Thursday, February 26, 2015

SOS thoughts by Imani Williams

1. Kabuki theater.....if it had an orchestral background would sound like this.
There is danger, and the heart is beating louder and slower all at once .
Black and smoke appears, suddenly there's fire. It rips two lovers apart. Perhaps a mother and a child instead. The smoke clears, She thought he was dead but there  as she listens closer there is a faint heart beat. Everything in slo motion. Acted with kabuki characters with a mixture of a stage as a background and a real setting.

7. walking gracefully through a meadow. curiously. eyes looking at bugs on a log. spider suspending a web. a gentile forest...a stream , climax when another presence is there..and another..then they take her. they do the pavan dance with her after she is blindfolded she is wondering what the point of this is. a pleasant surprise as they bring her cake. she questions whether or not to eat it but then they reassure her its fine, they tell her wonderful things she still feels suspicious...she dies of poison. they look at her take her necklace and close her eyes. the necklace symbolized royalty, she was a princes.

For the longest time I could not decide if i wanted to pursue song number one or see, but ultimately I am going to do song number 7 because I as the only person who chose it and the filming may be a bit easier. In song 1 the shots I imagined are pretty ambitious and i don't think I have the skill to do them well yet. But this is definitely something I can work towards just on my own.




Monday, December 15, 2014

Quinton Tarantino and Kill Bill

I have never before this year played attention to directing in films or anything for that matter. I was just one of the movie goers that was bashed by the film freaks and fanatics. But for this assignment I was tasked with paying attention to thongs I once overlooked such as directing. I looked up Tarantino and I discovered his mother was a nurse and his father an actor which makes all too much sense. The obvious coming from hos father but the themes might come from his mother. In almost all of his films there is an excessive amount of blood and gore, which he was probably exposed to by his mother. Anyway,  this movie was especially gorey and I thought his techniques were wierd. Often using stills, zooming in and out with the camera and brief black and white clips. I enjoyed the movie however and all his play with the plot using a plethora of flashbacks and jumping around.

Thursday, November 6, 2014

Killer of Sheep review

During the film festival after having Charles Burnett himself come to the school, I thought it only correct to go see the film I had heard him talk about for an hour. I went with an idea of what I thought the film would be like already in my head, again because I kept hearing about it, but I was very wrong. I thought it was going to be a documentary, and I guess it was but my idea of a documentary was very narrow at the time I saw the film so I was thoroughly confused. It seemed like any normal black and white movie. There were actors! I just think if you have to hire actors then its not a documentary an shouldn't be sold as one.

The film itself was a bit boring to me. It was a good film with an ok story. I realize it wasn't supposed to really have a big change in the characters, but when you have a film with static characters, it tends to get boring. I found myself watching my clock, wondering when it was going to be over. There were a few funny things in it as well as some very on the edge footage. Overall the documentary to me seemed like a compilation of interesting shots but I didn't understand nor was I able to really appreciate his work fully, or not as much as the "film experts" do.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

The Milk of Sorrow Film Review

The Milk Of Sorrow directed by Claudia Llosa is a story based on a girl who is in the middle of a family and medical struggle. Doctors think she faints and bleeds because there is  potato growing in her vagina. Her uncle, who serves as her guardian, believes she faints whenever she gets scared or uncomfortable and that she inherited this from the tainted breast milk of her mother. Her mothers milk was told to be contaminated by fear and sorrow because she was raped and abused 6 months into her pregnancy.

The shot type changes often in this film, going from a still wide angle to extremely close up tracking dolly. The cinematographer did something ver interesting when tracking the min character; when she entered unknown territory the frame was extremely blurry excluding her face, this puts you in as much wonder and anticipation as she felt and makes her anxiety more relatable. The sounds in the film were ale very vivid. For example the nail gun and the sound of scissors and screaming children outside.