Life Before Your Eyes
Jeff Koons' sculptures are "brilliant", both as abstract sculpture and as a metaphor for a narcissistic culture. (This is an example of liking something for those qualities in isolation, without comparing it to some other Standard. You can hate Koons as a huckster, but the imputed concepts are what make it enriching.)
We live in a very "shiny" time that makes our own image so clear in context with the background, e.g. reel/real life.
People sometimes go to see films that support their identity and beliefs, or to have a vicarious relationship with it in some way. We can use cinema as a mirror to reflect those elements, or to present other perspectives we might not have considered. All great directors (and artists in general) must realize this, if not also using it to manipulate our perceptions. It is interesting to work this way, where the meaning is generated naturally in real time, based on the context between reality and the mirror image of it in a surface. Like window reflections, one sees two superimposed images that can change with the quality of light.
Good films can generate a plethora of issues, even if not explicit, that projects itself on reality. The real art is to get those things to happen without forcing them.
American Sniper is seen as being agitprop for war hawks, whereas it is also brilliant in its depth and pathos of the human condition. Whiplash tackles issues of sociopathic behaviors, the vagaries of young students and graduates trying to figure out their futures, while seeming to cast a shadow of doubt on our motivations for our choices in life.
A good story is one that generates lots of other stories, some happening in your own life. Those are the film clips that one sees on that metaphorical screen in the front of your eyes. (For a "cartoonification" of this idea projected into the dystopian future, see the Black Mirror episode The Entire History of You)
These days directors must be thinking: "This bit would make for a good meme on social media." Eno was spot-on back in the late 1980s on this issue when MTV was hot:
"The nature of pop music is that it's always absorbing other things. Suddenly, it isn't just dealing with music, it's dealing with television, or it's dealing with safety pins... the punk thing."
The thing about video is it's always absorbing [projecting] other things..." Art now has absorbed social media, and will absorb other things in the future as various technologies are more widely used, such as VR and AR.
We live in a very "shiny" time that makes our own image so clear in context with the background, e.g. reel/real life.
People sometimes go to see films that support their identity and beliefs, or to have a vicarious relationship with it in some way. We can use cinema as a mirror to reflect those elements, or to present other perspectives we might not have considered. All great directors (and artists in general) must realize this, if not also using it to manipulate our perceptions. It is interesting to work this way, where the meaning is generated naturally in real time, based on the context between reality and the mirror image of it in a surface. Like window reflections, one sees two superimposed images that can change with the quality of light.
Good films can generate a plethora of issues, even if not explicit, that projects itself on reality. The real art is to get those things to happen without forcing them.
American Sniper is seen as being agitprop for war hawks, whereas it is also brilliant in its depth and pathos of the human condition. Whiplash tackles issues of sociopathic behaviors, the vagaries of young students and graduates trying to figure out their futures, while seeming to cast a shadow of doubt on our motivations for our choices in life.
A good story is one that generates lots of other stories, some happening in your own life. Those are the film clips that one sees on that metaphorical screen in the front of your eyes. (For a "cartoonification" of this idea projected into the dystopian future, see the Black Mirror episode The Entire History of You)
These days directors must be thinking: "This bit would make for a good meme on social media." Eno was spot-on back in the late 1980s on this issue when MTV was hot:
"The nature of pop music is that it's always absorbing other things. Suddenly, it isn't just dealing with music, it's dealing with television, or it's dealing with safety pins... the punk thing."
The thing about video is it's always absorbing [projecting] other things..." Art now has absorbed social media, and will absorb other things in the future as various technologies are more widely used, such as VR and AR.
