There is a very important lecture this week on the Degree Show which all students need to attend. It will start dead on 9.00 so everyone needs to be there.
Cluster meetings will start this week (except for Photography which will start next week). Interactive and Video (Documentary) will start on Friday:
Interactive 10.15 am in ETB05 – Mez will be available to discuss potential convergent media support for projects
Video (Documentary) in ETB10
Broadcast in ETG06 (for this week only)
The Drama Cluster will start on Thursday at 11.00 (room still to be confirmed: meet outside ET34). All communications for the Drama Cluster will now take place on the Drama Cluster blog, so start looking at that from now on.
Proposals and schemes of work
All cluster schemes of work are dependent upon receiving completed proposal forms from you. I still only have had one handed in, despite asking for them to be in on Monday at the latest.
Please hand them in at Reception to be put into my pigeonhole. Remember, these also form part of your assessment for 310 and 311 so they need to be detailed and well-thought out. Cluster schemes of work will also be discussed at the lecture.
I have been given five free tickets for the Jason Connery filmmaking masterclass at the Royal Spa Centre in Leamington Spa this Sunday (13th December) 5.30 -10.30pm. The normal price is £35.
If you would like one of those tickets, please e-mail me immediately at s.dawkins@coventry.ac.uk with a paragraph detailing why you should get the ticket. Preference will be given to those who make a case for it benefiting their professional development. I will look at all e-mails received by 5.00 on Thursday and make my decision then. As ever, the editor’s decision is final.
I will let the successful people know by Friday morning and send details of how to collect the tickets. It is vital that, if you get a ticket, that you attend so if there is a possibility that you will not be able to, do not apply for one.
It is important that you clearly hand in a clearly legible typed blog address where we can find alll of your research and links to examples of your artifacts.
If some of your artifacts exist on other media, usb stick, CD or DVD then also hand in a copy of these together with your blog address. It is really important that you do this.
The weighting of the marks is 70% for your research component and 30% for the presentation that you provide relating to your research idea for your final project piece. This presentation of your research and idea must be available on your blog and for you to talk about by the second week of the January term. The term begins on the 15th of January 2010.
After reflecting on the work you produced for the first term think carefully about the development of your idea for your final project.
As stated before:
Be ambitious but realistic. Don’t try and make a feature film……….don’t try and make a thirty minute soap. Don’t try a remake of Tarantino or your favourite Zombie movie. Look at stuff outside of your normal range of influences…………
Music, galleries, events, radio.
Use the central category and the two boxes below in the image to think about your ideas for your final project. Demonstrate the process you have gone through and put it up on your blog with links to relevant resources. This needs to be in place by the second week of the new term January 2010.
Some of you may have seen this film “No Country for Old Men”. It was made by the Coen Brothers for a 25 million dollar budget with Miramax. So a Hollywood financed movie but slightly outside of the normal range for Hollywood.
The story is sparse, very little dialogue, the dialogue that there is drifts from the everyday to the reflective and philosophical. There is a large reliance on visuals and atmosphere with deliberate cutting between characters that never actually meet in the film. What sources then does such a film draw upon? What is the screenplay based on? The Coen brothers are well known for being meticulous in their preparation of dialogue and storyboarding. The whole of their films are storyboarded before any shooting begins. The dialogue is set and precise. They say they do this in order to justify the budget they are asking for. They don’t run over budget or time.
One of the brothers studied film at NYU, Ethan went to Princeton to study Philosophy at undergrad. They both made films together on super 8 from the age of eight.
All of their films draw upon a wide range of sources: literary, poetic, paintings, mythology. In No Country for Old Men the literary references range from the 14th Century through to the contemporary American writer Cormac McCarthy. They reference films from Bergman to Sam Peckinpah.
The title of the film is taken from a line from a W B Yeats poem called Sailing to Byzantium.
The first stanza of which is :
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.
If you read just the first stanza carefully you will pick up the theme and stress on the centrality of death even in life. “Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.”
So we haven’t even got behind the title and there is already a diversity of sources that are being drawn upon. If we focus on the literary then two older stories crop up and can be tracked in various scenes in the film. The influences are not used as direct copies but, like Picasso said I don’t use other peoples work I steal it.
They steal and re cast the evocative elements of the stories that influence them. They intellectually engage with the ideas and themes of the story and re translate it through their own obsessions and concerns. The translation happens in the process of visualisation and cinematography that we all recognise as signatures of the Coen brothers work.
Two predominant stories crop up as important in the construction of the film and the motivation of characters: Chaucer’s Pardoners Tale:
A precise of which is:
The tale is based on a folk-tale of Oriental origin, although many variations exist. Three drunken and debauched men set out from a pub to find and kill Death, whom they blame for the death of their friend, and all other people that previously have died. An old man they brusquely query tells them they can find death at the foot of a tree. When the men arrive at the tree, they find a large amount of gold coins and forget about their quest to kill Death. The three men draw straws to see who among them should fetch wine and food while the other two wait under the tree. The youngest of the three men drew the shortest straw. The two men who stay behind secretly plot to kill the other one when he returns, while the one who leaves for the town poisons some of the wine with rat poison. When he returns with the food and drink, the other two kill him and drink the poisoned wine — also dying as a result. A short analysis of the Pardoners Tale
Lets re look at the clip that we first saw of No Country for Old Men:
Both of these stories have at their heart greed and the influence that money has on motivation. Both authors also play with the idea of chance and unpredictability of life in the world.
Carla Jean Moss: You don’t have to do this.
Anton Chigurh: [smiles] People always say the same thing.
Carla Jean Moss: What do they say?
Anton Chigurh: They say, “You don’t have to do this.”
Carla Jean Moss: You don’t.
Anton Chigurh: Okay.
[Chigurh flips a coin and covers it with his hand]
Anton Chigurh: This is the best I can do. Call it.
Carla Jean Moss: I knowed you was crazy when I saw you sitting there. I knowed exactly what was in store for me.
Anton Chigurh: Call it.
The figure of Chigurh is similar to figures like death in Bergmans The Seventh Seal or indeed some of the figures in Sam Peckinpah movies.
Research
Why am I dwelling on the importance of sources and influences. Any media producer that is worth their salt, has something to say or show beyond the mechanical cranking out of tawdry nonsense draws on multiple sources that don’t just exist within the limits of their own chosen art form.
Stuff that lasts engages with the things that have gone before be it from literature, poetry, painting, music, etc.
You need to show us that you are working in a similar way. Your blog should show us the range of sources and research that you have engaged with over the course of the first term. Your initial assessment will be based upon the work on your blogs and the three artefacts that you have made.
We want you to round off your work this term by reflecting on what you have done and thinking about what you are going to do in developing your ideas for your final project that is the culmination of your degree.
It is really important that before the end of the term, December 18th, you:
Look back over your three pieces and other stuff you have done during the course. Look at it altogether. What things do you notice?
Reflect on what you have done…………….how might you develop some of your interests, approaches for your final project.
Be ambitious but realistic. Don’t try and make a feature film……….don’t try and make a thirty minute soap. Don’t try a remake of Tarantino or your favourite Zombie movie. Look at stuff outside of your normal range of influences…………
Music, galleries, events, radio.
Use the image below as a guide for your refelections and what you are going to develop during the new year.
Jason Connery’s Film Making Masterclass on at the Royal Spa Cinema Sunday 13th December.
We are offering a special discount for students – make a group booking for 10 and the 11th goes free (works out at £3.50 discount per ticket)
The event has been added to our online booking system and tickets are selling fast. If you would like to make a group booking and take advantage of the discounted offer please call our box office on 01926 334418. I am happy to reserve a number of seats for you over a period of time.
Please let me know if this would be of interest to you – this is a great opportunity for aspiring students to gain an insight into the world of Film Making
Professional Practice Portfolio will begin next week and will run on Mondays and Thursdays until the end of term. Each person will sign up for one 15 minute tutorial with their Personal Academic Tutor: Clifton or Jonathan Lee (who is picking up Philip’s tutorials in his absence). Signing-up heets will be placed on the noticeboard outside Room 104. These first tutorials will be used to talk through your skills audit. So, you need to download the form from this blog, fill it in as honestly as possible and send it via e-mail to your tutor the day before the tutorial. It is vital that you spend time really thinking about this as the results of the skills audits will determine the content for 311MC next term.
So, if you do not have something on your skills audit form, it is unlikely that there will be any support for it next term.
We have spent sometime looking at experimental moving image pieces that you have possibly not seen before. Your reactions to them may be varied depending on your own thoughts about what is valid about media pieces that you yourself spend time looking at listening to or watching.
Your reaction to these experimental pieces in a sense is not important whether you like them or loath them is not the main issue. What is important is the range of references that you draw upon, expose yourself to and reflect upon. If you love or hate the pieces interrogate yourself as to why you have a particular reaction. It is not enough in your research or your own practise to say well I just kinda like it or I just kinda hate it.
Often when you encounter an unusual piece it is useful to think about and step back from your immediate reaction and try and ask why? What are my expectations of a piece of media work? What are these expectations, why are these my starting points? Might I not begin from other expectations or might my expectations be fluid over time rather than static or fixed in a particular mode.
This is your last short piece on the theme memory. It is often useful to look at the work you are producing together either in one place or one viewing. When you see your work before you that has been produced over a concentrated period of time you often notice similarities, recurring themes, repeated techniques. Things about your own approach and starting points that unless your work is together can remain hidden even from your own view. Before beginning to think about the direction of your final project look at your work together and try to notice how you go about its construction. What things keep cropping up? Why? Are they constructive or limiting?
Media producers, filmmakers, visual artists, animators, photographers, all develop from influences, interests, obsessions, particular starting points. They don’t produce in a vacuum but within particular contexts within a set of particular conditions. The best reflect, steal, remake, transform and revisit the work of others in their own and often oblique but associative fields.
This approach should be starting to become evident in your own research and your own work. As an example of the above and the importance of influences, a wide breadth of experience of your field of interest and past makers within it I want you to have a look at some of Tarkovsky’s work and how it has influenced the work of two contemporary experimental artists Jane and Louise Wilson.
In 1972, he completed Solaris, an adaptation of the novel Solaris by Stanisław Lem. He had worked on this together with screenwriter Fridrikh Gorenshtein, as early as 1968. The film was presented at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury and the FIPRESCI prize and was nominated for the Palme d’Or. From 1973 to 1974, he shot the film The Mirror, a highly autobiographical film drawing on his childhood and incorporating some of his father’s poems. Tarkovsky had worked on the screenplay for this film since 1967, under the consecutive titles Confession, White day and A white, white day. From the beginning the film was not well received by Soviet authorities due to its content and its perceived elitist nature.
From the clip below you can immediately see that the film is not following an obvious narrative and it is also evident that the range of influences on Tarkovsky are both poetic and painterly. Pieter Breughel’s Winter painting and Dylan Thomas’s poem Fern Hill were both influences. In this way, as with many of the other experimental pieces we have seen the piece is not set out as a straightforward narrative but is much more something that evokes responses, strong feelings in the viewer. These responses and feelings felt are often at the edge of the viewers and the filmmakers own understanding.
When faced with a non obvious structure that doesn’t conform in telling a simple story the question what does it mean is often expressed as the first one that comes to mind. Perhaps this is the wrong starting point?
When we listen to music, itself a predominantly non narrative form, or poetry likewise, we would view it almost as a category mistake to ask what does this music mean? As is obvious with music it doesn’t mean any one thing, its a dumb question to ask of music. Why should it always be a good question to ask of visual material?
I would like you to dwell on this issue when responding to work that you are not familiar with. What do you think of this point in relation to experimental work? Use your blog to construct and share your own response.
Solaris 1
Solaris 2
Tarkovsky Sequence (No Special Effects)
Similarities in poetic and visual approach can also be seen between Tarkovsky and Kubrick. The similarity in obsession and visuals are referred to by both Jane and Louise Wilson in their own work. Particularly Stasi City and Space City and directly in the Aryan Papers.
Their work is shown as multi screen installations within galleries and is difficult to access online. Luckily they gave a lecture at The London Consortium recently and their talk about their work (just over an hour) contains some extended clips from their work which like Tarkovsky, Kubrick and themselves directly addresses memory and revisiting events and others work the second time. Their work often involves re visiting real spaces where significant events have happened and that have traces of the past marked in their structure or spatial organisation.
It is worth watching the whole thing if you do nothing else this week do this and then watch Solaris by Tarkovsky.
Next Week we will be starting to focus on your own developments of realistic, realiseable and creative approaches to your final project piece that runs into and after the Christmas break.
Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us. (Oscar Wilde)
Every man’s memory is his private literature. Aldous Huxely
But this is History. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past. And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
It has been produced by the BFI (British Film Institute) and says some useful things about approaches that you might make in relation to thinking about media artifacts. The writing is skewed to talk about media texts but what is said completely holds for the creation of media artifacts themselves.
It reiterates the difference between primary and secondary research and how important primary research is. In brief it is much richer for you to go out and encounter the real world yourself and find out something on the ground that relying on secondhand pre digested material.
Primary: This is first-hand research. In other words, it relies on you constructing and conducting surveys, setting up interviews with key people in the media industry or keeping a diary or log of data on things such as, for example, what activities women are shown doing in advertisements over one week of television viewing. Unless you are equipped to conduct extensive research, have access to relevant people in the media industry or are thor- ough in the up-keep of your diary or log, this type of research can be demanding, complex and sometimes difficult to use. Having said that, if you are preparing for an extended essay, then it is exactly this type of research which, if well used, will make your work distinctive and impressive.
They use a good analogy:
You cannot simply rely on your existing knowledge when approaching work in Media Studies. Although you will have some understanding of the area being explored, it is not enough to enable you to examine the area in depth. If you were asked to produce a piece about the people in your street in de- tail, you might have some existing information about names, faces, relationships, issues and ac- tivities but this knowledge would not offer you details such as every single one of their names, who knows who, who gets on with whom, how people earn a living, what has happened to them in the past and so on. This extra information could change your opinions quite dramatically. With- out it, therefore, your written profile would end up being quite shallow and possibly incorrect. The same is true of your understanding of media texts, artifacts, issues and institutions.
Making the effort ot encounter the world is worth it, you will find more out and it will challenge and refigure your own prejudices. Research should tell you new things, unexpected things, things that test your own views.
In relation to memory this can be very interesting…….. We asked you to think about significant personal memories……… are memories correct, do they get re remembered… are they accurate? Do people that you share these memories with remember them in different ways?
This re remembering can become solidified into recorded history. Just look at the things around you that offer a story or commemorate a particular time, event, happening.
In Coventry as in other cities this is all around you, there is a Blitz Industry.
The dead. The body count. We don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault cos so many of our people died. And all the mourning’s veiled the truth. It’s not “lest we forget”, it’s “lest we remember”. That’s what all this is about – the memorials, the Cenotaph, the two minutes’ silence. Because there is no better way if forgetting something than by commemorating it. From the History Boys
Is there another history and story to the bombing of Coventry that hasn’t been explored, yet is still a part of some peoples living memory?
If you don’t get out and talk to primary sources…people who were there then you can never know.
A recent piece of work did indeed challenge the Blitz industries regular story to reveal an aspect of ordinary peoples experience that has been hidden or not recorded.
In our current hyper celebrity obsessed culture the cynicism or undermining of everyday peoples experience has become even more disregarded, devalued. Just outside here there are experiences, memories that are explosive and rich.
On a recent MA mass observation of a village in Northamptonshire a postmen was followed on his round and then talked to about the strike……he said things about his working conditions and how they have changed in recent memory that was a devastating critique of much of the guff reported even in the broadsheets. It was first hand, solid, based on grinding knowledge not secondhand regurgitated press release material. No body is talking to people to find out.
Pasolini a controversial filmmaker in Italy who was imprisoned for his work in the 1950’s 60’s and who was killed in the 70’s based his work on a connection to the people living in Italy, without influence and without power.
We have asked for you to do something different something that you haven’t done before. Primary research is one way. Other ways are embracing techniques that you haven’t yet used.
Cut Up’s
The cut up technique is a way of re making your experience of the world around you of taking bits of it and reordering them to produce chance and unusual juxtapositions.
Similarly combining different media can jolt us in the same way:
Derek Jarman an experimental British filmmaker combined the use of super 8 with 35mm to produce both personal movies about his own memories or reactions to the world around him and movies that combined the look of the school play with little known actors to comment on the recent events of the past.
His film Jubilee was a commentary on the Britain of the early 80’s
What some of the experimetal works have in common is a relation to evocation, the poetic rather than the dominant narrative tradition particularly in British film.
Blue
Another Visual artist that uses moving image is Bill Viola
