Movies and Authors

A major part of this week was spent going over the way a scene is built to convey a certain message. As I was going over the different things that help make up a scene I thought about how little I consciously think of these things as I am watching a movie. I can’t remember a time when I have been watching a movie and gone,"I like the use of deep space in this shot." I know those things subconsciously effect me though. Like the use of red and yellow in the Shinning, I when I first watched the movie I did not notice it, but when we mentioned it in class, and thought about it, I realized that red and yellow were used a lot. This week I watched a movie called “Funny Games”, which is a suspense movie, but also plays with the idea of film and plot a lot. For example the lead character makes direct addresses to the camera, and there are mentions throughout the movie about plot elements. The real point I am trying to make though is that, as I was watching the movie, I had the ideas that we learned in class running thought my head. In this way I started noticing things I had never noticed before in movies, or at least consciously. Editing is the thing that I notice most now. Like when I see a shot reverse shot, I think of how the characters said there lines at different times and the shot was edited together. I also started to notice a couple of cheat cuts.

In addition to the readings on the different film techniques, I had a Barthes reading. This one was on the death of the author. This short but very dense chapter was, I feel the most difficult so far. Band 3 did a very good job in explaining it though. What Barthes is trying to say is that, the author is not the source of his work. A text is made from different thoughts and ideas that come from the collective of society. That is to say that the authors work is not an original thought, because the author has been influenced by the ideas of society as a whole. It goes back to the whole idea of text, being a bunch of threads that form the idea. Basically when we read a text, we are reading the signs in the text, and everyone takes something different away. Of course the irony in all of this is that we are getting these ideas form a book, with an author, and we are trying to figure out what he is trying to say. Completely the opposite of what we are being taught in the book. Anyway I want to thank band 3 did a great job, explaining such a complex subject. My band has started to get some ideas for our project together. I am starting to get what Barthes is saying in our section, but there is still a long way to go.

I almost forgot to talk about the picture for this week; it’s the poster for the movie I was talking about, when I was talking about film. I choose a picture from the shinning last week, so I wanted something different for this week. Also as I had said before I had watched this film and noticed elements that I had rarely consciously observed.
Michael