Humans of New York

Whilst thinking about the direction I could potentially take my practical work in, I thought about a site I discovered recently called 'Humans of New York' which specifies in stories from people of all backgrounds and walks of life. Moving forward with practical work especially, I want to explore the personal stories I find interesting whilst applying the same rules of composition I have recorded so far, maybe also conducting primary research to find stories to work from. So far, my research has been more focused on women who take a lead role, this could be a theme I continue to explore within this idea.

Telling real stories, giving more context to my own work
Could treat these as individual editorial briefs?

Shot by Shot - Steven D. Katz

'Vision is the art of seeing things invisible' - Jonathan Swift

PART 1 - Visualization (pg. 7 - 9)

• 'In his landmark book 'Qu'est-ce que le Cinema?' French film critic Andre Bazin used the term presence to describe the moviegoer's sense that he is within the same spatial/temporal continuum as the picture on the screen.'
• 'Magical as it sounds, visualization was just another description of the creative process until the human potential movement discovered that it could be put to work.'

PART 2 - Elements of the Continuity Style (pg. 121 - 145)

• 'the universal units of composition are the long shot, the medium shot, and the close up. These shots are a development of the continuity system insofar as they are overlapping portions of a single space and only make sense in relation to one another.'
• 'Unconventional viewpoints, framing and shot size can be used to explore portraiture through texture, light and the infinite varieties of form.' - close ups
• 'The medium shot is also the general range in which group shots are composed for dialogue scenes.'
• 'One of the the full shot's most attractive qualities is that it allows the actor to use body language. This type of physical expression has all but disappeared from the movies since the silent period.'

How to read a film - The Language of Film: Signs & Syntax

3. The Language of Film: Signs & Syntax

Signs (pg. 170 - 191)

• 'Film is not a language in the sense that English, French, or mathematics is.'
• 'it's impossible to be ungrammatical in film.'
• 'Clearly, it is not necessary to acquire an intellectual understanding of film in order to appreciate it - at least on the most basic level.'
• 'The word 'image', indeed, has two conjoined meanings: an image is an optical pattern; it is also a mental experience, which is probably why we use the word 'imagine' to describe the mental creation of pictures.'
• 'we do indeed read an image physically as well as mentally and psychologically, just as we read a page. The difference is that we know how to read a page - in English, from left to right and top to bottom - but we are seldom conscious of precisely how we read an image.'
• 'Film is not a language, but is like language, and since it is like language, some of the methods that we use to study language might profitably be applied to a study of film.'
• 'Semioticians justified the study of film as language by redefining the concept of written and spoken language. Any system of communication is a 'language'; English, French or Chinese is a 'language system'. Cinema, therefore, may be a language of a sort, but it is clearly a language system.'
• 'As Christian Metz, the well-known film semiotician, pointed; we understand a film not because we have a knowledge of its system because we understand the film. Put another way, 'It is not because the cinema is language that it can tell such fine stories, but rather it has become language because it has told such fine stories' [Metz, Film Language, p.47].'

• 'An ant-covered hand from Dali and Bunuel's surrealist classic Un Chien Andalou (1928). Another very complex image, not easily analyzed. Iconic, Indexical, and symbolic values are all present: the image is striking for its own sake; it is measure of the infestation of the soul of the owner of the hand; it is certainly symbolic of a more general malaise, as well.'
• 'the source of the image seems to be a trope: a verbal pun on the French idiom, 'avoir des fourmis dans les mains', 'to have ants in the hand', an expression equivalent to the English 'my hand is asleep'. By illustrating this phrase literally, Dali and Bunuel extended the trope so that a common experience is turned into a striking sign of decay.'

Syntax (pg. 191 - 249)

• 'Film has no grammar. There are, however, some vaguely defined rules of usage in cinematic language, and the syntax of film - its systematic arrangement - orders these rules and indicates relationships among them.'
• 'Rudolf Arnheim, in his highly influential study Art and Visual Perception, suggested ten areas of concern: Balance, Shape, Form, Growth, Space, Light, Color, Movement, Tension, and Expression.' - the framed image

Book - Un Chien Andalou

In the library, I picked up a book which goes in to more depth about the script, relationships between male and female characters, use of figure and surrealism.

Considering the scenario (pg. x & xi)

• 'Bunuel characterizes the avant-garde as typically directed 'exclusively to the artistic sensibility and to the reason of the spectator, with its play of light and shadow, its photographic effect, its pre-occupation with rhythmic montage and technical research, and at times in the direction of the display of a perfectly conventional and reasonable mood''.
• 'Un Chien Andalou is to a certain extent a narrative dream. We can read it as a romantic and melodramatic tragicomedy, or a satiric version of the Surrealist amour fou. It is a tale of frustrated male desire based on the encounter between a determined 'hero' and a reluctant 'heroine' together with subsidiary dramatic characters.'

Un Chien Andalou: Surrealist Text (pg. xv)

• 'It's textual orientations are ambiguous and fluid. It has 'characters' of sorts who are involved together in some kind of 'story', but in a fictional world of Bunuel and Dali they are of little more importance than the surreally grotesque and absurd cinematic signs upon which the film equally depends for its spectacle and its effects.'

Character Relations (pg. xvii & xviii)

• 'The film depends upon a male-female relationship, played out by its two named stars, but their characters do not have names, are hardly ever seen to speak and are psychologically and physiologically inconsistent.'
• 'While the relationship between the two main characters centres on the female protagonist's resistance to the male protagonist's ministrations and attempted seduction, the sexual progress of the narrative is initiated obliquely'.

Character, Figure, Body (pg. xviii)

• 'In a film where identities appear to merge and are sometimes difficult to distinguish, it is in any case a conclusion whose narrative surprise is further inflected by the more than momentary and crucial difficulty posed, by the nature of the concluding shot, in recognizing the male figure as the 'main' protagonist rather than the 'new' lover of the previous segment. The female protagonist, throughout, has no such difficulties for recognition'.
• 'These quasi-magical abilities are linked to the film's obsessive blurring and destruction of the human form.'
• 'The film's discontinuous vision of the human body is thus connected to its overall explosion of psychological-dramatic logic and coherence in the cinema.'

The blurb of the book reads:

Un Chien Andalou, the most influential of all surrealist films, has shocked, provoked and puzzled audiences and critics since its release in 1929.

Luis Bunuel's first film was a collaboration with his fellow Spaniard, the twenty-four-year-old Salvador Dali. They aimed to expunge from their script any 'idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation'. The result is a film that alludes and disturbs but stubbornly resists a definitive meaning.

Ted Talk - Teach girls bravery, not perfection

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fC9da6eqaqg&list=WL&index=26

Reshma Saujani - American lawyer and politician

We're raising our girls to be perfect, and we're raising our boys to be brave, says Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code. Saujani has taken up the charge to socialize young girls to take risks and learn to program — two skills they need to move society forward. To truly innovate, we cannot leave behind half of our population, she says. "I need each of you to tell every young woman you know to be comfortable with imperfection."

Notes

'The bravery deficit is why women aren't represented..'

'Women have been socialised to aspire to perfection and they're overly cautious'

'requires imperfection'

'Instead of showing the progress that she made she'd rather show nothing at all'

'for any economy to grow we cannot leave behind half our population'

'being courageous'

'be comfortable with imperfection'

Composition 'rules' in Film (Amélie)

As I have already looked at the general colours and tone of 'Amélie', I wanted to explore the components of particular scenes - taking into account the things I have already found out about the film, and recording moments where the 'rules' of composition are evidently applied. The change of medium helped here too, I found I could record the distribution of colour a lot more effectively using pencil crayon rather than pen.

Le Enfants du Paradis - Scenes

Taking individual scenes from this film in particular have a similar to when I looked at 'The Passion of Joan of Arc'. The colours are left up to the imagination as it is a black and white film. The run time is 3h 10min, I think the longest old-style film I have ever seen. I really enjoyed the theatrical element within the film, stages and costumes appear throughout. I kept looking back at the 'rules' I noted down to see if I could find some scenes that corresponded with this, especially as I was drawing. In this film, the women's role is not the focal point as she is not the main protagonist - this is obvious from the composition of the scenes in the frame. I thought it would be interesting to record this dynamic as well as those with a female lead character. When I was drawing, I did take away any dialogue and again focused on the aesthetic.

Landscape Composition - Rules

In order to be able to recognise compositional patterns and rules followed by image/film makers I decided to look up the basics. Having these jotted down in my sketchbook is very useful for me to look back on when continuing to research practically.

Composition - Female Lead

The next stage of documenting and thinking about composition in relation to some of the films I have been looking at so far was to really hone in on the key elements of a mise-en-scene that are used frequently to depict a story/character. In all three female led films, 'The Passion of Joan of Arc' (1928), 'Amélie' (2001) and Sicario (2015), the use of a close up to describe facial expression or emotion is evident throughout, predominantly in the face of the female protagonist. Particularly, in 'The Passion of Joan of Arc' and 'Amélie', the frame is used to describe a hierarchy often between a man and a woman. The dynamic angles and cropped scenes add to the demonstration of a patriarchy within the story.