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English/Film M50 - Introduction to Visual Culture Seeing Visual…

- - - - Shadow
        Where light exists, shadows are able to be formed.
        Shadows are a product of lightness and darkness
        
        Shadow
        
        "Light and darkness can represent the absolute metaphysical counterforces that exclude each other and yet bring the world constellation into existence" (Blumenberg, "Light as Metaphor for Truth;" 1993).
        
        Hans Christian Andersen, "The Shadow;" (1847)
        
        "A light was burning in his own room, just behind him. It was quite natural therefore, that his shadow should fall on the wall of the opposite house; so that, as he sat amonst the flowers on his balcony, when he moved, his shadow moved also."
        
        Personifies a shadow of a man by describing it as a living thing, sitting pleasantly among the flowers.
        
        Hiroshi Sugimoto, "Colors of Shadow;" (2004)
        
        Absorbs and reflects light most evenly
        
        In the morning light, the shadows play freely over the surfaces, now appearing, now vanishing. on rainy days, they take on a deeper, more evocative cast."
        
        COLORS
        
        Chromophobia: the fear of colors
        
        David Batchelor, "Chromophobia;" (2000)
        
        Batchelor argues that color has been the object of prejudice in Western culture.
        
        Chromophobia manifests itself in the varied attempts to purge colour from culture, devalue colour, diminish its significance, and deny its complexity.
        
        Black
        
        Jared Sexton, "All Black Everything;" (2017)
        
        Since the rise of the Movement for Black Lives, black art and artists have criticized and commented on artwork in relation to the movement.
        
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        Franz Fanon, "The Fact of Blackness;" (2000)
        
        The stereotypes perpetuated in society favors the color
        white over black.
        
        "The evidence was there, unalterable. My blackness was there, dark, and unarguable. And it tormented me, pursued me, disturbed me, angered me."
        
        He mentions being "fixed" due to the labels attached to his skin color.
        
        2 WAYS TO PURGE COLOR:
        
        Color regarded as alien or dangerous or primitive
        
        Color regarded as a secondary quality of experience
        
        Walter Benjamin, "A Child's View of Color;" (1913-1926)
        
        For a child, they like colors that shimmer or colors with subtle nuances
        
        The range of distinctions within each of the senses--sight, hearing,etc--is larger in children than in adults
        
        FILM - Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)
        
        Stanley Cavell, "The World as a Whole: Color;" (1979)
        
        EX: magic ruby slippers, a yellow brick road, Emerald City, black and white scenes in Kansas
        
        This film incorporates the contrast between the first and second half of the film.
        
        With the first half being in black and white, the movie seems stagnant and almost 'lifeless."
        
        With the second half being in bright colors, the audience gets the sense of adventure and accomplishing a goal.
        
        Blue
        
        FILM - Blue (Derek Jarman, 1993)
        
        Derek Jarman, "Into the Blue;" (2010)
        
        At first, Jaman writes about the color blue as a "universal love in which man bathes--it is the terrestrial paradise."
        
        As he becomes more sic, he begins to lose sight and describes it as "an open door to soul, an infinite possibility, becoming tangible."
        
        FILM - Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztov Kieslowski, 1993
        
        Carol Mavor, "Blue Mythologies;" (2012)
        
        Mavor describes the blue lollipop as eating Anna and couples her cannablism with her sexuality.
        
        In this film, blue is used as a mechanism to portray a dark, ominous, and terrifying environment.
        
        Maria Popova, "19th-Century Insight Into the Psychology of Color and Emotion;" (2012)
        
        Blue gives an impression of being cold --> similar to shade and shadow
        
        "The appearance of objects seen through a blue glass is gloomy and melancholy."
        
        The bright sunlight reflects from the blue sky off the pool water creating a green-ish blue tint outline above the dark brown tiles.
        
        Hockney also adds a minimal amount of darker blue underneath the white ripples to capture where the small waves rise and fall.
        
        Small amounts of light blue can be seen on the pavement the man is standing on.
        
        Although there are no blue tiles from the photograph Hockney uses to prepare for his painting, I believe he uses blue on the tiles of his painting to create a more seamless connection between the water, tiles, and hills in the background.
        
        FILM - Mother of George (Andrew Dosunmu, 2014, Bradford Young, Director of Photography)
        
        This film is unique because the theme the director’s and director of photography’s utilization of the camera placements and the color blue and indigo is evident.
        
        Donsumu incorporates blue which is derived from the African deity, Yemoja, the god of fertility.
        
        Marginalization
        
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      - Reflection of Light
        
        Atmospheric light is essential for dimensionality.
        
        David Hockney, Portrait of an Artist; 1972
        
        The point of contact between light and the outline of the person’s body creates a harsh and sharp silhouette against the pavement
        
        The same source of light creates a softer and more blended edge between the shadow in the pool contrasted to the water that light is able to touch.
        
        To show movement of the water from the swimmer, Hockney recreates the harsh reflection of the sunlight on top of the water by outlining the ripples mostly in white.
        
        With this, we are able to see the contrast between the dark shadow and the brightest part of the painting.
        
        James Turrell, You Who Look
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUtf7KkKRmM
        
        Built Quaker meeting houses - church members meet inside to "greet the light"
        
        Uses light to illuminate other things and he made an "instrument that produces it the way you want."
        
        The instrument he mentions are used to create the products of his artwork.
        
        "The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olice trees but by the eerier absence of surf. The Heat was suurreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called "earthquake weather" (Didion, "Los Angeles Notebook;" 1968).
        
        White
        
        Herman Melville, "The Whiteness of the Whale;" (1851)
        
        "whiteness enhances beauty"
        
        Modern day EX: weddings are mostly in white to signify purity, new life, riches, innocence, etc.
        
        Le Corbusier, "A Coat of Whitewash;" (1925)
        
        Whitewashing is part of human hibitation since birth.
        
        Modern day EX: skin whitening products sold at drugstores
        
        David Batchelor, "Whitescapes," (2000)
        
        white that repels everything that is inferior to it
      - Object
  - - - Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
        
        "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me" (Eliison, 1952).
        
        The character's experiences of being ridiculed for his skin color was most apparent when he was lied to; a mentor figure praised him for his graduation speech then proceeded to invite him to a white-only hotel conference.
        
        When he got there he was blindfolded and forced to box other students. He won, but the briefcase that the scholarship was supposed to be in turned out to be a demeaning note.
        
        He was played and used for the entertainment of white people.
      - Caludia Rankine, Citizen (2014)
        
        "Apparently your own invisibility is the real problem causing her confusion."
        
        It is my fault for being invisible, not her fault for forgetting my name.
      - "Invisibility is built into each instance of visibility, and the very forms of invisibility generated within the visible are often what is at stake in a struggle"
        (Minh-Ha, "The Image and the Void;" 2016)
    - - Losing Sight Gradually
        
        Oliver Sacks, "To See and Not to See" (1995)
        
        Sacks mentions the creation of a new identity from losing sight
        
        Georgina Kleege, "Molyneaux Redux;" (2013)
        
        Claims that blindness is an all-encompassing tragedy that even a cure cannot undo the damage.
        
        Georgina Kleege, "Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account" (2005)
        
        There is an urgency to represent individuals' experiences of blindness as more than just the absence of sight
      - Born Blind
        
        H.G. Wells, "The Country of the Blind;" (1904)
        
        On the other hand, Wells describes an isolated town where the whole population was either slightly or fully blind.
        
        Contrasting to ___, the population lived easily and through generations blindness became normalized.
        
        Blindness was part of their identity, but because their friends and family were also blind, there was really no separation between the sightless and people with sight.