Richland Digital Video Spring 2019

As I was reading, I didn't quite understand what Dziga Vertov meant by kino-eye. It wasn't until he made examples of kino-eye, and fully going in-depth of what kino-eye entails. Like for the boxing example he gave, instead of showing the point of view of the spectator or audience, which would be watching to people box, he would instead concentrate on the punches and kicks given by an opponent. He wouldn't try to imitate the human eye, he instead wanted to create a whole new perspective of how to see certain, everyday things, by showing things the human eye might ignore. Instead of creating films with scenarios exactly how the human eye perceives them, you can instead give a whole new meaning and engage and grasp the audience more by using kino-eye.

I like how the author says that people are generally excused of their preoccupations that they could not be met: like if it is out of their control. It is not like this could have ended on people who are alive, honestly you can even vent like that to dead people. Some people would oppose to this, and Montaign  calls these people like unjust judges because the person they are accusing cannot rebuttal to a dead person.

Montaign begins by talking about how people seek to make things right after their death. His example of this is with King Henry the Seventh. The author then goes on to claim that people are excused if promises that are beyond their strength or means because many events are outside of their control. This has a main affect on the reputation of deceased persons, like venting about someone in a last will hurts their image. Montaign calls people like this unjust judges because the person they are accusing cannot rebuttal to a dead person. The concept of promises and curses after death is meant to highlight that the intention is what matters most. Montaign then shifts to talk about “idleness” which I interpret as meditation, he says that letting his mind flow freely, uninterrupted, allows his mind to be the most creative and most active. He says he intentionally does this and writes down whatever comes to mind. This is similar to the free writing exercises in many English classes. Montaign...

Kino Eye: The Writings of  Dziga   Vertov  Review The book is quite interesting in telling a series of essays on film theory.  The book is mainly on journal entries, letters, and movie proposals which is very worthy in addressing its main point.  Dziga   Vertov  is a Soviet Union film director and film theorist who strongly believes in pure documentary film.  And this book is one good example of this documentary film. In this book also he was able to make great ideas on the expansion of the art of film and the challenges it faced today giving the simplest insights of cinema art. Dziga  is also a believer in Kino-Pravda or film truth which is often discuss in his writings including this book. This document calls every  reader  to always find the truth.  He always  looks beyond cinema to deeper truth of science and philosophy.  As describe the  kino -eye  is able to  capture the truth fully than the ...

 Montaigne Review The Essays of Michel de Montaigne were made of three books and 107 chapters that are quite very lengthy. It was originally written in French from 1570 to 1592 and were mere records of  his  traits of character and his humorous side.  The essay was written in a rhetoric theme to intrigue the reader and employs a structure style that gives focus on the didactic nature of his wok. This essay was considered as an important contribution to writing and skepticism. Overall, his essay  was  exploratory journey which is written through logical steps to bring skepticism to what is being discussed in this book. The essay  describes his own self in full honesty. The insight to human nature that is describe in the book is a mere product of his introspection. It comes with intriguing titles such as “Of Sadness and Sorrow, Of Conscience and Of Posting”. In this book, it depicts his mistrust to human reason and experience as he explained that wh...

Dziga Vertov's use of the kino-eye in the article is the strong point. Understanding the grasp of that concept helps convey what he is saying much easier. Learning how and where the kino-eye is important as it enhances your film-making. When he lists examples of how he would take a shot of a scene, I could imagine myself approaching it differently, like when he talks about the boxing match and only showing the successive hits, I would have them in a bunch of angles, top down, left, right, underneath etc.. Understanding the movement of these objects is what he was talking about here and capture the most important ports of said movement.

I really did not grasp the meaning of Kino eye until Vertov started making examples with different scenarios. Like with ballet example he used and talked about how the camera would follow parts of the body instead of the whole dance crew. I started to learn what he meant by Kino eye at this point; he was making a comparison to using a camera as an eye. This means he would invision what your eyes would do and try to mimic that with a camera. Also with the Kino eye you have a chance to go beyond the standard of a human eye and can get angles you would not normally see.

I really liked: "Example: the filming of a group of dancers, not from the point of view of a spectator sitting in the auditorium with a ballet on the stage before him. After all, the spectator at a ballet follows, in confusion, now the combined group of dancers, now random individual figures, now someone's legs-a series of scattered perceptions, different for each spectator." - I like this because everything is based on your frame of perception. I think that using ballet was a wonderful example. Each viewer is different honestly. Who knows about ballet? who doesn't? what does it remind them of? it's great... I really liked when he talked about kino-eye too, "The weakness of the human eye is manifest. We affirm the kino-eye, discovering within the chaos of movement the result of the kino-eye's own movement; we affirm the kino-eye with its own dimensions of time and space, growing in strength and potential to the point of self-affirmation." Hones...

It was very interesting to see how his view on how paining and photography tying to Cinema. I never realized how much you can do and what happens behind the scene.

Dziga Vertov begins this essay by describing the relationship between the human eye and the cinematic camera. At first the camera sought to replicate the eye. Camera shots were meant to make it look like the sight of the viewer.  Vertov continues to say though that the camera can be used for so much more. The shots in a film can transport the viewer into any circumstance. Vertov emphasizes how cutting together a montage can allow the editor to essentially be God. He can create anything he wants by using specifically timed cuts. Vertov claims that by cutting out the mundane shots a work of film could be drastically improved. Use of the camera and editing allows the film maker to create anything he or she wants, not limited to what the human can perceive.

Andre Bazin - The Ontology of the Photographic Image In this short excerpt, Andre talks about how the process of taking pictures is considered an art. The art of taking a picture and turning it into a film isn't as easy as you think it is. I didn't know all of the stuff behind the camera before reading so seeing how taking photos can be another form of language amazes me. After reading this excerpt I can begin to understand more of the art form of taking pictures and putting them together to make a story.

Looking through the comments that other people have made I have to tend to agree with them that the experts were kind of difficult to read especially myself who's not necessarily a film connoisseur or even very artistic. I like the analogy that was used between images and life I can see how someone would think that if they're really passionate about it as for me if I understood correctly I believe that they were trying to rank creativity which I don't think can be done.

When I read the blink of an eye by Walter Murch I was filled with amazement. I have taken a film appreciation class before but they never went into depth just how much work it's done to make a film. 1000000 feet of film is crazy. I now have a greater appreciation for how a film is made and I catch myself looking at camera techniques when I'm in the theater now. I knew that making a movie was complicated but I didn't know to what extent and now I do who knew.

I've always been a fan of Cinema rather than Photography. In my opinion, no matter how good the photographer is or the painter is, it could never be able to compare with cinema because there are many aspects in cinema that pictures just can't do. They both have different ways to persuade people but for me pictures are like a short summary of a book whereas the cinema is the whole book.

In this chapter,  Bazin  sees cinema as an idealistic event and at the same time technical. He believes that idea precedes the invention which makes it superior to technical means used to achieved it.  For him, cinema is realistic because of the mechanical mediation of the camera. He consider s  cinema as above painting which served as a medium for duplicating reality.  The ability of cinema to record the event in time and make an imprint of duration of the object is what sets it apart from photography. His myth of total cinema is all about the reflection of human’s psychological and ethical obsession in the arts while depicting reality.  Bazin  also envision cinema as a step toward a more realistic depiction of the world including sound, color and depth of field.  And because he  believes  in  the origin of an art that is reveal in nature, the quest for cinema for realism support his claim for an objective and pure cinema. ...

The way that the author compares the ways that photography, cinema, and painting are being used as a way to preserve life. For example, when the author was explaining how the ancient Egyptians would preserve the bodies of those who have passed away. The reason behind this was to make sure that when they came back into their bodies it would remain the same. Just like them people now have been preserving moments in their lives through paintings, cinema, and photography. So whenever they want to relive a moment or bring up memories from one of these formats.

Cinema along with photography have been a vital way that people preserve their memories and keep them alive for decades. Another thing that is also memorable are paintings, they have just as much meaning as film, paintings capture moments. The author explains how we use all of them to create and we see all of them in anything that we do, mixing the medias is a common thing. The comparisons between them are important, photography can be taken from the film, paintings can be created by influence of both and vise versa.

 Although I could not relate too much to this reading, I did find some comparisons very interesting. I notice the author compares a lot of sociology and psychology to Photography and Cinema. Being someone who comes from a field of sociology I am actually impressed that the two have anything in common. The thing he compares photography to the most would be paintings. Which makes a lot of sense because many artist even take pictures or use pictures before painting and artwork.

In all honesty, I could not follow this excerpt almost at all. My reading comprehension is already fairly bad, and reading this excerpt made me really confused because I had a hard time understanding what I was reading. All I could grasp from this reading was the main idea of comparing photography and paintings. I honestly cannot think of what to respond with since I could not understand what was being said in this excerpt. However, I do know both ends of the comparison. Although I have never sincerely partaken in anything photography related, I do know about it and some of the process photographers go through, and as for paintings, I have personally made paintings of different styles. Both of these art forms can affect people in many ways and both capture the artist's views in a creative yet wise way.

This text thoroughly explores photography and its relation to painting and cinema. A few things about this text was very interesting to me. Preservation was a big topic discussed, and I found it interesting that many paintings were painted for the purpose of preserving the idea/memory of something or someone. Next, the author talks about the difference and fight between style and likeness. Painters, and art in general, usually follow a pendulum of realism and abstract. Photography can capture an image perfectly and makes like-real painting obsolete. This frees up painters to focus on more stylized, abstract forms of painting. Next, the author talks about how photography is incredibly creative and ends by mentioning how movies are just photos that also capture time. Overall, this text was very interesting, and it makes me wonder about the effect photo editing would have on the author's opinion.

From January 29th, posted in wrong place: The exert from "In the Blink of an Eye" by Walter Murch was filled with things that surprised me. Firstly, the 1,250,000 feet of film absolutely blew my mind, I had no idea that movies would come even close to a million feet of film. I've never seen "Apocalypse Now" so I am not quite sure how the final product ended up. I would like to watch the movie now after learning about how much time and effort was spent editing. The editing process of this movie helped me understand more about cutting shots, because the majority of it is not actually cutting the shot, but instead deciding where to cut. Also, the shadow splices was interesting because it meant that for every cut they had changed their mind about it 15 times. The whole process shows the flexibility of editing and how a story can be made many ways depending on the editor. I had a few takeaways from this. First, that I am very glad we get to use technology to edit ...

Life moves quickly. Technology moves faster. Walter had to adjust and start editing digitally. Man, I'm grateful for the technology we have now. As far the story goes. I like how he described how he did his cuts and film. Even when you think you have the perfect picture. Take another just in case. Because once the editing start you'll never know how much you'll cut out. Cuts are truly a miracle to movies/theatre, etc. When moves first began, their was no cuts. It was continuous. With cuts you can have different emotions different settings and really make people believe you're in all the different places. While just sitting in a seat.