Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Frijolero by Molotov

I Don't Wanta Fanta!

The Molotov Man

I read the Molotov Man article a while ago, but I never wrote a blog about it because I was blown away by to the point that I didn't know where to start or organize my thoughts, so I just figured I'd respond to it later. I have accepted the fact that I just need to let my thoughts flow. Seriously, this article is perhaps the most impactful article I have read all semester. Let me begin with Joy Garnett. I was sympathizing with her at the beginning of the article to tell you the truth. I didn't see anything wrong. She had taken an image and made it her own as well as all her supporters. Wasn't Joy helping Susan out in way by bringing attention to her photograph? Have not many images gone into the public domain after so many years? Perhaps, but what Joy had done was decontexualize the original image. That is the problem.

"Who owns the rightst to this man's struggle? The words continue to resonate in the room.

Meiselas was documenting the war in Nicaragua. In fact, she had documented a crucial moment in Nicaragua's history when this man is threw a molotov cocktail at the Somoza national guard garrison, "one of the last such garrisons remaining in Somoza's hands." The Sandinistas would soon after take power and govern Nicaragua for about ten years "and this image ended representing that moment for a long time to come". Meanwhile, this image of the Molotov man would reappear all over Nicaragua; on walls, on matchbox covers, on church pamphlets. Anyways, If I were Susan Meiselas, I would probably feel the same way about Pablo Arauz's context being stripped away. He had fought too hard to have his story turned into an image of an abstract riot. In the end I can't help but agree with Susan. We owe it to ourselves and our subjects to preserve the specificity of these images, so that everyone may known its history. Because those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it as Santayana once said. Just because you can manipulate an image doesn't mean you have to. And Susan's photo didn't need to be manipulated. Yet, I can't help but say that certain images/footage might benefit the public by being manipulated, or parodied. Parody. Now thats something to take into account. What if I want to send a beneficial message to the public by manipulating an image of George W. Bush, which might cause people to see him in a new light. For the good of the public.
Anyways, I'm still thinking about this. You know, my found footage video on Fanta was a parody. Soda is bad for you in general, and the types of marketing for this product is insanely over-the-top (fanta can chasing people), so I decided to make fun of it. Besides, its a subject that I don't think you can compare to the seriousness of Pablo Arauz and the Sandinistas.
By the way, there is a rock/hip hop band called Molotov from Mexico that is extremely popular for there politically charges songs. I wouldn't be surprised if they were inspired by the Molotov man.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

I Want My Eggs Scrabbled with Cheese

I have never worked so fast in such a short amount of time in my life. I completed my project in about 10 hours (I only had one class that day). Honestly, I don’t know how I finished it on time. God must have felt sorry for me and slowed down time while I was working on the project. First of all, I didn’t really start my project until very early Wednesday morning for various reasons, one of them being the fact that I kept changing my idea beforehand. I must have changed it a billion times before I finally was satisfied with my scrabble idea. I felt that with scrabble pieces I could creatively put the Space odyssey quote into the project, which I did. And it allowed me to do stop-motion. Stop-motion = awesomeness. I ended up using my sister’s digital camera, and it hated me with a passion. I had to drive to Wal-de-mart and buy a new memory stick because her memory stick was full, and then I had to drive all the way to her house to pick up the charger because the camera died at noon. I also had used her cell phone to a shoot a 15 second clip of a book sliding across the floor, but Final cut only imported it as a single frame, which is why it is only a single frame in the project. It was part of the story I had in mind of a book of games sliding to my feet and me opening it up and suddenly seeing words appear on a page out of nowhere. As you can see in the video, it tells me that I must play scrabble in order to win the prize; the ultimate prize being the cheese sandwich of course. Anyway, if I had used the 15 seconds then my project would have gone over one minute, so it was all good in the end, or so it seemed… I went to the editing lab that afternoon and edited faster than I had ever edited before. The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy had me mesmerized. I had been studying Tchaikovsky in music history class which is why I had the song stuck in my head. I printed to video around 9pm and raced to Cheese sandwich. It played back fine during print to video, but I forgot to see if it actually printed anything. It didn’t. So, I was a little disappointed in myself. Shit happens. At least now I will never make the mistake again of not checking it. Anyways, I was just glad to be there and see everyone else’s projects which I thought were amazingly incredible. Every time I find it fascinating how people can take the same assignment and dish out completely opposite, yet fantastic works.
If I could change anything, I would have stop-motioned each word to the point that the words would have written themselves out smoothly, but I was worried that I would run out of time at the time. Oh and one more thing, I’m sure you can notice the chalk on the floor around the scrabble pieces. I didn’t have a tripod and it was the only thing I could think of in order to have the frame in the same spot the entire time. Haha.