Scribe: 5.14.2009
Period 4
Tricia reminded me that I was scribe today [so did Tristan, and apparently he reminded me better...?] Anyways, Tricia says “Hi”.
Today was interesting, now that AP testing is over.
Survey says the AP Eng. Test was fairly easy compared to the in-class practice we did.
-Jordan sang “All by Myself” for a while
Then Eldridge drew a diagram (?) on the white board.
While Eldridge’s version was horizontally displayed across the white board, mine will be in a vertical formation because of the limitations of the computer and my laziness.
_________________________
Diction Imagery Detail Syntax Tone
_______________________________________
Visual Representation
_______________________________________Logic Structure Plot Units Setting Theme/Motif
________________________
-Jordan made a good connection of perception with photography (camera angle/color)
This somehow brought up Andy Warhol, who is a “modern” artist, and has made 3-hour films of stuff as inanimate as the empire state building. Warhol’s famous/infamous Campbell’s Soup piece, which reproduces the mass production of the soup, which is a double irony.
The controversy of Warhol’s title as an artist is also an irony, because he uses his “art” to bring public attention to ironies in such methods that his “art” is no longer considered art by some.
-Michelle L. (@ Eldridge): “Do you enjoy ruining everything?”
Moving on….
Syntax is important in movies. Think about it, they take cuts of film and re-order them in a specific manner to tell a story in a certain way from a certain perspective.
[Examples: Moulin Rouge! (2002) and The Matrix (1999)]
Moulin Rouge has scenes that are like cubism because it gives simultaneous angles of a shot but the vision is not changing.
This proves how cubism is like Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in the way they both see representations as all relative. Like a ball bouncing in a car. To the person in the car, bouncing the ball, the ball is moving up and down. To anyone outside the car, the ball is moving in a sinusoidal motion.
Then we watched Dreams, a movie by a Japanese director.
The first dream was about a Japanese boy [who many said looks like Ed, even though Ed is Chinese] who searched for these fox people in the forest. The boy look-alike of Ed watched a very slow procession of the fox people emerging from a cloud of fog.The foxes noticed him and his mother wouldn’t let the boy come back into the home.The foxes gave the mom a wakizashi/tanto (a small blade) for the boy to perform seppuku (aka, suicide by disembowelment). The mom advised the son to go find the foxes underneath a rainbow and beg for forgiveness, which they usually do not give. The scene ended with the boy in a field of flowers walking toward a rainbow.
Many of us found the movie… eerie (as Niki D. said), but that is only because it defies our conventional logic. Thus, we perceive the film to contain no conventional logic, but that is all relative because the culture portrayed in the film is unfamiliar to us.
Some things to note about the Fox Dream:
- -It took a LONG time to get into the forest, and mere moments to exit.
- -Space and time of the film change at the director’s will, it is his story of his world.
- -The color/tone is set by the rain and strange diction the mom uses to her own son
- -The obedience and Japanese tradition further emphasizes how the conventional logic of the film is from a different perspective and therefore different from our own.
- -Samurai influenced Western movies (Food for thought from Eldridge, this will probably come up later as we watch more of the movie)
- -Foxes (or Kitsune) are common in Japanese folklore, they usually have supernatural abilities and can take the form of humans depending on their age and wisdom.
- -Apparently, this story had Yako (or outsider foxes, which tend to be malicious and mischievous) because ordering a boy to commit seppuku is not the thing a Zenko (or good fox) would do. But at least they weren’t invisible Ninko foxes going around and possessing people.
I’m out.
-Steven Jones
Period 5
Hey period 5,
Class started off today by talking about the AP test, and we agreed that it was fairly easy for the most part. Mr. Eldridge then had us try to relate diction, imagery, detail, syntax, and tone to visual representation. Some of the ideas we came up with were:
-tone can be like color (happy, sad, angry, etc.)
-syntax is like split screens on television, because it shows hows things are structured and how you see the representation of something.
-imagery is like cubism– it allows you to see objects from more than one perspective
Then, for the rest of the period we watched a foreign film (that was supposed to be a “dream”) called “Sunshine Through the Rain”. It was very short and had a very simple plot, so we were all surprised when it ended suddenly. Mr. Eldridge told us that we weren’t supposed to focus on the plot, but rather the imagery of the movie and how it affected the other aspects of it.
akirakurosawasdreams.jpg
Filed under: Daily Scribe and
So, the movie was good and all, but I have a question.
I know all of those rhetorical strategies and figurative language devices and everything, but what category does time go under?
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Time would be syntax, right? Because the formation of the story is like the order of a sentence and the location of words.
Dang, i thought I would score big posting points for all my Kitsune knowledge, but you already posted it. The only thing I have to add is that even Zenko like to play tricks, and a common Japanese folktale is of a man who marries a woman who turns out to be a fox spirit, and she swindles him of all his possessions.
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uhh the movies felt like an out of body experience
sort of like something people would either make or watch under the influence
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here’s a little bit more info on cubism in case anyone was still wondering about it.
Cubism was developed between about 1908 and 1912 in a collaboration between Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Their main influences are said to have been Tribal Art (although Braque later disputed this) and the work of Paul Cezanne. The movement itself was not long-lived or widespread, but it began an immense creative explosion which resonated through all of 20th century art.
The key concept underlying Cubism is that the essence of an object can only be captured by showing it from multiple points of view simultaneously.
Cubism had run its course by the end of World War I, but among the movements directly influenced by it were Orphism, Precisionism, Futurism, Purism, Constructivism, and, to some degree, Expressionism.
& jay, totally agree..
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I brought up Andy Warhol to use him as an example for the “logic” movies. You know, like the movies that dont really have a plot but there is logic to them…you just have to figure it out to understand. Well thats how the movie Dreams is. People dont understand why it was made until they understand what the movie is about. They have to use logic.
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I agree with you Jay, but I thought the movie was really good. They were so strange-and at times funny-that they were intriguing. We should definitely watch more movies, Mr. Eldridge.
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