Organic Film?

The idea of film occuring without the touch of a human hand is an abstract idea. if you really think about it, nobody can can really make a purely organic film. Film is a product produced by the human mind and the human touch. To see an oraganic film it would be like seeing a ghost. The ghost is a recorded feeling in time and space that occurs over and over.
The film "tree" I feel reached this goal in the most effective manner. The idea of a guy setting up a camera and tying it to tree and pressing record is so simple. He captured the natural process of this moment and space. It was almost as if this camera were an other worldly entity taking a document of this plain in front of it. This is the closest to organic filming because no human decided where the tree branch was going to move. The tree branch blew in the wind and the camera recorded where it moved to.
Other films also demonstrated 'organic filming' as I would like to call it. The film where the two dogs were eating food was quite organic. A human set this up, but the dogs were the interest in this story. The two dogs fell into a pattern of eating. This narrows who the author of this piece is down to two. It could be either the white dog or the black dog. They took turns eating from the food bowl and the water bowl.. We can narrow down who the author was even further. There were two dogs, the white dog and the black dog. The white dog seemed to control the situation. Whenever it was done eating it moved on to the next bowl. This forced the black dog to go the either of the bowls that the white dog was not eating at. This tells the viewer that the author was in fact the white dog. He controlled the story, he controlled what was happening on film, he controlled the other dog. A human did control the story he merely set the object in which recorded this phenomenon.
In the film "Two dogs and a ball" something off screen controlled the viewers opinion. Two dogs were sitting in a fixed position as the viewers watched them jerk their necks following something off screen. For a few moments we watched them follow something as if they were hypnotized. The thing that hypnotized them the object that was narrating this story. The audience saw the dogs moving their heads in almost an identical fashion, and the dogs saw a tennis ball. The tennis ball controlled the subjects in the composition of this film. The tennis ball was the teller of this story. The tennis ball controlled the two animals of film.
Lastly, the film about the parents reading dreams about themselves to the camera. At first you think it is the parents that are authoring this piece, because they reading the dreams to you. Then a hand comes into the screen, handing the parents papers to read. You can then assume that it is the camera man that is controlling what is happening. Then you realize, the entity that is truly controlling what you hear is this mans subconscience. He dreams these words. His parents a simply a translator for the dreams he has.
Organic films are interesting pieces that are controlled but other forces besides a human. The people who recorded these natural phenomenoms had nothing to do with it. They simply set up the camera and nothing more. Something else actually told us the story.

Althea Thauberger

This week when Althea Thauberger came to show us her videos I watched all of them and tried to absorb what we viewed. Alot of her work incorporated mostly singing. Don't get me wrong musicals are a respectable form of storytelling, however usually its not for me. The First work (not afraid to die) seemed like a portrait that moved. Then this voice came in. My first impression was, "come on, I don't have to sit through another laborious musical do I?" Yet the way Althea Thauberger uses music is not quite the format I was used to. After discussion I learned it was her purpose to throw her viewers off. She took conventions and bent them just a little bit. This made everything more interesting. Her work songstress was a music video, but at the same time not a music video. It was film that had sound included, yet it was a long take of the same view. No one could say that this is normal. Now that I look back at my experience with her I realized it was much more enjoyable.

Bas Jan Ader

I was viewing the Bas Jan Ader website and enjoying his silent films when my roommate came in. He sat down silently for a total of maybe ten seconds then asked, "what exactly makes this art?" I ignored it at first then thought to myself that he sort of had me stumped. Anyone could fall off of a roof and film it. I then watched more of his videos and noticed how smooth and fluent they were. The lighting was dark and seamless. I am particularly referring to the work entitled "Nightfall." The composition was even and balanced but these attributes are trivial.
This sort of art is made to make this world a more beautiful place. It reminds me of this Simpsons episode where Homer became an artist through a fad that was passing at the time. This fad eventually died leaving Homer only to go out with a big bang. So as his last act of art he released all of the zoo animals and flooded the town. He did not do it for arts sake he just did it to put a little twist on life. Bas Jan Ader was very the same. His work is just here to make us think. So I told my roommate whom was still skeptical of his work that,"You will never see this exact image ever again, so appreciate it as art now otherwise your just wasting thought."

Freud and the comic view on jokes

Simple jokes such as 'Buster' Keaton being dragged into a lake by a boat that should be afloat is funny on the surface for one reason. It's Wacky! It gets the laughs of everybody who is watching it. But why are we laughing? Sure it is funny, and sure we acknowledge it as so, but there is somewhere in our psyche where our laugh is coming from. This gag of buster being drowned brings a situation to our conscious being. If we were actually there when a man was being dragged into the lake we would probably be horrified. However, from the safe confides of our home viewing experience we laugh at this situation. Frued compares situations like this to words. In the wrong context serious words can be made comical. At first the "joke appears to be wrongly constructed."(28, playful judgements) However the "comic affect is produced by the solution of this bewilderment."(28)