Amanda Esposito's Response on Vertov/Brakhage

I agree that with Dziga Vertov when he is telling us to use cameras in different ways.  Ever single image is a different perspective on an object. Since the loss of innocence we are taught to view the world in the same way as everyone else. Suppose a class is suppose to take a picture of a chair. Everyone in the class will have similar pictures, because that is how we are taught to look at a chair. A chair is just a chair. We accept this without questions. A chair is just a chair by name and that its use is for sitting. We do not think to ourselves what could that chair could be. We rarely challenge what we are told, but how are to we know what is the truth or not if we have never seen it. Like it would be interesting to see what humans would come up with if we weren’t all taught the same things. This creates a bias vision of the world and we are all taught to look at the world in the same lenses. Like how in the article Brakhage says “How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of “Green”?” I feel like this innocence is rarely or never captured on film. It would be interesting to use cinema to challenge this bias view of the world and to show things in uses that are accepted as. 

Dziga Vertov's "Kino-Eye" gave me flashbacks to the Futurist Manifesto in both its language and its philosophy. I highly doubt that this was unintentional. One particular sentence that struck me as something straight from a futurist writer was "How can one not admire the automobile?" which today also strikes me as an extremely outdated sentiment. Humans have become able to coexist along analog devices for so long that we are no longer fascinated with them and that's honestly sad. We need to keep pushing forward and keep being fascinated. I really liked the idea that Vertov put forth that we are not going far enough with cameras. To attempt to replicate the human eye is stopping ourselves short. We need to figure out what the camera can do that the eye can't and push it beyond what we can even imagine. The camera's function is not to imitate reality but to enhance it.

I enjoyed the Brakhage reading but felt like it went a little bit over my head. It was talking about media and sex and love and I feel like those are very interesting and poignant connections but I wasn't given enough context or detail in the short reading.

Jessica Reply to Vertov

SOOOOO, am I correct in thinking that this article is basically a philosophical comparison of the human eye and the "eye" of a camera? The wording is very visceral, almost to the count of losing context. I've once again missed the purpose of the article. I'm confuse about what the writer is trying to convey.

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Raymond's Response (Vertov & Brakhage)

I found Dziga Vertov's article to be quite interesting.  I love how he explained the kino-eye and how sometimes technology is becoming better than our natural senses.  Think about an insect for example.. we cant possible zoom in and look closely at the detail and inspect the life of something so small. However, camera lenses are able to zoom in and see what we are unable to see without disturbing the natural habitat. For that, I can appreciate the technology. The camera also has the ability to show us things from multiple angles, faster than we could naturally.

I liked the article and loved his take on how mankind has essentially perfected God's work.

I also liked Brakhage, I have always been fascinated with how the mind works and the visions we keep in our memory. So even in dreams we see things, though our eyes are closed.

Amanda Esposito's Response to "The Life and Death of Media"

As a student studying creative computation, this article really made me think about how my art will one day be obsolete. As technology progresses, we become accustomed and expect a higher standard that we impose on media and art. For example, many video games back in the day were considered so cutting edge and were great at the time, but they cannot hold up to the current standard of what we expect from video games of today. All the work that went into making those game is no longer valued, because no one plays those games anymore. Some games are still popular today even with the poor graphics, but many of them are lost. New consoles are always coming out whether we like it or not; Technology is moving faster than us.  Even though technology is evolving, many people still appreciate the old. Not everything is "dead" because many people still have old consoles and play the old games, but many are forgotten and left behind. Many of these old games are deemed to be classics and stick out among the endless sea of growing media. 

This can also be applied to films and music as well. When I tried to introduce my little sisters to the original Star Wars trilogy, they talked about how dated it looked. Even when we switched from VHS to DVD, many movies that were on the VHS never made it to DVD. Now as DVDs and CDs die out there is not many forms left of physical media. Some people collect it, but the main market for physical media is dying out. There is more media out there than we can ever process in our lifetime. Some of the media has to die for others to get their time in the spotlight, but that is just the way of life. As these old forms die out they still shape the media today and live on through them. Just like how individuals will die and be forgotten in at most five generations; the same goes for media. These deaths are not in vain; they shape the future. 

Zach Biehl's Vertov/Brakhage response

I found both of these articles interesting, but were just a hair off-target for me. It is not the eye itself that is so biased towards out societal preferences, but the viewer's perspective and preconceptions of what film as a medium can be. Viewers interested in forward-thinking work are not bothered by departures from the depiction of real life as viewed from a single human lens; I for one am eager for any kind of distortion/departure from the norm in terms of the image presented. However, for the time it was published I'm certain this conception was not held by many. Vertov's final assertions to cease psychological/detective drama, theatre productions, Dostoyevsky/Nat Pinkerton, and the concept of the "newsreel" is a bit short sighted as well. Unfortunately, the majority of the film world is concerned with making money, and while people are still so fascinated by these topics/productions, they will be produced forever. A commercial world will always tower over the avant garde. Brakhage seemed to have a more matured grasp on essentially the same concept. His comment that "you are not only influenced by the visual phenomenon which you are focused upon and attempt to sound the depths of all visual influence," really resonated with me, because I've always observed other students' as well as my own choreography being directly influenced by whatever work it is that we're performing at the time. Imitation is not only deliberate but subconscious at its core, as our pattern-centric brains grab onto anything they can categorize.

Ultimately, I enjoyed the thoughts provoked by the articles (Brakhage especially), but Vertov was a bit too literal with his approach to his piece.

A response and a rejection.

I found Vertov's piece particularly interesting. He speaks of how the camera and the human eye tell the same story completely differently. I have often in projects or even in just taking some pictures found it annoying when I cannot get it to look like what I'm seeing with my own eyes. Vertov makes me think about that more. It does not always have o be a hindrance. The fact that we can "endlessly perfect the camera" is an asset, and it can also open our mind to approaching a subject in a new perspective that cannot be captured by live viewing with our own eyes. This ability makes creative filmmakers and photographers "builders," not just recorders or imitators. As with most of these creative quasi-manifestos, I found Vertov arrogant. His claim to "create a man more perfect than Adam" and overall pride in being kino-eye is offputting to me, and like most of these manifestos, it makes me discount it somewhat. But unlike most, I think he has some real substance.
And on the other end of the "BS Spectrum" for me is Stan Brakhage's writing. Filled with convoluted and yet somehow still vague prose, I find it hard to take his idea seriously. I frankly found it needlessly complicated and hard to follow. It reminded me of the video we watched after discussing the futurist manifesto. It was about 10 minutes long and featured the human filled with electronics and the computerized voice. It rejects massive figure and projects some sort of new world society with little more reasoning than someone thinking they know better without any attempt at proof. I find these pieces are overly convoluted and full of jargon just to make them sound smarter than the reader. All it does for me is make me think they don't have an argument whatsoever.