Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Dancin' to the beat

To get things started off I want to clarify that experimental films have never been my cup of pepsi, but sometimes after you learn about the medium and how it works then appreciation will sprout from an ignorant mind. The first film watched was To the Beat. As far as images go there was nothing really there that blew me away, just shapes shifting and colors changing to the beat of the music. It wasn't until there were a couple of images with a mother and her children that this film appealed to me. I found the image where all three are sitting on a picnic blanket (?) and these black splotches are crawling over the image to be really haunting. It reminded me of Ghost and who doesn't want to be reminded of a good ol' Swayze pic. Another image was of the little girl who was inside a fence because I found it to speak of childhood and how we can only observe now and not have our childhood back. One problem I had and its a common thing in our culture in general is wanting to find a narrative in every film. The end of this film pretty much told me "hey this is just a series of random images juxtaposed together with nothing of importance to it." So though I couldn't find much appreciation with the images I feel its because I was searching for story and meaning (ooohhh so emo). As the semester goes along I know these posts will become more intelligent, but right now this is all I can give.