Cloud of concepts

Compilation films (Jay Leyda: Films beget films – 1964

Print films:
Found Footage /Archival (footage) Films / Film Essay/ Collage film

Digital films:

According to Jay Leida, The Fall of the Romanov Dysnaty is an example of compilation in film.

Esther Schub / The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty 1927
“Being passionate about showing historical facts and not merely staged reenactments, Shub created her film entirely from historical footage filmed in pre-revolutionary Russia and Europe between 1913 and 1917. The result – which came to be known as Padenie Dinasti Romanovykh (The Fall of The Romanov Dynasty, 1927) – became a big success, both in its own time and beyond. The film redefined the idea of montage documentary and even prompted claims that Shub had “established a specific cinematic genre, the so-called compilation film.”¹ While the latter is highly debatable, because films of this kind appeared long before 1927, Shub’s approach to selecting film material and the editing methods she used in The Fall of The Romanov Dynasty certainly set the work apart from its compilation film predecessors.” In Senses of Cinema.

Films and the archives: a tense relatioship

First impressions
“Films excavate from the past”
“Rare archival footage”
“Archives to be mined by filmmakers”
“Historical appropriated films”Appropriation: positive and negative aspects: see the dictionary: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/appropriation

Montage = edition
Changing meaning by editing with films from others.
Problem 1: Montage (Kuleshov Effect)
Problem 2 : appropriation

Kuleshov effect: “Any montage sequence in which the relationship of two adjacent shots appears to be particularly meaningful. In what has come to be referred to as the Kuleshov (or Kuleshov-Pudovkin) experiment (allegedly c.1919), the Russian film-makers Kuleshov and Vsevolod Pudovkin (1893–1953) claimed to have assembled a sequence of disconnected shots from library footage, intercutting the same shot of the apparently expressionless face of a famous Russian actor with close-ups of a bowl of steaming soup, a dead woman lying in a coffin, and a little girl playing with a toy bear”

Effect explained by Alfred Hitchcook

“Archival documents—if the viewer recognizes them as such in an appropriation film—thus always generate a sense of multiple contexts and double meaning, even if these are vague and indeterminate. In other words, the very fact of the recontextualization of the found document in an appropriation film creates the opportunity for multiple readings of that document”. Jaimie Baron in The Archive Effect. P.118

Reading: The Archive Effect: Archival Footage as an Experience of Reception : Introduction.

List of Found Footage films:

Alain Resnais – Night and Fog – 1956
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTBwpKB16gA

Chris Marker – Letter from Siberia – 1957

“The film moves with gleeful but not mocking irony from live action to simple cell animation, so the description of a scientific expedition to uncover frozen mammoths in the tundra looks eerily like something from South Park! ” In Senses of Cinema.

: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN1XWKULjfQ

Alexander Kluge: Die Patriotin / The Patriot (1979)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRuQ3SUgSSk

Woody Allen – Zelig – 1983
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUW8JsLDsNo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q8kZKpVaDg

Matthias Müller – 1990 – Home Stories
“A collage of Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s and 1960s, filmed directly from the television set. The constantly recurring motifs of suspense and clichés of plot make it possible to move seamlessly among scenes from different films with different protagonists: uneasy sleep, getting up, listening at the door, turning on the lights, being startled, etc.” In Media Art Net
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/home-stories

Harun Farocki – 1993 – Videograms of a revolution
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrQaPPETpR4

Douglas Gordon – 1993 – Psycho
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtLg5TqqVeA

Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin: Letter to Jane (1972)
“The film is also a model lesson on how to read any photographm how to decipher the un-innocent nature of a photograph’s framing, angle and focus”. Susan Sontag, On Photography – p. 108
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLTJ664s5YU

Ken Burns – Civil War – 1990
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8w02jBO6nY

Chris Marclay – Telephones – 1995
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MMfgRg53SU

Harun Farocki – 1997 – Still Life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_mbZO92y3Q

Joel Pizzini – Glauces, a face study – 1998
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqxMxPwG3dU

Omer Fast _ CNN Concatenated – 2002
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IID_XUsl0JM

Chris Marclay – quartet – 2006
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VmXoeZir7A

Chris Marclay – The Clock – 2010
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp4EUryS6ac

Joaquim P. Andrade – Garrincha, Alegria do Povo – 1960
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N7JEWA18Ls

Orson Welles – F for Fake – 1973
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIVgUjj6RxU

Melinda Stone – Somewhere in time, San Francisco Market St, Side By Side Comparison – 2005
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YElvjNXmg58

STEREO 3D + Films of Films

“Humans can obtain an unambiguous perception of depth and 3-dimensionality with 1 eye or when viewing a pictorial image of a 3-dimensional scene. However, the perception of depth when viewing a real scene with both eyes is qualitatively different: There is a vivid impression of tangible solid form and immersive negative space. This perceptual phenomenon, referred to as “stereopsis,” has been among the central puzzles of perception since the time of da Vinci. After Wheatstone’s invention of the stereoscope in 1838, stereopsis has conventionally been explained as a by product of binocular vision or visual parallax. ” by Vishwanath, Dhanraj. In: Toward a new theory of stereopsis. Psychological Review, Vol 121(2), Apr 2014, 151-178.

Side by side stereograms – Western Wall Jerusalen & Brewster Stereoscope

First tests with FILM

1890s : William Friese-Greene : 3D film process patent

1900 : Frederic Eugene Ives stereo camera rig.

1915: Edwin S. Porter and William E. Waddel presetented test at the Astor Theather NYC

1903 L’arrivee du train 3D by Lumiere brothers

In 1922: Power of Love (not successfull)

In 1935: Audioscopiks

Short documentary film directed by Jacob F. Leventhal and John A. Norling.

The main point of the short was to show off 3-D film technology.
The film was nominated for an Academy Award at the 8th Academy Awards in 1935 for Best Short Subject
Red-green anaglyph process, with prints produced by Technicolor.

1952: Bwana Devil

First 3D color film
The film made use of Milton Gunzberg’s Natural Vision process.

3D associated with horror genre: House of Wax, The Mad Magician, Dangerous Mission
Disney : Melody and Fort Ti. Melody

Amusement parks and IMAX (Image Maximum) : 1980s, 1990s

Friday, the 13th (chapter 3): Murder in three dimensions (1982)

Teeth of the sea 3 (1983) / Amityville 3D (1983)

Captain EO (1986) Disney Studios: Michael Jackson, George Lucas: Room effects were synchronized with the film (smoke, lasers). During ten years of operation, Captain EO is a great success.

Terminator 2: 3-D – Battle Across Time (1986) Universal Studios Florida. James Cameron. Room with six 65 mm projectors on three giant curved screens.

The Amazing Adventures of Spider Man (1999) Universal Studios Florida.

Vehicles equipped with hydraulic cylinders and polarized glasses, special effects makes movements of the vehicle (when the hero lands on the hood of the vehicle, visitors could feel the impact!)

Digital Images and Projections in 3D

From 2D to 3D: simple conversion, but laborious (by hand): Wizard of Oz, Casablanca, Star Wars and King Kong (Peter Jackson).

3D filming
Ghosts of the Abyss (2003) and Aliens of the Deep (2005) – James Cameron and Vince Pace developed the 3-D Digital Camera RCS / Avatar and others….

3D projecting
uses only one projector that can multiply the number of frames per second produced. It also helps to keep an original image in perfect condition. Unlike 35mm projectors, with frame rates of up to 24 frames per second, digital projectors can project up to 144 frames per second. This increased scrolling speed makes it possible to multiply the alternation of images received successively by the left eye and the right eye.

Animation ; 3D

Ed Catmull (one of the founders of Pixar) + Fred Parke (University of Utah) – 1972

This animation was discovered by Hollywood and showed in the movie FUTUREWORLD, a SCI-FI movie 4 years later

“A Computer Animated Hand” by Andrew Utterson

Since then, animation has changed into the so-called 3d Animation

Today’s use of stereocopy and 3d animation in Science:

The eyes of Curiosity

The rover has seventeen “eyes.” Six engineering cameras aid in rover navigation and four cameras perform science investigations.

Mounted on the lower portion of the front and rear of the rover, these black-and-white cameras use visible light to capture three-dimensional (3-D) imagery. This imagery safeguards against the rover getting lost or inadvertently crashing into unexpected obstacles, and works in tandem with software that allows the rover make its own safety choices and to “think on its own.

Mounted on the mast (the rover “neck and head”), these black-and-white cameras use visible light to gather panoramic, three-dimensional (3D) imagery. The navigation camera unit is a stereo pair of cameras, each with a 45-degree field of view that supports ground navigation planning by scientists and engineers. They work in cooperation with the hazard avoidance cameras by providing a complementary view of the terrain.

Read WIRED about Curiosity´s cameras

Hololens: Mixed-reality with 3d

“Microsoft’s virtual reality headset, the HoloLens, isn’t yet commercially available, but the amazing new tech is coming to the Kennedy Space Center this summer, and offering visitors a “mixed-reality” tour of Mars. ”

ADOBE 3D Tools

Sneak Peek of Adobe Fuse CC: https://www.adobe.com/products/fuse.html

How to make stereovideos with ADOBE: AES

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/atv/cs5-cs55-tutorials/ae-cs55-stereo-3d-controls.html

“Learn how the new stereoscopic 3D camera rig plus resulting chain of compositions in After Effects CS5.5 are manipulated by the Stereo 3D controls effect, including setting camera separation.”

Adobe TV: http://tv.adobe.com/

Day: March 5, 2018

Week 8: films beget films

Cloud of concepts

Week 8 – Stereopsis : film and Animation