Camp

"41.  The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious.  Camp is playful, anti-serious.  More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to 'the serious.'  One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious" (Sontag).


This quote really stuck out to me (which I'm about to note on the attendance sheet).  It was one of those "aha!" moments.  And it made me think about the show Chuck, which aired on NBC from 2007-2012.  I've been rewatching it with my boyfriend, and a few episodes in he said this - "It's like a B film, but for television."  I'd never thought about it like that before, but he was totally right.  It takes itself so seriously (even when it's trying to be funny), but it's not really serious at all.  The situations and solutions that the main characters come up with are completely over the top.  And, like its B story predecessors, it is pretty campy.

Our Soviet Friends

This video is based on the Kuleshov effect, which was coined by another early Soviet filmmaker like Eisenstein, who we spent a lot of time talking about today.  Hitchcock does a good job explaining it.

Here is the original video.

The idea is that after seeing the soup, the man looks hungry.  After the dead child, sad.  Etc.  However, his expression never changes.  This is the power of montage editing.

Legos & Gender

I thought this Buzzfeed article related to what we talked about a few weeks ago.

Silence

Last class we spent a lot of time talking about silence and lack of space.  "10,000 Hours of Looking" (or whatever it was called) and things of that sort.  

There is a Polish movie called "Roza" (2011).  Here's the synopsis from IMDb.

A harrowing tale of survival centers on Rose, a Masurian woman, whose husband, a German soldier, was killed in the war, leaving her alone on their farm. A single woman had no defense against Russian soldiers who raped as a form of revenge, nor against plundering Poles who found themselves in desperate straits. The law of the jungle had replaced the rule of law. Help arrives for Rose in the form of Tadeusz, a former officer in the Polish Home Army who survived the Warsaw uprising and is attempting to hide his identity.

At the 1:21:30 mark, the main character is arrested and is tortured for ten years.  However, for the most part, the audience doesn't see any of this torture.  We only see his face get more beat up, but we never see the actual action.  This silence makes the scene more powerful, because the torture that the audience imagines for Tadeusz is even worse than what the director could have come up with.

Let's Talk About Sex...

...or not, according to the Foucault reading for this week.  It reminded me of a scene from Monty Python's Meaning of Life.  Hilariously uncomfortable hearing the word vagina and clitoris being thrown around in a classroom by John Cleese.  Gotta love it.

Identity

A few days ago my boyfriend showed me this.  Identity is such a personal thing that it's easy to forget that outside forces can influence it.  One of those sources being our parents, of course.