Extra Credit - Becoming Robot

The “Nam June Paik: Becoming Robot” exhibit at the Asia Society was certainly a fascinating exhibit. It is, no doubt, commentary on the 21^st century world that we now inhabit and a criticism on how focused our world is on receiving information and utilizing technology.

One installation that really interested me was “Three Camera Participation/Participation TV.” It is composed of a video monitor and projector and it doesn’t truly perform its art until some enters and activates in.

When you walk in front of the cameras, an image appears. It is an image of you, existing as three hazy colored silhouettes (green, red, & blue.) If you step out of the camera range the image disappears. It is a piece that seems to signify nothingness and the ephemeral nature of the ‘self’ and existence. Another charming piece of work is Paik’s “Family of Robot” which consists of robots made up of older televisions and radios. I interpreted this to be both a criticism on the way that we are all turning into appliances and becoming consumed with our technology but also the fact that appliances seem to be acquiring consciousness and human behaviors. However, since the exhibit is named “Becoming Robot,” I’m leaning towards the first theory. Another piece that I enjoyed was “TV Buddha.” It is a gold statue of Buddha who is portrayed in a sitting/meditation position looking at a television with his face projected back onto it. I took this to be commentary at how we are sort of meditating or praying towards entertainment culture and in a way, worshipping it, as well as what it reflects back to ourselves.

Paik’s work is particularly relevant to culture now. It seems as though everyone is obsessed with the new apple product that is coming out and technology as a whole. It is consuming culture and people, turning them into robots as they become more reliant on technology to do even the smallest things. This happens so much so that people NEED their technology, it becomes a part of them, and essentially they become it. This exhibit was very interesting to see and analyze.

Blog #4- Sound-Image & Image-Image Relationships

Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts1x6uADFtM

The scene that I chose to analyze is the beginning of the climax of the film The Silence of the Lambs. It is a brilliantly edited scene and a perfect example, in my opinion, of how to utilize parallel editing to create suspense and tension. Parallel editing or cross cutting is the technique of continuously alternating two or more scenes that are happening at the same times, but are occurring in different locations. The context of this particular scene is that both Clarice Sterling and FBI director Jack Crawford are attempting to search for the same criminal (Buffalo Bill) and their separate investigations drive them to different places.

The element of sound is magnificently weaved into the scene. There are no non-diegetic sounds, such as score or soundtrack, present. However, the diegetic sound is used poignantly to create tension as well. The sounds of the FBI team, such as shuffling feet, guns, and cars is juxtaposed with the sounds that dominate Buffalo Bill's residence. The whining of the dog, the rock music lightly playing in the background,  and the sounds of Buffalo Bill angrily knocking down his furniture truly add to the tension and agony of the scene. The parts with the FBI team is also relatively silent in terms of dialogue compared to the parts in Buffalo Bill's house. And, of course, who can forget the sound of the doorbell, which is what I attribute to be the perfect sound to weave these two separate scenes together. The screeching sound of the doorbell followed by the arrival of Clarice and shattering glass due to the FBI team reveal that the FBI are at the wrong residence and that it is Clarice who must now face Buffalo Bill alone. The sound-image relationship reinforces the creepiness of Buffalo Bill and how dangerous he is due to his unstable and unhinged behavior. The sounds create a sense of anxiety in the audiences.

The shots themselves seem to be simple shots. There are a couple long shots, but it is mostly composed of medium shots and close-up shots. One shot that stands out in particular is at the end where the camera zooms into Jack Crawford and the audience can immediately detect the worry in his face. This tells us that Clarice is in danger and that the upcoming climax will be inundated with tension. The image-image relationship is ultimately fulfilled by the brilliant parallel editing. The images in the different settings are juxtaposed using lighting. Buffalo Bill's scenes are largely composed of darkness and blue tones. Where as the FBI team scenes are crisp and bright, taking place in a suburban and seemingly harmless setting. The cuts make the scene ambiguous as we are led to believe that the action in Buffalo Bill's house is the same as what is going inside the house that the FBI team are ready to ambush. The rhythm is also very smooth, which also contributes to the belief that these two scenes are taking place in the same location.

Overall, the relationships between sound/image and image/image as well as the editing accomplish the goal of creating suspense and a big climactic moment that will result in a payoff at the end of the film. It is a great example of how to create tension without using a cliche horror movie trope or soundtrack.

ASSIGNMENT 3 - CONTINUITY

The Performers


Description: This piece focuses on two different paths that two struggling musicians take in order to showcase their talents/music. It is a parallel between the two artists who end up in different places but start and end the film in the same emotional state. The process of making this film was certainly a learning experience, especially using the DSLR's and playing around with the different settings. The editing experience was also an enriching one and fun especially since we got to play around with matching the beats of the song used to the clips. Hopefully the work we put into the assignment can be seen in the final product... Enjoy!

Extra Credit #2

Panel: Documentary as Scholarship: Theory, Practice, Context {Documentary as Research} Speaker: Charles Musser (Yale) and a panelDate: 11/18/14

“The future depends on research.” This is the note that just received in my last seminar lecture. Research, whether it is in sciences or humanities or any field, is the vision (or at least the spark of vision) that the world needs in order to create innovation. Research done in order to garner ideas on how to prevent something from happening or research conducted in order to aid and abet a problem that has already been created are both equally important in solving problems in medicine, social ideas/constructs, as well as in environmentalism.

This panel is essentially centered around the idea of documentary as a form of research and how to establish the medium of documentary as a legitimate/widely accepted form of research. One of the panelists defined research to be “the process of asking questions within institutionally defined parameters, within historically conditioned settings, through established methods of inquiry, inside systems of order, etc.) In other words, what documentary lacks, in the views of the audiences and other researchers, is the order of other types of research (an example would be the scientific method.) The panelist also explained how research is “Janus” faced, appropriately named after the Roman god of beginnings and transitions who is depicted as having two faces as he looks to the past as well as the future. This means that that research is inherently two sided composed of one side that is dictated by legibility, convention and assessment and the other side which is dictated by innovation, the concept of new knowledge, and the not yet known. In research, there is both order and room to create, yet there is often presented a distinction between thinking and making. The intersection between research and the arts is so rarely explored because the problematic views that there is an innate difference between scholarship and craft. The form of documentary as research is a complicated phenomenon because people aren’t willing to accept the validity of the form and the knowledge required in order to make a documentary.

One of the panelists described a problem that the French philosopher Derrida once came across in one of his classes that can perfectly show this bias. A student of his wished to give in a visual production piece in response to an assignment instead of a traditional essay. He expressed that his “inclination was to accept this innovation” but that he didn’t because he “has the impression in reading or in watching their production that what I expected from a discourse…had suffered.” His argument was that words are not images and imaged are not words but even though imagistic research is a form of innovation, it fails because it’s not in the standards of discourse. Essentially, though Derrida welcomes the innovation, the “precision and rigor” which give scholarship its credibility are not present in a project like this.

To this point, I must respectfully disagree with Derrida and any researcher who say that they welcome innovation but their actions contradict this statement, as they decline innovation. A simple fact of life is that everything (humans, mindsets, the world, idea, etc.) must evolve as time progresses in order to become situated in the new times and, quite frankly, survive. One cannot expect to go their entire life without changing. Change is always a necessary factor in the betterment of things. We are always told to “think outside the box” and are always looking for innovation/vision and urged to think in an innovative fashion. However, if we reject the innovation that is proposed, how does one expect us to move towards improvement? The concept of research and scholarship is so grounded in order and rigor, that it is viewed as being boring, traditional, and uncreative. It doesn’t necessarily have to be viewed this way. Research is engaging, interesting, and important and if it wasn’t so grounded and accepted innovation such as documentaries as research, it would be seen more in this way.

Research should be about questions. Questions about the things we don’t know, questions about things we want to know more about, questions about things that exist and questions about things that might exist. It should be about trying to find answers to these various questions. It should be accepting of different methods used to find the answers and more open to innovation, especially in a world that demands innovation to solve the problems we are faced with and cannot reconcile with the information/technology we already have. And maybe this will be interest more people and inspire more people to conduct research.

Extra Credit #1

Panel: Tsunami Hits Cannibal Tours: Documentary in the 21^st Century
Speaker: Brian Winston

Date: 11/17/14

Attending the opening reception and panel for the Codes and Modes conference as well as listening to the keynote speaker, Brian Winston, was an extremely enriching experience. I’ve never really been interested in documentaries, either as a watcher or as a maker, but recently I’ve been trying to broaden my knowledge of filmmaking in general. Thus, this talk and the whole conference in general truly attributed to my education on the medium of documentary in general as well as the particular problems facing documentary in the 21^st century. Winston first defined documentary as a space for ideas and for people to discuss issues in the modern world. However, he also expressed that these issues are sometimes dealt in improper ways, engendering problems in the documentary genre.

            

The first problem that Winston brought up was that documentary film often reveals the “ridiculous racism” involved in the conception of the film itself. The eyes of the camera often dehumanize and objectify the subjects, who are often minorities and foreign populations that are unfamiliar to the audience that typically view these pieces. This is the problem that I took interest in most. He discussed this issue in terms of the Oscar nominated documentary feature The Act of Killing (2012). This documentary confronts former Indonesian death-squad leaders and requests for them to reenact their mass-killings in whichever cinematic genres they wish (including typical Hollywood crime scenarios and musical numbers.) Winston described The Act of Killing an ethical swamp of issues and as he says “we feel good about our empathy and knowing we can know spell Indonesia.” In essence, documentary filmmakers are beginning to argue that it is due to the “jaded audience” that they are adopting procedures that some of us read to be reprehensive. Thus, creating a trap for these filmmakers, as either the audience will feel bored or they will complain about the way controversial issues are handled. Thus, Winston goes on to say that the integrity of image is questioned and the digital medium turns the “half full glass into a half empty glass,” as we can no longer have a form that makes some comment on the real when we can no longer even trust anything on the screen.

Winston brought up a variety of interesting points during this talk/panel. I can relate these points to classes that I’ve taken and how there are so many filmmakers making films for an audience. This isn’t right and it isn’t fair to blame the audience if they recoil at your reprehensive attempts to appease them.  Filmmakers must take into account that audiences contain intelligent individuals who will question, who will criticize, who will watch analytically and observantly and who will not hold themselves back when they feel they have comments to make. Filmmakers should make films for themselves, so that these films are authentic to themselves, and then there will be no “trap” for them to fall into.

Blog #3 - MOMI Trip

Unable to go with the class, I visited the Museum of the Moving Image last Friday and found it to be a very interesting experience. It was fascinating to see all these mechanisms that we’ve discussed in class and the enormous, older apparatuses that were used in filmmaking’s past. It’s hard to imagine, in a world that now places so much value on smaller sized technology that such colossal machines were lugged around on the set of films. The changes in moving image technology have certainly made the filmmaking experience more efficient. The ability to construct machines that are higher quality but also lesser in size make the filmmaking process easier as well and better for audiences to visually experience. The material we produce these days are clearly better in quality but can also take us to worlds that we do not necessarily know (space, war, etc.) but also worlds we do know (family life, friends, coming of age, etc.) in a more heightened and realistic way.

One of my favorite exhibits had to be the “Behind the Screen: The Actors” gallery. I loved seeing portraits of all the older actresses and actors that were the faces of my childhood, as I watched all these movies with my parents. Similarly, the Chuck Jones exhibit was really well done as well. I loved reading all the excerpts and animation sequences featuring cartoons such as Looney Toons and Dr. Seuss characters like the Grinch. I’ve always been captivated by animation, the art associated with animation, and companies that specialize in animated features such as Disney/Pixar. The exhibit was highly informative and visually appealing with all the bright colors used and the arrangement of all the sequences.

This leads to the first of my favorite demos. The stop-motion animation demo was simply very enjoyable and a very nice way of interacting with visitors in the museum. Playing around with the various “scenes” such as waves or the rainbow or the city skyline to make a small animation by slowly moving each image with each photograph taken, consumed a good portion of my time at the museum. It was very amusing. The second demonstration that I was particularly fascinated by was the music demo. As I mentioned in my artists statement, I’ve always loved playing around with the tension of sound and image and the disparity created when the tone of sound/image does not necessarily match the tone of its counterpart. Therefore, given a scene and allowed to play different scores with it and then analyzing the difference that it made in the overall tone was extremely intriguing. I chose a scene from Punch-Drunk Love, a film that my Practical Film Analysis class analyzed over the summer. An important part of the film itself was the anxiety-ridden characteristic of the score and how that affected our understanding of the characters and plot. This demonstration further proved how important the score truly was in that movie. 

(one of my stop motion pieces) 

ASSIGNMENT 2 - AUDIO INTERVIEW

ASSIGNMENT 2: AUDIO INTERVIEW from Soumya Misra on Vimeo.

Blog #2 - Listening Exercise

Last week I embarked on a journey known commonly as a “sound walk.” I decided to record the sounds that came with my commute home, which involved several forms of transportation and the crossing of boroughs. It is early in the morning on a rainy Saturday.

I truly believe that the only thing that can tackle the chaos of New York City is a rainstorm. The rain brings some of it’s own chaos with it to the city, counteracting the screeching horns of taxicabs and rushed shuffling of pedestrians. The sound of my own feet stumbling upon uneven sidewalks and crunching on leaves is drowned out by the giggles of children as they sink their galoshes into deep puddles that ricochet, spraying water on all nearby surfaces. The cars seem to imitate the children, their tires treading through equally daunting puddles, the echoes of splashes ringing in my ears until the next car follows.

The hoards of reporters following the Ebola crisis are huddled, outside of Bellevue hospital, under umbrellas that thrash in the wind. They are furiously broadcasting into their microphones, releasing scratchy noises as the electronics and the rain intermingle. As I pass them, the rain comes down harder. It hits the ground in heavy smacks. Ripples of rainwater trickle down sewage drains.

Riding on the bus brings its own unique noises to my journey. The engine of the bus continues a low hum throughout the ride, providing background noise to the conversations of elderly men and women. They talk about Broadway plays and even sing some bars of show tunes. I can also hear the static noise of music blasting from headphones coming from behind me. In front of me I hear the sound of water bottle being sucked dry, cracking under the pressure and popping once released. These are sounds I am not used to hearing on the bus, as mundane as they are. Usually on the bus, I plug in my headphones and drown out the noise from the surroundings with music.

I can hear him before I see him. “Nani! Nani! Look how much candy I got from trick or treating!” It’s a high-pitched voice, verging on shrill, but also the sound I was most excited to hear. The thuds of his steps on the staircase seem like they belong in Jurassic Park or some other dinosaur movie. From the staircase comes my younger brother, enthusiastic and giggling, ending my journey home and my sound walk.

ASSIGNMENT 1 - DEFINE A SPACE

DEFINE A SPACE from Soumya Misra on Vimeo.

Blog #1 - Artist Statement

I believe that there are two sides to any filmmaker. One side that wholeheartedly embraces their own identity, and uses it to create a film that is entirely personal and representative of themselves. While the other side desperately attempts to escape their identity, and creates a film that explores a world completely foreign. I believe that every great filmmaker is able to masterfully reconcile these two sides to create films that are authentic and ultimately evocative of their identity, both what they are and what they wish to be. It is this revelation of identity, while watching someone else's films, as well as expression of identity, while creating my own, that affect me the most as a filmmaker.

I intend to produce films that are entirely authentic to my perceptions, passions, and, ultimately, myself. I've always related to the phrase "a jack of all trades but a master of none," participating in a wide array of activities from receiving a black belt in Tae Kwon Do to taking guitar lessons. Filmmaking provides me with a wonderous space to explore several forms of creative expression. Film is not a medium that merely entails a visual experience. I like to investigate the tension between visuals and sound and how this tension can affect the tone of my films. The juxtaposition between several elements in my work is rooted in my overarching analysis into the idea of identity, and the internal conflicts present in every individual.

The content of my work frequently delves into relationship and family dynamics, particularly how they shape the creation of independent and dependent individuals. They follow open-ended narratives often influenced by mythology. However, the narratives and characters are adapted to the modern world, commentating on modern societal issues such as notions of gender and weakness. They are very much character driven, exploring the insights and behavior of individuals, drawing heavily from my interest in Psychology. I hope to aesthetically and thematically capture the importance of individuals and identities by engendering complex yet relatable characters and narratives.