A Theater, a Street, and a Criminal
From the Georges Perec reading, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, I read “The Street,” which really reminded me of Osamu Tezuka’s Tales of a Street Corner. In terms of the writing, it felt like I was reading a mixture of poetry and short narrative. Perec captures a nice snapshot of a generalized moment on an unnamed street. Rather than focusing on singular details, the entire scene is captured and described by words, providing vivid imagery of life and symmetry. Everything, from the “parallel alignment of two series of buildings” to “two blind people in the Rue Linne,” gave life to an otherwise mundane moment that occurs every hour, everyday.
Harlem, NY July 2018
Towards the end of the end of the chapter, I was really reminded of my times in New York City. While I never read anything written by Georges Perec, it seems almost like a habit to notice everything happening all at once. On any given day of my past summer in NYC, I noticed the smell of the subway, the rusty pipes that stuck out from the ceiling, the way someone slumped over a pole while standing on the train - and my rides on the subway only contributed to 30 minutes of my typical days! Rather than a deep philosophical analysis of a random street, Perec provides “guidelines” or “instructions” about how one should examine a street. Everything, from a person killing the engine of a car to the way people walk, should be examines. She instructs, “You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless.” Detailed observations of our mundane world leads to a beauty that most people would not notice. As a filmmaker, I passively practiced Perec’s “instructions,” but, now, I should be more active in order to apply my everyday life to my own art.
For the 2nd project, I will be drawing heavy inspiration from the Batman graphic novels, particularly with the character, Harvey Dent (“Two Face”), a former attorney-turned-criminal. I recently purchased a copy of Dark Knights Metal which takes multiple versions of Batman, makes them evil, and gathers them to fight against our “ideal” version of Batman and the Justice League. Comics, in their own respect, are a fantastic form of both art and literature. Simply, it is a film that can be read in physical pages. However, if I learned anything from my time at Forbidden Planet Comics (NY, NY), comics have so much more depth and technique that a lot of people overlook because of the “stigma” of comic-readers.
My photography project will take pages out of Dark Knights Metal and key out certain colors to replace with my own photography. Though the comics focus on the conflict between good and evil, my project will take a look at more personal conflict. Based on my own experiences and observations, most people possess an “alter-ego” that they put on in social settings. However, when they are alone, they often adopt another persona, one much more intimate. My images will deal with this conflict, and, with the comic panels, they will construct a “collage” resembling a coin. Harvey Dent always carries on a coin to decide the fates of his enemies, so my installation will resemble this. Originally, I was going to include another component to this installation where I print images on PhotoTex paper and stick them to a head-bust. However, with my packages arriving much later than my presentation date (one of these packages is arriving from China!), I may focus on the “coin” installation rather than incorporating the bust.Though, as of right now, I don’t entirely know what my images are going to be, they will involve this sort of internal struggle.
Dark Knights Metal, Scan of the “Batman Who Laughs”
In terms of my research presentation on the Eastman House, I was surprised to see how relevant it became when we began discussing the idea of space as an element of art. As stated in the presentation, the idea of the “theater” was to allow the audience to experience a film as a shared spectacle. One of the most difficult things about researching the Dryden Theater was the lack of information about the space itself. Both books and online sources rarely mentioned the Dryden, grouping it with the George Eastman Museum as a whole. Most times, whenever I would Google “Dryden,” an old English poet by the same name would pop up instead of the theater I wanted to research. However, by thinking about what made the Dryden a special place, I thought about my experiences of recording in the Dryden Theater on September 5th, 2018. It was a place where original film reels were still being projected in a theater space! This displayed the art of film in its basest form, which is as a spectacle shared by many people. Once I took this twist, I recalled Walter Benjamin and researched what he thinks about film in general.