by studioxadmin | Oct 21, 2010 | HD: Film Commentary, Miscellaneous
Social networking is not a new phenomenon. It has been studied for at least as far back as the late 1800’s. This rapidly expanding online industry is dependent on an imperative that developed in our brains long before our species took human form. The social network has been a dynamic artifact of evolution going back to our single cell origins.
At this current apex of social evolution, each of us is a channel or wave of information passing through the global mind. Our claim on this virtual reality is substantiated by photographs, videos, posts, friends networks, emails, texts, tweets, peeps, treats and how far out our contacts reach to meet. Social networking sites have already eclipsed pornography as the prime generators of traffic on the Web. The popularity of these sites is largely due to their efficiency in helping us conduct the mating ritual and they help us do so by getting our story out.
Every story combines three essential elements, plot, character and point of view. A social networking website is a point of view in search of character and plot. We hear stories all the time. Stories are so important to us that everyone wants to be the main character in one. The point of view in social networking is that a person with an interesting story makes valuable contacts. We want that story to be told to as many people as possible so that we have the best chance of finding good contacts. Stories inspire us to want to be extraordinary, to raise the level of our game, to do something that everyone recognizes as worthwhile.
A social networking site is a place where a person puts their best foot forward and shows us the character that they want to be. It is also a place where we explore the characters and stories of others. We search for people with common values and complimentary needs to enrich our story and theirs, or to reconnect with people who enriched past chapter’s of our life’s story. In cyber-culture, the mating ritual has found a place to express many latent emotions. This is good. This is healthy. We keep a wary eye out for predators, but also trust in the benefits of widening our social circle.
For the corporate interests, consumer profiles are pieced together from demographic data gathered by the way we perform the ritual. How old we are, where we live, who we live with, what we like and what we buy make up the character and plot of that story but who supplies the point of view? If every story combines three essential elements, plot, character and point of view, we must realize that the creators of these social websites are are supplying the point of view to the story that we are supplying with our character and plot .
Facebook, for example, is a blank page upon which a person’s story is written. What and how we write about ourselves, our choice and use of language, our preferences in friends, music, television, movies and popular websites make up the character and plot of that story. The viewpoint of that story is imposed by the author of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. Mark is the one unifying connection that runs through the entire Facebook demographic.
We may not all be Mark’s friend, but we are all actors on his stage and legally, he has a legitimate claim to authorship of the entire digital output of his enterprise including our profiles. However it is important for us members to keep in mind an online community is made up of individuals who are connected in ways more significant than a social networking site can encompass. The real social network exists whether or not Facebook or BoobTube take part in it. The social network was not invented by any one. You are the social network. They can take away all the computers, cameras, recruiters and programmers and the social network will still be alive and well, because no one can take away your story.
by studioxadmin | Aug 29, 2010 | HD: Film Commentary, Miscellaneous
A picture is worth a thousand words and a motion picture is worth a thousand fetishes. The first definition given for fetish in my dictionary states, “A material object believed to be the dwelling of a spirit, or to represent a spirit. It may be induced or compelled to help and safeguard the possessor and to protect from harm or disease.”
The first part is clear; actors in a movie represent characters in a script in the same way that spirits inhabit an object. Actors confirm this with statements like, “I lived and breathed that role.”
The second half of the definition sounds superstitious. How can movies be induced to safeguard and protect us? Assuming primitive tendencies are played out everywhere, the ways of old are practiced at the multiplex too. Movies seem to safeguard and protect us primarily by confirming each person’s individual belief in what is right and wrong.
Under fetish, in my dictionary, definition number two reads, “Any object of devotion or blind affection.” If paying admission can be construed as devotion then audiences turn film into fetish simply by going to the movies. The suspension of disbelief that a good story extracts from us amounts to a kind of blindness.
Moving from the conceptual to the concrete, nearly every thing in a movie can be branded a fetish. Look anywhere and be prepared to find one. Set design, props, costumes, all are undeniable beachheads of fetishism. The stories themselves become fetishes the way they are presented. All the key elements of a movie are showered with torrents of devotion, and something like blind affection, as they are created, fit together, lit together, photograph and trafficked through the new media.
The camera itself is a fetish, as is the projector. Framed production stills from movies, become fetishes of fetishes. The big screen is an ultra-potent fetish. The small screen may eventually catch up. Before screens came along, mirrors were the most popular fetish.
There is a third entry for fetish in my dictionary, “Sensual gratification derived from touching a part of the body of a person, or a piece of clothing belonging to it.” Considering the glaring fact that sex is the most consistent theme in movies, is it too big of a stretch to connect movies to this type of fetishism? Observing the actions of dating and lovemaking in movies becomes a sort of participation in the rites themselves, in which audience members are touched by characters and receive sensual gratification from them.
Even watching something as tame as a romantic comedy in a movie theater becomes a kind of, soft-core group sex but with no added emotional baggage to deal with and zero disease. There must be something worthwhile about sitting together in the dark and watching other people touch and kiss. We make regular sacrifices for the experience. We pay for the privilege and we are doing it in dark rooms, with total strangers, at all hours of the night and day, all over the world.
by studioxadmin | Jun 19, 2010 | HD: Film Commentary, Miscellaneous
Stories characterize, expound and explore our dual nature. They unite minds, and enlighten individuals. Stories help humanity thrive by emphasizing the value of cooperation and the necessity of independence. They recount the dangers of over-indulgence and forecast the promise of positive potential in the human race.
Western civilization was brought into the modern era with statements like, “In the beginning was the Word.” With all due respects to the scriptural masterworks of the great religions, our relationship with the divine reaches back to our dancing, predatory ancestors. This was many thousands of years before any widespread language systems had emerged. However, in deference to the passage quoted above, the stories of all the world’s cultures had their beginning as one story, an attempt to impose order on the chaos that we wrestle with everyday.
A movie is literally a light shining in the darkness. Movies mend chaos with order, fashioning realities with ideas and imagination to help distinguish what is good from what is evil. But order quickly disintegrates and chaos never sleeps, so storytelling is alive and thriving in the 21st century.
We continue to invent new ways to tell them, but the old stories influence all of the new ones. Movies that become an enduring part of our culture do so because they contain practical examples of common sense drawing from and contributing to the record of all that humankind has learned since our primitive beginnings.
Over eons the first stories morphed and multiplied into a myriad of stories. Now, through motion pictures and the Internet, the myths, legends, and histories of all traditions will merge back together again. Through the universal language of image and song, motion pictures are presenting the world with its unified story.
by studioxadmin | Feb 22, 2010 | HD: Film Commentary, Miscellaneous
Do we apply to the lens for mere reflection? No. For that we have mirrors. We subscribe to the motion picture for precisely what the mirror cannot do, illuminate the mystery of our existence.
When we watch a motion picture, we allow what the camera has recorded at a previous time and place to interpose itself into our perception of the present time and place. For an entirely alternative reality to be allowed to supersede our ordinary reality like this has been, in the past, reserved for pagan enchantments, shamanistic ceremonies and high-church rituals.
Motion pictures, dreams and rituals share several artifices in that respect, such as plasticity of time and space, the occurrence of vivid, uncanny detail and situations where unconscious fears and desires are expressed.
Dreams work by relying on the suspension of waking consciousness. Motion pictures work by relying on what is often called “the suspension of disbelief,” which also accounts for why we forget we are looking at a flat screen and become absorbed in the story. More importantly, motion pictures of the highest order convert our most sovereign beliefs, if only momentarily, to the extraordinary order or belief system imposed by characters and situations within the story we are watching.
Motion pictures record and compose artificial realities using sound and image. Seeking meaning to our lives, we reach out with the light of cinematic language into the unknown; similar to the way a flashlight extends into the darkness. The cone-shaped beam of the movie projector casts an enchanted luminescence over ordinary things, turning a dim room full of nothing but chairs into a portal to the next dimension, a temple for the collective consciousness to merge with the unconscious.
As a hollow, dark and mostly empty space, the motion picture theater represents the mind and motion pictures bring to light the chaos and conundrums that take up space in our minds.
If movie characters stand in for us, the camera often stands in for God. It is one of our oldest habits to imbue that notion of a great eye that watches us with the authority of God. Could it be that, after a long time of searching for God outside ourselves, through religion and war, motion pictures enable the eye of God to open up inside us? The camera watches and we see through its eye, while it peers out in every direction from inside the mystery of our existence.
by studioxadmin | Jan 22, 2010 | HD: Film Commentary, Miscellaneous
As a writer and storyteller it was necessary for me to adapt to the film making discipline because motion pictures reach more people than any cultural medium other than music. Besides, I too have always loved the movies.
For centuries music was humanity’s universal language, but in the past hundred years movies have expanded the vocabulary. Movies possess even more potential to communicate, because they can utilize images as well as music.
Now, thanks to the digital age, a motion picture that I post on my website this morning can span the globe almost instantaneously. For an individual to have so much range to communicate is unprecedented. A film of mine can play in every corner of the world and be watched by individuals whose daily preoccupations are utterly different from my own.
I think of someone who may be illiterate, they may be deaf, mute, or all of the above. For that matter they could have only one eye and still watch my movie. I think of that person when making my films.
If this individual has just wandered into the most far-flung Internet cafe on the planet and discovered my movie playing, what should they come away with? What should I tell them? I will remind them how much we rely on each other for our survival and confirm to them that their passionate participation in community is essential if we are to thrive as a species. It is a profound responsibility to be alive and making movies at this critical juncture in our history.
