Jan Svankmajer’s Darkness/Light/Darkness seriously made me a
little sick. Why was it sickening? Because the human parts were moving and
organs were showing and the body parts were moving individually. It was not a
pretty sight. It starts out with two clay hands and then forms to become clay
human that is stuck in a tiny room with one light. The disturbing part is the
fact that the clay human body parts are apart and the hands put them together.
Some vulgar images include an actual tongue and brain that are placed in the
clay head. The is obviously not suitable for children. The clay man is also
completely naked, and the character is a man, because it was emphasized.
Therefore this is definitely a video for mature people.
Dimensions of Dialogue Part 2 shows a female clay person and
male clay person (same male from Darkness/Light/Darkness) consuming their love which
resulted in an unwanted pregnancy. The video depicts that unwanted pregnancies cause
tension between the two lovers and thus become chaotic.
Svankmajer’s Food is separated in three parts breakfast,
lunch, and dinner. Breakfast shows people waiting in a long line to get there
food. The food vendor is another human being, that delivers food like a vending
machine. One person from the line puts money in the person and follows the
instructions and then when that person is done eating the “vender” comes back
to life and leaves the room, and the person that purchased the food becomes the
vendor, it continues in that cycle. Lunch starts out with two customers in a
diner. One is rich and the other is in a lower class. Both cannot get attention
from the waiter and end up eating everything on the table, their clothes, table
cloth, shoes everything. At the end the rich man even tries to eat the less
fortunate man. This shows that two people from different classes can act in the
same way, and usually the poor follow the rich. It also shows that the well
mannered person can turn out to be more inhumane than the unmannerly person (another
way of saying, “don’t judge a book by its cover). For dinner it shows four different
people adding spices and sauce to their own body part. Each character eats a
part of their body that identifies who they are. A married man eats his hand
that shows, he’s a husband. A athlete eats his leg, that shows he’s a runner, a
woman eats her breasts which shows that she’s a women (how sexist! A woman
could be represented in other ways and known for other things.) Lastly a man
eats his penis showing that he’s a man. This animation shows how humans can be
very inhumane at times.
Pen Point Percussion shows the different perceptions and
views of sound. It can be seen as sound waves, or musical notes. Mostly it is
the patterns shown in sound waves. Norman McLaren draws sound on film and it
creates sound based on the thickness and size of the shapes drawn on the film.
The size determines the volume; the tone is controlled by the shape. This process
allows me to appreciate the technology we have today, we don’t need to draw the
sounds we want in our animations. Although, it’d be nice to create sounds by
drawing them.
Patchman Work is very unique. It’s interesting that the
video was inspired by every memory he has regained after losing consciousness
from a car accident. The video is a stop motion that shows a collage of
different facial parts. Not only were the images collages but the sounds was
also a collage, this work is very unique. I like the seamlessness and how the
sound and pictures correspond with one another. The rhythm and timing was
perfect. The artist’s story reminds me of the book Catcher in the Rye because he
realizes how phony he was before the accident. He saw that he followed everybody’s
feelings, actions, and words. This led him to dissociate himself from others.
He wants to escape society and reject societal expectations of everybody. It’s
almost as if the artist is saying that we are all puppets that act to the
wishes of the puppeteer aka society.
