Brzeski and Faden: A look at to documentary styles

The first film, This Unfamiliar Place, directed by Eva Ilona Brzeski, tries to stir the viewers emotions as the narrator tries to get her father to tell his story of growing up as a Jew in Nazi occupied Poland. The narrator has the sudden fascination of her father’s younger days after surviving a disaster of her own, an earthquake. For me that is when the film started to go down hill. Something about the juxtaposition of earthquake footage and wandering through the forest (the narrators place to ponder the happenings of the world) next to the grainy images from the Holocaust and the father’s past did not quite equate and link up in my mind. I understand that the daughter may have felt that she now survived something, though she did not survive anything nearly as vile as the Holocaust. With that said, there was still a lot of time left in the movie at this point and my opinion could have still changed though the father never spoke to the camera about his past. He never actually told his story besides saying he didn’t want to tell his story. There is no reason for this movie to exist, it failed in its mission. Imagine a James Bond movie where Bond never has to go on a mission, he just sits around the office writing a report. While the film had potential and was set up in a way that while I may not agree with had a subject matter that overall that I find interesting though the essence of the subject matter was completely missing.

The second film Eric Faden’s the Tracking Theory – The Synthetic Philosophy of the Glance, is a look back at the relationship of the railroad and cinema. The narrator compares three more modern films about the railroad before playing a retro film that looked at the early evolution of the two technologies. The film points out how the railroad revolutionized the sense of time as trains traveled great distances and needed schedules to operate on. The other sense that a train added was the moving picture. The ability to stare out the window and watch the world go by in a blur. Motion pictures captured both of these aspects. It allowed for time to be spliced and edited and it allowed for that same blurry image from the side of a train as you literally would ride along in the earliest of films. Both of these technologies brought forth a new perspective of the world. They reached out and allowed for cultures to interact and for exploration, forever effecting the culture of the globe. In effect, both the train and cinema created a smaller world where people were able to interact in ways never before possible. Stylistically this film is a strange combination of different forms of documentary style. It uses actually footage from the past at some points though recreation at others. There is not one narrator the whole time though instead several different people in essence conveying the message of the film.

The Culture of Hollywood

The Culture of Hollywood, Can it be Re-appropriated?


This past weekend cultural icon Paul Newman passed away at the age of 83. The movie star, most famous for his roles in Cool Hand Luke and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, left behind his wife Joanne and five daughters. Newman’s interests however were much greater than just movies. He left the glamor of Beverly Hills to peruse his motor sports passion and went on to become a champion race car driver and team owner and he backed into a salad dressing business that was never supposed to amount to anything that made him super-philanthropist and introduced himself to an entire new generation of followers. Newman left behind a vibrant history capturing one of Hollywood's most unique careers.

Cultural appropriation is the viewpoint that is taken on by the opposition to a certain image or icon. For Hollywood and movie stardom, what might bring you great fame and riches can be appropriated to also bring about more struggles and anxiety than it is worth. The cultural appropriation of Hollywood is failed celebrity marriages. It is a career narrowly defined by a single success. It is drugs, DWIs and rehab. It is out of control spending, families that are split and don’t communicate. It is paparazzi tracking your every move and interfering with much sought after person moments. For those wishing to critique the glamorous life of being a movie start there is no glamor left by the end of the day.

Paul Newman was an exception as he strived to re-appropriate this viewpoint. He was a statement to the fact that Hollywood is not just a pool of narcissistic minimal talent. Instead he fought the status quo and proved that truly gifted person with a love for theater and the arts can still make it big with a career that spans generations. Newman did what he loved to do, still directing local community theater performances up until just earlier this year when his health began to deteriorate. Unlike what is wont in Hollywood, his celebrity marriage worked out and his career was never interrupted with stints in therapy to get off prescription drugs. For Newman there was more to life than just movies and basking in glory and stardom. He followed his heart and pursued his passions. His sense to give back to the community was met with his actions and his support for children's charities and summer camps. Over $250 million to date had been donated by the Newman’s Own brand. Paul Newman was a one-of-a-kind figure who re-appropriated the values of Hollywood in the way only a true icon can.

See more: The New York Times Obituary

The Phonevision

Today, video-on-demand (VOD) is one of the hottest ideas in media, from the ability to remotely pay for a movie from your couch, to being able to catch up on episodes of your favorite TV shows at your computer. Each day users are able to view more and more material when they want it from where they want it. However, few know the origins of VOD and the technologies that preceded it. One of the original ideas that would eventually lead to VOD was the Phonevision. Phonevision was set-top box that would unscramble a nightly movie for $1, a hefty amount of money in 1951 when the box was first unveiled in a Chicago-market trial run. The box received an over-the-air signal that either needed a code which was received by calling a number to purchase that evening’s movie or by inserting a coin into a coin slot on some of the boxes where the subscriber could drop in exact change to unlock the movie. The trial run was declared a success by Zenith, the company behind the Phonevision brand, however problems remained. While the technology worked, proving the concept had potential was more difficult as some large obstacles remained, namely costs. The box was not cheap and it needed a dedicated phone line to receive codes to help decrypt the signal, the movies were not cheap, and each family only watched on average 1.75 movies a week making it hard to convince Hollywood studios to participate.

After 90 days the trial run had concluded and the service was discontinued. Over the years the device continued to come and go in various markets with minor improvements along the way though never ultimately caught on. The big push for VOD came eventually through pay-per-view which gained in popularity during the 70s and 80s as more and more households began to pay for cable television, making the pay-per-view process much more simple and straightforward. Nowadays the spirit of Phonevision lives on in set-top boxes such as the Vudu which allow users to choose from and rent 1000s of hi-definition movies at the touch of a button from their own couch.

See: http://www.deadmedia.org/wiki/index.php/PhoneVision

Einstein visits California

Einstein visits California
A response to "Three Winters in the Sun"

I found Einstein’s three year stay in California to be of particular interest. Going through the multimedia you realize just how brilliant the guy was. Of course you know about the mathematics and the physics, though having never really studied Einstein I never realized how diverse and well rounded his full intellect truly was. What I found most interesting was how he was able to use the many different facets of his life to promote and intertwine the goals and the motives he sought to achieve. He used his fame and his friendship with Charlie Chaplin to promote himself in the glamour of Hollywood. With the spotlight then on him he was able to raise social issues important to him including fighting discrimination, raising awareness of the Nazi party and supporting Zionism. He utilized his connections in LA’s Jewish community to help take in other immigrants who suffered similar oppression though were not as fortunate as Einstein to support themselves.

While Einstein may have ultimately regretted the decision to support the building of the atomic bomb, hindsight is of course 20/20 as the saying goes. When we look back now it is easy to say what could or could not have been done to save lives, and we can more carefully and accurately make the decision with more and more information than was ever available to the commanders during the war. I find it hard to say with any certainty what would have been the best outcome, but instead choose to accept history and look at what could be done the next time to prevent similar circumstances from occurring again. With that said, you laugh at the fact that an ongoing FBI investigation locked Einstein out of the Manhattan Project, arguably one of the most important scientific panels of the 20th century, though at the same time you overlook the fact that hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese-American citizens were locked up in internment camps during the same period. In other words, sure it may seem ridiculous to not let someone help you build a new piece of equipment though if you are completely cutting off a ton of other peoples lives for years on end, not letting one person work on a team is no biggie. In the end one may still question the judgement of the government, though during the war ones allegiances were of most importance and nearly impossible to sort out. While only years after the war the US welcomed ex-Nazi scientists to help them build a vehicle to land on the moon, the fear a foreign agent might leak plans to build and harvest the awesome power of atomic energy were certainly real during the time period.

As far as the CD itself is concerned I found the amount of material available to be very impressive, while the ease with which it was present to be more cumbersome. I liked being able to do so many things at once, like watching a video while panning across photographs, though I missed having some sort of timeline and was regularly confused as I tried to keep dates of trips, events and investigations straight. I found the clippings and text to be a wide array of Einstein’s routine happenings though sometimes I couldn’t read them because of the transparent backgrounds. Overall the information was presented in the way to give the average viewer a quick snapshot of Einstein’s time spent in California and a more in depth look into his extensive life outside numbers and science.

The Perfect Blog

The Perfect Blog
My response to The Five Obstructions

What is the perfect blog? How does one read it? How does it look? What stories does it follow?



No, no, I won’t get carried away, and don’t expect me to answer those questions like writer and director Jorgen Leth had to do during his first obstruction challenge in Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions.

I found the movie overall to keep me quite entertained. For an artsy independent film, I found the story-line more interesting than not and I was generally curious as to the reaction of Leth each time the next obstruction was reveled to him. Even more so as the story went on I became more and more curious as to how Leth was going to approach the challenge and what the end result would be. In most cases I found that each subsequent obstruction built on the previous attempt and added to the overall dynamic of the film. Along those lines, I think that is why the cartoon obstruction worked out so well. By piecing together all the different parts of the first three obstructions along with the original films, it nicely summed up the entire project. It also, for me, helped me overcome what was my most obvious distraction, the fact that there is no single perfect person and within each of the first few obstructions and the original film, you must accept the contrary as fact as the narration plays out.

What turned me off from the movie was the way Leth approached each obstruction with such emotion. Now my mother taught me to not cry over spilled milk, though crying over the fact that you can only use 12-frames in a shot -- come on, that seems a little over the top. Watching the film I felt that Leth should have been more excited overall that he was even asked to do this new project. I understand that he may have butcher his masterpiece, though I look around Hollywood today and I regularly see these days new directors trying to remake old films that studios try to stamp out time and time again to little avail, hoping to cash in on a large box office. For Leth, he got the opportunity to remake his own masterpiece.

With that said, there was one obstruction in particular where I agree with Leth’s hard feelings. The rule von Trier set forth to go to the worst place in the world and film on location there. And while it is hard to quantify, perhaps the choice of the red light district in Mumbai is not actually the worst place in the world, suffice to say, I would not be too happy living there. For me, it is a matter of simply a matter of priorities. It is one thing to go to a poor neighborhood and film a documentary, it is another to use it as a backdrop to a short video all about extravagance and perfectionism. Still though, as bad as Leth thought it was I found it somewhat satisfying to see the joy on the communities faces, especially the kids as you tried to stare through the translucent barrier Leth had erected behind him on the set.

It was on a similar note this past week when a picture in The New York Times struck my eye. The picture accompanied a story about increasing criticism of a recent Vouge photo shoot in which seemingly random homeless Indian citizens are seen modeling $100 fashion garments and $10,000 designer handbags. The article points out the obvious criticism of publishing the photos including pointing out that over half the country lives on less than an dollar and a quarter a day and the fact that you still have 1000s of farmers killing themselves each year to avoid debt that is burdening their families. In other words, the critics of the ad don’t necessarily disagree with the products though simply the way they are being marketed. Of course the article also lets the other side debate their side of the matter with people claiming, that brand awareness of products is important in the emerging markets and the notion that the idea of flaunting money being a bad thing is a uniquely western one and that if one looks at China or other Far East countries he or she can see though who made it like to show it. I am not sure where I stand on this debate and I am sure I could flip flop back and forth all day, though I will say this: I know that buying a two dollar shirt instead of a hundred dollar shirt and donating the rest of charity is not going to stop poverty. At the same time I realize that the street-dwelling models in these photos will most likely never be able to realize the value of the objects they are showing off. I don’t think Vogue is necessarily doing any harm to society though at the same time I don’t think they are nearly as active as they could be in helping identify the sources of poverty and working to solves its bane.