Animated film

I had this idea for making a small animated film and it came out funny, but still at that moment I realized that there’s something special about animated films. While making it I was creating 2 characters and giving life to nonliving things. I could have used simple video camera, but the whole process of creation is much more amazing this way.

I remembered my favorite movie called The Science of Sleep, that was already mentioned in this blog before, where fantasy and reality are mixed together . In this movie everything seems to be alive and even dreams interfere with reality. This is just the kind of feeling you have while making an animated film, and afterwards you won’t look the same at objects around you ;) It’s like when you attach to something and you start giving it names (a car, a pen, chair , anything... or... is it just me who’s doing such things? ) : o

Dreams and Movies

After viewing another movie with a dream as the main theme, I was again very interested and impressed by that subject. Since I was a child, I always had crazy dreams and sometimes I wrote them down and tried to analyze them. Dreams always seemed to me as the biggest riddle, and I ascribed to them big importance.

So, to go back on the movies… Naturally, as I was drawn to dreams I liked to view every movie in which a dream plays a big part. A movie is ,for me, one of the best mediums to represent a dream, because I find a close resemblance between them. They are both visual representations, an assemblage of images, illusions and in both of them we identify ourselves with persons. If you watch a movie trying to analyze every scene, first you will try to understand every object in it and it’s reason for being there. In the same manner you will examine every little thing in a dream – objects, colors, persons… As I am not an expert for dream interpretations, I’d like to point out on a paragraph from Sigmund Fraud’s book The Interpretation of Dreams :


Gruppe * speaks of such a classification of dreams, citing Macrobius and Artemidorus: "Dreams were divided into two classes; the first class was believed to be influenced only by the present (or the past), and was unimportant in respect of the future; it included the enuknia (insomnia), which directly reproduce a given idea or its opposite; e.g., hunger or its satiation; and the phantasmata, which elaborate the given idea phantastically, as e.g. the nightmare, ephialtes. The second class of dreams, on the other hand, was determinative of the future’’.

As I see it, this types of dreams described here are using a kind of language as a tool too communicate (forsee the future) or to react on reality, very simililar to the language director is using while making a movie, that may indicate to the next action, forsee the next step.


When you look at Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams for example, you may find a perfect formation of a dream and a movie. Series of his actual dreams represented through a movie, a dream analized and then reconstructed by him. He uses his own symbols and interpretates at the same time what he thinks his dream means. And on the end there is a viewer, dream is not for his „eyes“ only but is available for a group of people - it is exposed for a million of different understandings and analasys. He made his dreams public and saw them all once again. That’s the thing everyone would love to be able to accomplish – to see it once again and to record it forever.
As I allready have said there are a number of movies dealing with this subject, and I may write down some of the other titles worth paying attention to, for example: Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) , Waking Life, The Science of Sleep, Oculto...

As this post became longer then I expected, I’ll put it to an end with one fact that tells us about first attempt to record a dream and it dates back to 3000-4000 B.C., where they were documented on clay tablets.

Representation of the body

 

I had a brief conversation with my friend earlier this evening and a lot of subjects came up, but it was mostly about art, life, religion. So, after all this talking, I am still full of so many opinions and one thing we both agreed about is that if you don’t share your thoughts, interests and everything that you find important enough to give it some time to think about, you won’t be able to advance and to develop. Every little thought is worth mentioning.

Today I had a lecture about body in the world of art (mostly visual art),  so here are some of my thoughts on that subject:

What is beauty and when did we start giving it the meaning that it has today?

How do we understand body today? With all this cyber replacements, do we start to neglect it?

Is representation of body also representation of our will for possessing that body or just a dead symbol?

How do you see body, as a shell, kind of a mask of our soul or as an symbiosis of both?


Today we may find a lot of projects that are connected to this theme, and one of the most important artist that analyze and research this topic is Louise Bourgeois. She divides the body into little segments while analyzing it. Other very important artist that is working in the field of 
performance art is well known  Marina 
Abramovic. The base of all her performances is the body. Body is her medium for communication and also her subject. She becomes living sculpture.


If you look at a various photographs of a body for example from Mapplethorpe or Rineke Dijkstra you can notice that all those body representations are presented mostly as a sculpture. Living body is formalized as a non living sculpture, that may be a quote of many themes from painting and different understanding of body throughout the history of art.

But with so many new age inventions, cloning, silicon input and other surgery interventions, internet, body is becoming replaced, lost, transformed into metaphor.
As Louise Bourgeois once said - For me, sculpture is the body. My body is my sculpture.

Jeff Wall at SFMOMA

While I was searching for a good site that can provide me with some most important informations about world contemporary art scene, I came across SFMOMA website where one upcoming exhibition really surprised me! SFMOMA is organising retrospective exhibition of works from Jeff Wall, one of the photographers whose work I appriciate the most. As some of you probbably know he is an artist who first started as a painter and then found a big interest in a relation between photography and painting. His well known lightbox framing made a big trace and influence in contemporary way of thinking, presenting and understanding photography, painting as well as cinema. His photographs, cinematography, as he likes to call them are perfect example of 3 most influental art segments putt together. On SFMOMA website you may also view a video with Jeff Wall and his explanation about his work, as well as some of the photographs that will be included in this retrospective from 1978-2004. Well, all I can say is I wish I could visit this show!

Intro

Louise Bourgeois
MAMAN, 1999
Steel and Marble
30 feet 5 inches x 29 feet 3 inches x 33 feet 7 inches
365 x 351 x 403 inches
927.1 x 891.5 x 1023.6 centimeters


This is my attempt to share my thoughts and views on everything that occupies me - with you, me and the web!
I hope it will help me understend and clearfy all those massed up informations that keep coming into my mind and not getting out...
Pardon my English mistakes :8)! ;)