Bring Me The Head Of Bill The Body!

I see why Ivan encourages us to do a post every week and not just several at the end of term all at once... the ideas in the lectures seem to ebb away and become less focused with time, like dreams when you first open your eyes in the morning, or tears in the rain....but anyway, here I am 3 weeks later still trying to get my head around our new lecturer! A not to uncommon problem!

Week one of Bill's lectures introduced him as a ball of game obsessed spontaneity! Less structured than Ivan's lecturers but more challenging because of this.

New Media & Temporal Montage

I don't mean the difference between the old Doctor Who show and the new one as viewed in a Youtube mash-up of clips! Taking aside the discussions of games and gaming, and how if you play if you're on-line with a certain newly released game, how Bill will come up from behind and kill you in a most undignified and unrelenting way. The important thing about this lecture for me were the ideas of the different ways to approach media and their development.

Specifically in film where we focused on ideas of perspective and the passage of time within the medium of film. The focus of this discussion initially was on "The Life of An American Fireman" made in 1903 by Edwin Porter and the ontogeny of the cinematic organism of narrative structure.

                    

In the film the way in which the story is told is defined by the limitations of the technology of the time. The camera is fixed in one place, with a fixed focal length. The film suffers from the same limitations as theatre, confined and constricted with action always directed away from the camera and chronological progression destroyed by this single point of view methodology. It lacks what we now take to be a universal idea in film....the cross cut. A method of editing that allows us to see multiple points of view from within the film and so helping us understand the situation better. It's not only a tool that develops our understanding of one scene but also has a greater effect on the story as a whole. You couldn't have films like Inception, The Matrix or Memento without being able to rapidly change from one perspective to another within the film.

As with the introduction of perspective to painting by artists of the Renaissance, the idea of time being unsecured in film through the use of cross cutting enables us to go beyond the constraints of the traditional narrative progression, start to finish. So whilst the camera and film may have liberated art from the rigid definitions of reality allowing artists like Picasso and Rene Magritte to take skewed perspective on reality. I think that cross-cutting has both allowed us to create a real time evolution of events in a linear manner, it has also allowed for the possibility of ignoring time all together! The Back to the Future film series couldn't exist without being able to simultaneously cut from one perspective to the other!