is online media that I have appreciated over the years and still do to this day (explodingdog.com)but there are also sites that reward internet users for being lazy and unintellectual. There is definitely media on the internet, especally in the experimental form, that I believe is still advancing the art form but it is too easy for these artists to come back to make flash animation videos of hampsters dancing or a Quicktime video of a computer's memory. I just ask that this media makes use of the contemplation of where experimental cinema is going.