Friday, February 19, 2010

fred: the dark side

This is a still from the 16mm. It shows Fred in silhouette. When it is watched in its native silent self it is quite an eery shot. What was Deacon's intention for this in the final film? Did he also detect Fred's darkside? Did he plan to include this part of Fred's nature in the original film? I can't think how else this shot may have been used. It certainly doesn't portray the loving, light-hearted Fred. Needless to say, I'm using it to talk about his dark side.

Posted by at
Labels: ,

1 comment:

  1. Mike CarrollMarch 5, 2010 at 6:53 PM

    Hi Carolyn, as we discussed, I happy to look at this with you, from the position of a mainstream film maker, or just as someone who has been around, has lived in a community not so different to the one you describe, and has a perspective, or at least interpretation on the events as you describe them. But I haven't read everything, so if there are bits that are significant in yr blog, please let me know, and I'll check them out.

    And obviously I respect that this is your subjective POV, so I won't try to argue rights or wrongs in interpretation. But I'd like to say right off, I do feel that I'm both unable and unwilling to enter into a purist academic discourse about the subject matter. So what you might call a mammalian quadruped member of the canidae family of order carnivora, I'll just refer to as a dog. Is that cool? (Rarefied academic discourse is a real discussion stopper, I reckon.)

    So straight off the bat, what I see here is an ethnographic investigation, with you (the ethnographer) attempting to make sense of a relic that has very restricted specificity. The UB phenomena did only and could only exist within the rigid bounds of the time and place that spawned it. Same as my community experience. The past is a foreign country, and they do things differently there.

    That being the case, what I find interesting is learning what you find interesting. That is, what it is about the whole thing that you, a younger person, are engaged by? You mention in one of your blogs the whole thing about reality TV, which was all the rage when you were a teenager. So does that have some bearing? Do you see this as a ferral 'Big Brother' household? I think it would be interesting to turn the camera around from time to time, because (and I'll take you to task on this later) film making is about playing to an audience, and I think that's a question audiences will respond to most readily: Why does she care so much? What's the connection? What kind of journey are we on?

    Im also there with you on the naturalistic approach. It is a fundamental underpinning of my work, but I suspect that we understand it slightly differently: For me, a naturalistic approach is the opposite of a normative or idealistic approach: In the later, we project an ideal outcome, which in this case might be a hypothesis about the UB phenomena, and we seek to close the gap through an argument that step by step works to support that conclusion.

    A naturalistic approach, on the other hand, is a pre-hypothesis approach. It adopts a shared description of the current conditions, and allows the emergence of future possibilities without trying to predetermine what they are. And because it's an emergent process, it's an exploration, for which the outcome is unknown and until we get there, unknowable. Of course, once we have reached a conclusion, everything will seem blindingly obvious in hindsight. However it's a fallacy to reverse the proposition and believe that what is obvious in hindsight should also obvious in foresight. It isn't and it can't be. That's a lesson from Complexity Theory 101.

    So what peaked my interest right up is;

    Why do you care?

    What could the fact that you care mean?

    ...interesting.

    -M

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)