through the lens final

Matt Winkelried
Film Theory 201
May 1, 2010
Professor Jonathan Rattner
Structuralism and Experimental Film

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Hhw1XuYHLc

Through out the semester, we have explored, viewed and read different forms and styles of film that I have never encountered or really knew about. We began with formalist theories and film making, the goal of which is to depict the beauty of cinema, and its ability to be an expressive art form that can be manipulated. Formalism also focused on cinema’s ability to transform reality as the filmmaker believes or envisions it. Theorists we discussed, such as Eisenstein and Balasz, were keen on transforming this reality to a new imaginative universe through the use of editing and other post-production tools. We then went on to discuss a second film theory tradition we called realism. This concept of realism allowed the filmmaker to focus more on the look and the shapes of images that they are exhibiting on screen. The goal of realism is to break out the full potential of the world that we see. Among the realist theorists that we discussed were Tarkovsky and Bazin. They relied on the camera work more than editing tools. For example they would focus on long shots, not quick editing. Realist filmmakers and theorists ultimate goal was to use the power of the medium to capture the real world around us as it is, not how they transform it to be.
We then went on to a concept that I have never heard of or witnessed before. Structuralism is an approach that is very different from the formalist tradition and the realist tradition. Instead of focusing on the content of a film, structuralism emphasizes the structure of a film, and aims to completely change the viewer’s accepted and comfortable sense of perception with images and the way we see them on screen. In Zorns Lemma, by Hollis Frampton, the images are given to us in no specific order, however, as the film goes on each preceding set of images, the numbers becoming the words becoming the images, take over and become intertwined and signify a particular image from earlier in the film.
Leighton Pierce is an excellent example of an experimental filmmaker whose works draw inspiration from structuralist theory and filmmaking. His short film Glass (a memory of water), demonstrates structuralist ideals. His film successfully implements these ideas and creates a piece that definitely made me critically look at the film and experience multiple emotions. In an interview with Leighton Pierce, Pierce had spoken about how before he was a film maker, he was a composer and sound designer and with that he implemented sound into how he affectively used his camera and created shots. Glass used both visual and sound to effectively entice the viewer. I look at this film and I tried to incorporate similar methods of creating mood and feeling. By using the natural diagetic sound along with specific images I was able to create and intertwine emotions that are oppositional to each other.
My film does not exactly follow Frampton’s ideal, but has many similarities to Zorn’s Lemma. I took a series of shots that I thought were intriguing and unique and filmed them either in plain sight, or manipulated through the lens’ of sunglasses. This dichotomy was an attempt to play on perception: the direct shots are examples of a viewer’s “normal” perception, while the sunglasses try to change their perception. The film is not about any particular story, which is an element of the Structuralist tradition. I felt that there is beauty no matter how one sees these images. In my film, each shot length is not exactly equivalent to the next or previous one, but all the shots are roughly around 30 seconds long (give or take a second or two). In the piece about Zorns Lemma, MacDonald says that like many critical films, the experiences recorded in Zorns Lemma are not “conventional” filmic experiences. He was making it the viewers’ responsibility to understand and interpret the images on their own.
The goal that I was trying to reach with my film was to leave any messages the combined images made up to the viewers. I wanted the audience to feel either anxious or comforted by the images on the screen- and after having a set number of people and talking with many of them I asked them if they developed any of those feelings during the viewing. About half said they were comforted and the other half felt anxious. But my overall point of my film is directly in the title, “Through the Lens” meaning I want people to see things differently from one another, through their own what I like to call “lens.” I did this by structuring the film so that each image had equal opportunity to create the emotion to the viewer.
Each shot that I chose to use had a specific and internal meaning to them. My personal favorite shot was the shot of the swing set. I pushed the swings to give them the short natural look to them. I felt that by filming the swings I was capturing a lost childhood or the past that my generation once lived in and was specifically focusing on the memories of childhood, which were meant to sooth the audience and remind them of the life they use to live. This shot could also, however, make some people feel anxiety because of this lost childhood, so it functions both ways. In relation to that, I ended the film on that same swing set, only at a different angle, distance and through the lens. Providing the message that what is in the past is in the past and is unobtainable and I used the sunglasses to emphasize that the image in distant and can be sometimes cluttered by things (the lens) what lye ahead.
Studying different theories is important because it allows us to really think about why certain films are made the way that they are. The ways of making film has evolved as technology has evolved, and so has thinking about film. The history of film is important, and so is understanding the movements that changed the way that film has been made. These theorists taught us different ways of approaching film in terms of form, content, and purpose, but studying all of them was important. Over the course of this semester, the last thing we studied was the structuralist tradition, which allowed us to look at experimental films, which are the greatest example of the different ways of making films, and which allowed us to understand that there are different ways of making films for different reasons, and this is a long tradition. Personally, I am glad that we studied structuralism because it gave me a lot more exposure to experimental films, the theories that surround structure, and ultimately confidence in making my own experimental project, “Through the Lens”.