When I was little my dad loves Star Trek and in an effort to try and make my blog different than the rest I’m trying to keep my personal influences in here at all times. I also to try and link in things that make me feel comfortable in everyday life. One constant in my life has always been television, now I know that sounds like a social deprived family life but that was never the case, I had a normal childhood and a loving family, we did everything normally. I got my love of specific types of television shows from my Dad. I love American soap style programmes such as Bones, Stargate Atlantis, Ghost Whisper and many others. Every year my Nan tells me the story that my Dad faked illness to get them to drive home from a day trip to the seaside to get home in time for a television show. Its influence on my life is not that bad but it does fill the SkyPlus planner and is used for a method of unwinding.
I watched a screening of Little Otik a film by Jan Svankmajer described on IMDB as a movie about a cannibal log baby, which I find hilarious. Little Otik starts off as a lovely tale of a man trying to take away his wife’s pain by providing her with a substitute to what she can not have, children. As fairy tales go it is not the Disney stereotype we are used to in the current western society. However if we look back at some of the first documented versions of the classic Disney fairy tales you will clearly be able to see the basic ideas of greed, death and poverty that rings out in Little Otik. I first watched Little Otik in the first year as it is made using stop motion animation and film. I have always loved the stop motion animation style as it has a disjointed look on reality as you can see it is not smooth running film. Another of Svankmajer’s creations through the looking Glass also inspires me as its Gothic nature put a less Disney spin on the tale, the literal interpretations of characters such as the Queen of Harts and the Card guards is also interesting as it reads directly from reality into the dream world in my opinion.
Another subject I have been looking into is cinema Verity, I have picked up this youtube clip:
Pennerbaken’s don’t look back was also screened in the lecture, the film is as you would have seen in the clip part of the Verity movement and drives us through the piece with a visual logic not a verbal one. This idea of a visual logic is quite inspiring as it links more with the surrealist styles that have interested me throughout most f my projects at Coventry.
