“the torch” #33 – Idealism in film: or how to generate a visual message

Images arguably hold an immense telling power, they can move us to tears or to action, in some cases achieve both without preaching. What is it about film that invests it with such might, and in our times more than ever before? Is it that we as viewers are just too willing, too much in need of purpose and explanation that we can’t resist but read so much into them? Or does the bottom line message so purposefully visualized effectually come across and give us something we didn’t have on our own up until taking the seat and watching? The give-and-take equation – is it an equilibrium or a one-sided outpouring, influx and consumption of ideas only? And how does it work anyway, idealism in film that is gripping, vehemently entertaining even, but not lofty? Take a look and read up on “The Torch”: here.

(pic©mo)

quote of the week

“Among the Romans love potions were generally held to be dangerous things. Ovid, for instance, warns the suitor to avoid them. They will not make a girl mad with passion but simply mad. There seems to have been a certain reluctance to disclose what went into these brews but if what Theocritus details in his second Idyll can be trusted then one might conclude that the victim was more likely to throw up than freak out.”
(Arthur Keaveney, Lucullus: A Life (1992))

quote of the week

"He is too serious, he knows that, too willing to believe - and deaf to the comedy of mismatched couples and unseemly flesh. To comfort himself, he imagines the separate layers of his brain: there are spaces there, cavities that exist between the forces of sex and work. What is he to do with these fixed voids? Other people know. He's never known."
(Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries (1993))

“the torch” #32 – in the crux: sounds and scores

Music being probably the first art form ever practiced by mankind, and music being also the most mysteriously assertive expression of life (for it is well established how it works its wonders not just on us human beings alone), it is only reasonable to investigate its role in film. The acoustic layer of our perceiving a movie has been an issue from the earliest days, and the silent era certainly no exception. Whether it is meant to accompany a picture or to speak its own voice, music has the power to enlarge what and whomever it touches upon. Accordingly, any filmmaker has to be aware of the manifold implications that come with utilizing a score to enhance the visual performance, and to explore what further potential for innovation of the craft this may hold in store. If you want to follow up on the ongoing discussion about what a film should sound like, or join in yourself – you’re most welcome: here.

(pic©mo)

quote of the week

“At the Forty-second Street station they stopped a minute on the bridge that crosses the track to the branch road for the Central Depot, and looked up and down the long stretch of the elevated to north and south. The track that found and lost itself a thousand times in the flare and tremor of the innumerable lights: the moony sheen of the electrics mixing with the reddish points and blots of gas far and near; the architectural shapes of houses and churches and towers, rescued by the obscurity from all that was ignoble in them: and the coming and going of the trains marking the stations with vivider or fainter plumes of flame-shot steam – formed an incomparable perspective. They often talked afterward of the superb spectacle, which in a city full of painters nightly works its unrecorded miracles[...]; but for the present they were mostly inarticulate before it.”
(William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890))

quote of the week

“Die Welt is meine private Angelegenheit.” / “The world is my private affair.”
(Alice Schwarzer (2008))