Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries

Above are some screen captures from several "films" by the South Korean artists, Young-hae Chang and Marc Voge who work collectively as "Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries."

Their artwork could be described as half-way between film and literature, which is why I think they're of special interest for this class. Their pieces are created for the Internet (though they also show in galleries) and they consider the internet the basic medium they work in, “We try to break as many rules as possible. We try to express the essence of the Internet: information. Strip away the interactivity, the graphics, the design, the photos, the illustrations, the banners, the colours, the fonts and the rest, and what's left? The text.”

Of course its not just "text": it's also narrative, imagery and sound. All elements of film and yet these are not exactly "films" as conventionally defined because there are no "pictures," just words. Nor are they conventional written "stories," either, because motion and sound are an essential part of these works.

Take a look at some their pieces and think about how motion and sound/music work in them. Think, too, about our recent discussions in class (and in your logs) about editing and sound as significant factors that shape the viewer's attention, sympathy and opinion.

Dakota, Pao! Pao! Pao!, Orient and All Fall Down have a kind of noir-y mystery feel about them; Dakota has hint of the road trip movie, too, and All Fall Down features a split narrative (something we'll see later in "Memento Mori"). The Last Day of Betty Nkomo reminds me a bit of the music video genre, though far from it as well.

The Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries website is here and here you can find some commentary about an exhibit of their work currently being shown at the Moderna Museet in Sweden. The curator says, "I am almost hypnotised by the flashing images and the mesmerising soundtrack. It reminds me of the special state of mind one can enter while watching a film at the cinema. Or the feeling of sitting by oneself, deep in thought, at a bus stop in a city, in a flow of impalpable impressions. I’m not quite sure which. Perhaps a bit of both. The works are very filmic, hovering somewhere in the borderland of animation, silent movies, poetry and rap."

Thoughts on last night's class: Logs n' Blogs

Some students have had questions about the logs, so I wanted to take some time to explain more fully how I'd like them to function and what I think their potential is. I also wanted to ask you a few questions about the possibilities of the main class blog.

You can respond to anything I write either here in the comments, or in your logs.

I think that the most important writing, the most important part of the class itself, are the logs. I know this will seem strange to students who are used to attaching importance (or having it attached for them) to those items they are graded on. And the logs are ungraded. Furthermore, they are an "informal" space---a space of notes, quick thoughts, first ideas, fragments, comments, trial runs. I don't expect fully fleshed out, developed and polished arguments to appear there; those things are the proper matter of formal essays. So why am I putting so much value on them? Because I value them pedagogically: they are a necessary prior step before any completely realized ideas can be set down in essay form. In other words, they are one of the spaces were actual learning happens. Graded papers are the final product of learning: examples of what you know. Before you can express ideas, you have to produce them, you have to work things through by reading, by talking and also by writing. Writing can be an important creative medium---not just a fancy display case for the finished results---but the actual tool you use to learn.

The logs are also an autodidactic space, a space for self learning. The end goal of education in general should be to teach people how to teach themselves. In a successful class the teacher would be no longer necessary, or the role of "teacher" would entirely re-conceptualized. Therefore it is the student's responsibility to make the logs useful to them, it really is up to the student whether the log will be an exemplary and significant moment in their education (which I've had many, many students tell me), or just some assigned task to be done as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Of course that doesn't mean I won't help you or make suggestions about what you can write about (I'm already doing that, by the way, in my individual comments). For example, I've suggested that you begin by using the log as a space to discuss that week's class: the film, discussion, anything else pertaining to that session. But that's just a starting point. You can also ask questions about the class, pose questions or describe examples of other narratives you've read and seen, bring in points from posts you've read on the main class blog.

Most importantly, I've asked you to use it as a "self-reflective" space: somewhere not only to state your opinions, but begin asking questions about them, reflecting on them, becoming more self critical and thoughtful about why you have the responses to texts that you do. That's an important part of education. To end a class without ever having questioned any of your prior ideas, opinions and assumptions is the worst possible intellectual failure.

So what you do in the logs is in large part up to you. My only rule is that they are not to be a space for facile movie "reviews." No thumbs up or down, no points, no stars. After all, this is a class. We are screening films in a classroom. And discussing them in various educationally institutional spaces, face-to-face and online. We are not watching movies in the same way or for the same reasons that we do outside of classrooms---primarily for entertainment. We are studying different kinds of narrative texts, subjecting them to analysis and investigation, learning how to see them---and by extension, the world?---differently.

Also, don't forget that the logs are situated in a public space. By posting them online in the blog I've set up, students have an opportunity to break out of the individuated and one-way discussions that usually characterize learning. Although every class consists of a group of people, rarely does any truly collective production of knowledge take place. Students, and many teachers, usually respond to classes as simply a group of individuals. Learning to think about class as something non- or trans-individual can be difficult.

Most students have not been taught how to ask questions in class or how to structure a discussion for the good of all. They have never been given the opportunity to learn these skills. (And some don't even seem to register the fact that there are other people in the room at all, so the idea that each student might have a responsibility to something more than just his individual whims is for the most part nonexistent. That you can ruin a discussion by setting a trivializing tone, or blocking serious discussion, or even by not participating---in other words, that what you do has consequences for everyone----is an idea few students seem to have ever encountered.)

The online logs, though, can be an opportunity for truly collective discussion, collective learning. Which is how knowledge is actually produced----no one creates ideas in a vacuum. Knowledge is built out of, is built on the work of others. When Sir Isaac Newton remarked, "If I have seen farther it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants," he wasn't being humble but giving voice to how knowledge is created: no one's insights are ever truly individual. (And Newton's remark is itself an illustration of this since he borrowed the phrase about past writers, philosophers and scientists as "giant's shoulders" from earlier writers, notably the 13th Century monk John of Salsbury, who in turn probably borrowed it from an earlier source, Bernard of Chartres.)

So start reading other student's logs, and my comments on them and adding your own. Already there are some interesting convergences between what a couple of students have written. I was going to pull them out and post them here so everyone could read and think about them, but then I wondered if I shouldn't instead be encouraging you to hunt these things out for yourselves a bit.

Which brings me to my next subject, this page---the main class blog.

My idea was to use this as a space for multiple uses: to post copies of texts handed out in class like the syllabus and assignments, to post important texts not handed out in class like the Glossary, to post additional material about films being shown that week with which students could prepare their viewing (so that you can view what are likely unfamiliar and challenging works with some background and information), and also to post about films, articles, events that aren't directly connected to the work in class, but may be of interest to the students in it.

So far, I've just been posting these things one after another. Last night I was wondering if maybe I shouldn't make some visual distinction between those posts of direct importance to class, and those posts of incidental interest. While that might make it easier for you to sort things out, it could also send the message to just ignore some of the posts entirely. And part of learning is knowing how to sort through material and categorize it yourself. So which way would be more useful? Any ideas?

Untitled Film Still

Science and Cinema

I've been thinking about the important function of the audio track in film since the first class. We talked about how sound is one of the basic film elements exploited by Chris Marker in his spartan narrative film, la Jetee, and sound and music play even a more significant role in the film we'll watch this Tuesday.

This reminded me of an absolutely astonishing bit of animation I saw a few months ago: The Inner Life of a Cell. It's an 8-minute teaching tool created by XVIVO, a scientific animation company for use in Harvard's undergraduate Biology classes. The link above takes you to a short version with soundtrack that XVIVO released to show their skills.

While the version that will be used in Biology courses runs a bit longer and has a voice-over narrative that talks science, it's the sound-tracked one that blow me away. It looks and feels like a narrative film, some kind of avant garde sci fi fantasy. Structurally it is a narrative---it's a series of (molecular) events arranged in an order, after all. But it seems like much more: some of those cells almost read as characters. And I think its the soundtrack that gives the video its overwhelmingly cinematic feel.

Distant Voices/Still Lives

The director, Terence Davies and a trio of screenshots from the film.

Here's a round up of material on next week's film: first a short biography of Terence Davies and a synopsis of the action in the film. Because the film is so layered, both visually and aurally, I think a synopsis will be somewhat helpful for a first viewing.

The film critic Annette Kuhn has a some interesting commentary on the film on the British Film Institute's website, screenonline. In particular, she describes the relation between form and content in the film:

"...the film's 'poetry of the ordinary' is grounded in, and dictated by, its subject matter. Composed largely of events and situations recalled by different family members, Distant Voices, Still Lives is about memory itself, and through its organisation of sounds and images enacts the very process of remembering. Especially distinctive features of the film include the mixture of standpoints from which events are recalled, the vignettish character of the memory-stories, and references to popular songs, popular culture, religious iconography and religious music...the narration, like memory itself, is cyclical, repetitive, ambiguous, suggesting, as Martin Hunt puts it, an "ambivalent, interrogative, contradictory and ultimately unresolved" relation to the past."

I like her description of the film as not so much a representation of memory but an enactment of it.

Here is another essay on Davies's evocation of memory in the film, "The Art of Memory: Terence Davies' Distant Voices/Still Lives."

And finally, a discussion in a french film blog, 24 Lies Per Second. There are many lovely screen captures (some with french subtitles) and part two of the tribute has audio of a rare interview with Terence Davies.
Part One.
Part Two.

Thoughts on last night's class...

I wanted to point out that we won't be doing such close analysis of film as film throughout the entire class. Afterall, this is a class on Film and Literature, or as I've styled it, a class on narrativity. But, because students may be less familiar with techniques and terminology of film that with literature, I wanted to take time to draw attention to some basic elements of cinema.

We didn't spend much time talking about the content of la Jetee---the plot, the themes, and interpretation of them---but we will pick this up in the discussion class we have scheduled after we've screened Distant Voices/Still Lives. Similar issues of the relation between memory and identity surface in both, as well as in many of the other films we'll see this semester, so we have plenty of time to draw all that out.

I'll be posting material on Distant Voices/Still Lives between now and next class, so check back and comment under any posts you wish.

I hope you are looking as forward to writing this week's logs as I am to reading them. So far class discussion, both in class and online, has been very promising.

Genre and viewer expectation....

In her log this week, sshayer wrote:

"I'm interested to see how much I, as a viewer, automatically buy into the director's point of view, just because of devices he or she uses to make me think a certain way. I mean, it's such an unconscious thing for us as viewers, but when you actually stop to think about it, it's becomes so obvious that things like the narrative structure, and shot setups, and lighting etc., are so deliberately placed to literally direct us, and I wonder how difficult it is to view a movie in a way that wasn't intended."

Genre conventions, particularly in film, are one of the devices which cue viewers to respond in certain ways. I want to talk about film genre in class soon, but I thought I'd post these experiments in genre-bending today. These are recut trailers for existing films that rework them as distinctly different, if not "opposite" genres: Mary Poppins as a horror film titled, Scary Mary, the love story musical, West Side Story, as a zombie film, the horror film, The Shining becomes the wacky family romance comedy, Shining, and the romantic comedy, Sleepless in Seattle is reimagined as a suspense thriller.

What's interesting to note is how much of a role music and sound play in recoding the images. Obviously editing and specific styles of editing play a role , as do rewritten descriptive narration, but look how much is conveyed at the level of the soundtrack: incidental music and noises, specific songs, even the sound of the narrator's voice.

Student Logs

Its noon on Friday and so far a few logs have been posted. I think it will take some time to get used to the routine of posting your log Friday morning or before---but hopefully not too long! I made 10:00 am the arbitrary cut-off point (though I have no way of stopping people from posting after that, and I don't actually want them to not post at all!) so that we would have the whole weekend to read each others logs and comment on them.

Which brings me to my other point---don't forget to read your fellow students logs and post comments on what they've written. I'm hoping that eventually interesting discussion threads will form out of some of the logs. This, too, will take time, but right now just get in the habit of checking out what others have written and posting a comment or two...

I've written my comments on all those that have posted so far---remember too that you can reply to my comments. And also remember to use the comment section under the various things I post on this page as a space for your responses.

So far the logs I've read were thoughtful and interesting despite the fact that there wasn't as much to write about after the first class as there will be after future sessions. Feel free to bring up topics, too, don't feel chained to only discussing topics that have first emerged in class. It's up to you to make your log useful for yourself---in the process it will become useful for others, too---so take seriously using the logs as a space for what seems urgent, necessary, or interesting to you.