Monday, February 25, 2008

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.