The Cinematic Orchestra - Man with a Movie Camera

Lucas suggested this as a must-see-hear; I agree.

Melies remixed

Some of you might find this interesting:

http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/whatson/the_george_melies_project.aspx?start=yes

It's a series of Melies films set to new music by Phillip Johnston. I caught the remix for Nosferatu a few months back and it was great.

A Primitive Wink at the Primitive

As an adieu to the first module of the course on early cinema, below is a film by the American Edwin S. Porter called Uncle Josh the Moving Picture Show. You might remember Porter from such films as The Electrocution of an Elephant and The Great Train Robbery. Made in 1902, the film is a direct copy of a British film called The Countryman and the Cinematograph.

There is a lot going on in this film. We have the awareness and representation of:

• generic codes, of the types of films that were churned out for popular consumption;
• the idea of the primitive spectator fooled by the cinematographic illusion who instead of merely suspending his disbelief, accepts the illusion as reality;
• the direct impact cinema had on the sensorium and the body;
• the intense identifications between characters and spectators;
• increasingly sophisticated editing and optical practices;
• the price of investment - here, it's violence when one's fantasy is rudely revealed as fantasy.

The flagrant rip-off of another film also shows the ambiguous status of the cinematic object at this stage--itself a reproduction, created by many hands and a hazily-understood technological magic, what claims can it have as an original, singular work of art?

Weaving the Image

Below is a heavily degraded copy of a film sometimes entitled, "The Weavers of Avdela." It was shot by the brothers Maniakis in the Balkans. I'd like to present it as an alternative, or a third way, of thinking about the films of earlier cinema. On the one side we have the brothers Lumieres, turning their camera back onto themselves: the factory and its workers, family situations, trips to cities and abroad. In short, a bourgeois cinema. On the other side (of the Atlantic), we have the Edison laboratory bringing images of the spectacular and the salacious into the field before the camera: seminary girls, semi-naked muscle men and boxers, animal fights, and, most shockingly, The Electrocution of an Elephant.

What alternative might we find here in the Balkans, at a point where the west feels the influence of the east, where the presence of a 114 year old grandmother reaches back into the 18th century? I suggest we might find something in the weave itself, in the loom, in the warp and woof and the diagonal line that is possible; Grandma Maniakis remembers a time before the photographic, before the direct duplication and indexical registration of reality. Also important to note here is the absence of men from this space; while the brothers may be shooting the scene, it is in no way constructed for a typically male mode of enjoyment. These women work as they have done for centuries. There is a distribution of duties according to age. It begs the question: what does the moving image do to the weavers of Avdela?



The above post is about 250 words and is meant as a very rough guide to how and what you can write about in your own blog posts. Please note I knocked this up in one go without revision - I trust that you will take longer than I did and present some more considered ideas.
In case you'd like to put a video in your post as I have done, you will find a button that says "embed" on the bottom RHS of the youtube screen. Click it, copy the code you find there, and paste it into where you write the text for your blog post.

Readings

I've sent email messages from google docs where I uploaded readings. You should be able to access the readings by clicking on the link in the email. Let me know how it goes. Thanks, Rod