Summarize Whitechapel 180-197

This section of our book talks about the realities of documenting history through the addition or subtraction of editorials, the software, reenactments/replica, rendition, and any other action put forth on a documentary thats allows the viewer to reminisce about the subject, enabled to remember and contemplate it. Stallabrass uses these interviews with the creatives to further uphold the notion of the need for inclusivity in individual voices that comprise a collective fantasized community outlook. But the way the creator of the documentary makes the documentary, the way they edit, the history during the time they're filming, the context, the subject, the editorial, the effects; these all are constantly changing as time moves forward and history continues to be alive in the present moment we find ourselves in.
Stallabrass uses examples from creatives that infuse all kinds of materials and timely aspects into their works to relate them through the public, hopefully making it's way into individuals homes and mindsets and fostering positive connections between them and future generations to come. A big factor in this is how we learn to perceive and interpret media. One example is that all the editorial software available to us today is manipulating our ability to distinguish between reality and dream. It can also be an editorial technique used to center a viewers attention on the time, place, and quality of the video. In the jihadist videos that came out after 9/11, the quality of the video was made to seem as if the terrorists were not to strike again, transcribing this through screen by rendering the quality of the video to be of VCR quality. Another quality was described in the As Sahab videos in which all features of the camera were utilized; the night-vision, the bluetooth audio, etc. This allows the consumers of these videos to be fully immersed in the experience, and perhaps unwillingly coerced into being their visual consumers, creating a force by audience number and attention.
Another artist talked about reenactments and renditions of old media and history. The issue with this was that this dramatized the experience of the people who actually witnessed it. Recreating a witness of an event is still dramatized, no matter if you only get material from the persons who were there in the first place. The real reality is living in the present moment of the history of the people who know the in's and out's as much as they can in reality to the time difference of the event and the reenactment.
This leads into our main idea of factuals and how they change in accordance with time, culture, geography, people, presenter, audience, platform, medium, etc. etc. The way we present an argument or vision changes in the period we are in, and depends on a lot more factors than just straight facts to present. In an age where media is conditioning to the ways in which we percieve and accept information, I think the media of documentary has the power to become something so multifaceted that if done right, it could be the basis to a majority of our media references and relations in the future.

Storyboard Link

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Hz7l8cgUSGHP_WEkh3WRS4Njz6_-PAyR/view?usp=sharing

SUMMARY 9.18.18

In addition to becoming it's own art form, reality created a new scope of vision into the reality of a romanticized medium. The way that documentaries were made were presented in story form rather than reflected of a real chain of events. Early documentaries followed formulas and had scripts with beginnings, middles and ends. While this is the standard formatting for any storyboarding, the beginning, middle, and end lays itself out as the story of reality progresses. The collector of the media, the director, takes time to assemble the pieces created and style them in a way that they think best represents the story.

The key word here again is "style". This is still the main argument of what documentary presents when we present it through our eyes. The vision of a good reality is to not be bound by constructions of what should happen, or what we think played out despite seeing something completely different. While it may be tempting to tell the story from our point of view, it's important to think about the subject of the film as the topic involved, not through the vision of the person or topic becoming involved by immersing themselves in the situation. Not arguing that one's immersion in the topic or situation being filmed is bad, it's just that their presence can become too overbearing in the context of the film. A good documentarist takes the piece for what it is and doesn't manipulate it to their liking, but looks at it from a whole, all the good and bad, and tries to piece it together coherently and simply, replicating the order of events and reactions similar to what the raw chain of events was when it played out.

This form of art is one of the purest. Or it should be. If done right, documentary should be the purest form of communication and inception. Purest doesn't mean clean or exceptional or divine, it just means that it accepts all forms of documentary, the ugly and the pretty. Mostly the ugly. The documentary should aim to fixate on the respondents to raw materials, which can be anything and everything. The idea is to have meaning behind every image shown. Every clip and material and person being shown has to relate back to the environment of the films meaning itself. Documentary should be kept to the most minimal stylistic appropriation possible, but show all the qualities of real life coherently and with meaning.

Summarize "Night and Fog" 9.11.18

This film presents footage from the stoic aftermath of the Holocaust. The story is told through the narrator, the only voice present in the entire movie. Even though they had no audio to match the video, it sorta plays into its own metaphor that the victims of this massacre had no voice. This helps establish that this is more than a documentary; it signifies that it is a pertinent moment in our history and that we should pay attention to the fragility of the human cycle.

The movie was juxtaposing moments of peacefulness with moments of gore, as well as showcasing them in the same shot to show their inevitable inseparability.

The images of life and growth in the beginning of the film was represented through shots of families, children, city scapes; normal life. These clips only appear in the beginning to signify normality, the beginning of where it all began. Only in the beginning of the movie, before the war erupted, could we see the stability that was once these people’s lives. 

The movie also went half and half with this idea of life and death. Throughout, shots of meadows and still-life in the green made you think of a tucked away farm or factory on the outskirts of a larger, populated centrum. In the middle of a nature centrum, these death factories were kept a secret between the hierarchy for nearly the entire time they were operating. The buildings were designed to be as plain as possible, using the basic architecture to transcribe normality, a smoke screen for everything that was hidden behind. These jump cuts from meadow to human body to overgrown railroad to shutting doors; they all stem from the physicality of the place itself. The way the earth was used, the way it was walked on, the institutions and formalities that were built on it. This concentration camp was contracted, built from nature, and then filled with its occupants. The film does a brilliant job at disclosing the origins of the site as well as the progression of the use of it.

But the movies visual focus wasn’t solely mimicking the natural cycle of death, it wanted to foremost highlight the human-imposed death that made the whole cycle start in the first place. Without the man, there would be no idea. Without the idea, the action of constructing the camp would have never sprung to life. Without the construction, the victims would never have filled it. The film goes into action and reaction sequences, and before and after shots. The explanatory or filler action scenes are usually followed up by gruesome reaction scenes of bodies being thrown limp or people looking empty at the camera, prompting the viewer to react immediately to the information being visually presented and audibly described. 

Project 1 Proposal

Women have always been objectified in media, but the image medium for this objectification has been made ubiquitous in our every day thoughts, actions, and experience. Advertising is a form of communication and creation, but it also serves as an exploitation tactic to the idea or image that it wants to sell. The Capitalistic commodity of advertising sells as a portrayal of itself, working both sides of the coin as it distributes it's business incentive while simultaneously conforming it's image to embody societal norms and cultural values, which are of course stereotyped, and do not actually reflect the cultural reality of today.

Since the middle of the 1950's, the media image representation of women has evolved dramatically. What was once a magazine filled with commercials of vacuums and stovetops created for stay-at-home moms became a platform, calling for the "normalization" of women to wanting to have to better themselves. To adhere to present times and to apply their image to the new feministic wave, advertisers urged their female consumers to value self-appreciation and freedom. This would have been nice, if only the advertisers reinforced that shifting cultural value and reflected it by realistically portraying images of women being self-appreciative in every lifestyle, not just the one that seemed culturally fit.

Presenting the value of self-appreciation as an image crafted to encompass societal expectations of the "average" American woman persona has has major effects on women who don't find themselves being represented in that media persona. Over the decades, the media has white-washed representations of beauty in almost every major advertisement dedicated to women's beauty and cosmetics. Today, these major Eurocentric media outlets are continuing to culturally appropriate the exact same groups that they fail to represent in their media exemplars.
 
The focus of my project is to show how the media devolved from objectifying women through conservative portrayals and traditional images, to rapidly transforming it's focus to the image of  sexualization and total exploitation the woman's body in the name of creating an image to sell. If sex and sexual liberation were going mainstream on the front pages, so grew the now-omnipresent sexualization of women as objects rather than subjects.

Sept. 6th Sergei Einstein

The way I understood it, the montage being spoken about in the article is the actual piece of work itself, however long, made up of shots (individual cells). The way that Einstein describes the art of montage is how it grows from individual cells. The whole of the montage is realized through devotion to the baselines of the work. The effort of organizing every cell so that it's lighting, shape, style, stillness or speed coincides just enough and not too much for the contrast to go overboard. It keeps the pace but switches from shot to shot to show a changing and forming film world, but not enough to lose a watcher in the midst of the collisions. Good montage sequences do exactly that. Artists use auditory and visuals in pair with one another, creating a rhythm by using the two senses are reflectors of each other. The synchronization is something that we've managed to achieve today when it comes to sound and visual performance, and I can only image all the tools we'll be seeing in the enhancement of montage.

The Corporation; Tuesday, 4th September 2018

This documentaries job is not just to simply define the interactions that happen between corporation and humanity. This film shows the hierarchical processes by which certain images find themselves at the forefront of a persons apperception. It also tells us how these corporation powers have managed to falsely fold over the public, the government, the FDA, college professors, and research/facility funding. Widely talked about in the feature is the idea that a business should be seen as a group of persons in power enacting the collective corporation's wishes, not as one person making all the calls. These power cells in the anatomies of these businesses can be made up of the nicest people you've ever met, but together, they have the ability to bring down entire communities, cities, and even greater parts of the Earth.
     Privatization of the public and rain waters in Bolivia's third largest city Cochabamba led to a total destabilization of pertinent services in community infrastructures. The water laws prevented people from collecting this water to survive, and used their unpaid bills to evict people out of their lands. These infrastructures of education, public health and sanitation, and employment were uprooted and further demolished by the Bechtel vs Bolivia's Water War in Cochabamba. When the people asked for water, they got teargassed. When the people had to pay for water now, they stopped affording sending their children to school. When water and basic services are held in the hands of a corporation that owns however much of a percent of fresh water reserves, that percent of water owned doesn't reflect the number of people who would be affected if those reserves were to cease existing, to which they'd be left in the instruction of the corporations. And I don't think those corporations have any training in dealing with emergency water shortages.
    "Transnational corporations have a long and dark history of condoning tyrannical operations. Corporations in Germany led to the upheld of Fascism". Today, the boycott of the once Nazi drink Fanta created for Germany so that Coca Cola could keep their operations running and flowing into Germany during WWII, would do no good or harm in the grand scheme of things. Corporations like Coca Cola are able to disregard any major cataclysm, as long as their effusion of monetary funds keeps circulating from public to public.
    The concepts of some of these stories are horrifying. It showed me just how easily it is within the present jurisdictions of businesses to systematically control and organize lives within entire continents. The day that Snowden defected and released those documents was a governmental breach of privacy using web surveillance, a  ploy using a medium made possible by the boom of the 21st century interfaces, such as cell phones and online social networkings. Companies and governments alike have been using techniques to track the movements of their public way before Snowden, though. IBM's were German-ordered punch cards used to collect census and death tracks within WWII concentration camps. The same IBM's came from a company that dispersed their regular punch card products to citizens all around, keeping quiet about their productions until the crimes were disowned to the public.
    The leverage that a single individual might have against a thriving and expansive business is microscopic. Even governments have become powerless under the gaze of corporations through their expansive globalization process. But, the leverage changes fast if the individual were to have something that the business was scared of revealing, a change of roles in cat versus mouse. These leverages can be created, and the actions of businesses can be exposed when the moral collective consciousness comes together from those who voice their concerns not as individuals, but as a community that wants to take back its claim on this Earth and doesn't want those rights being infringed upon.