2020-21 Theme Declaration

This year I will be working within the theme of art and art, and more importantly the style associated with this theme. My interest is not only in how art comments on itself, but in films that comment on the way we relate too art. In preforming this theme, my focus will always be more on developing my own avant guard style that comes with the theme then discussion of the theme itself. Some examples of my goal style can be seen below.   

The first major way I will explore this theme is by looking at the relationship between cinema and social interaction. In my view all people are products of the media they absorb. Children are the best example of this idea, a kid will want to play ninja or pirate depending on the shows they choose to watch, preforming the media they have happened to see. As a person grows up this idea still holds true, people are more complex in their older years because they are exposed to a greater amount of media to reflect. For example, a person who watches period dramas and Austin interpretations and a person who prefers edge-lord dramas will have a different idea of what a relationship should look like. We initially choose media based on our personalities, then in watching that media we are taught a certain way of being that we continue to preform into our adult lives. Out of the ideas on this list I think this is the least explored. I cannot think of a movie that holds this as it's central single, nor can I think of a movie which makes this a secondary idea (except the last movie I will discus in this post). 

The second way will be via the way we relate to art in a more general sense. The way the individual views art and formulates opinion and analysis on that piece is highly interesting. Lets take emotional reactions to a scene for example: A person can easily laugh at a funny scene without a character in the film laughing. However, a person is less willing to feel sad without a character feeling sad in the scene. Additionally, I find it interesting how people describe their reactions to a film. People are more willing to discus the story and mis-en-scene over any technical element of a movie, but almost exclusively discus technical elements of paintings. An example of this idea can be seen in Holy Motors. 

The third idea within this theme that I find interesting is how we impose our own problems onto characters within a movie. The classic example of this is the Kuleshov Effect. We are drawn to think characters we like think like us. In a modern context this idea has been best expressed by a youtuber named jreg. He is a political satirist who claims to not follow any particular ideology, instead he is just against centrism. Because he is not outwardly a specific ideology the comment sections of his videos are routinely filled with nazis, anarchists, and communists all separately imposing their ideology onto his art. This idea is difficult to represent in an interesting way, so the best way to fulfill the idea is by providing a narrative canvas for others to impose their will onto in my films.   

There are few examples of films that use all three of these ideas, and if they do they are often a over-ambitious mess. However, we can see a success through Charlie Kaufman's most recent movie I'm Thinking of Ending Things. 

This is a film about projection. In it an aging janitor thinks back on the life he imagined for himself, chiefly represented by his imagination of the women he would be dating. In the end he gives up these imagined selves and kills himself. This plot is not clear until the final moments of the movie. Arguably, the movie has no central message working more as a pure representation of modern thought with many smaller ideas interwoven.

It clearly shows his imagined girlfriend is a product of media by showing the janitor watching a movie and then occasionally switching out the actress who is playing the projected women for the actress playing the women in the movie the janitor was watching (often mid-scene). It considers the role of the audience through a conversation about the possibility of creating an emotional painting without a person in it to be emotional, an idea that comes into play during the film's last shot. And it has many moments where I projected my own insecurities.