Club Archive/ Teddy Fitzhugh
This series of Teddy's captured the nightclub in Britain. Throughout the series we see flashes of bra straps, sweaty heads of drooping hair and gyrating, rhythmic limbs all encapsulating the movement and ease found in that kind of heady environment. “There’s a sense of escapism and hedonism that’s unique to British nightlife. It’s one ultimately of joy and community but it also comes with undertones of tension,” says Teddy. “Both of these sides come through in the physicality of the crowd, which I was always interested in capturing.”
The black and white images add a beautiful tonal quality and heighten that close atmosphere. And the focus of figures in the photographs bring these images together as a series and give them a sense of neutrality. It’s all due to his ability to capture his subjects completely lost in the music.
The way the author presented the journal of his adventures, and the contexts include:
- frames of filming
- diaries
- photography
- editing progress of films
- newspaper quote
Fred Tomaselli
Fred is known for doing collage which combines paintings and/or dazzling patterns over the surface of photographs. His style of cutting out medicinal herbs, prescription pills and hallucinogenic plants alongside images (flowers, birds, butterflies, arms, legs and noses) from books and magazines is his way of expressing his emotions into the work.
''I want people to get lost in the work. I want to seduce people into it and I want people to escape inside the world of the work. In that way the work is pre-Modernist. I throw all of my obsessions and loves into the work, and I try not to be too embarrassed about any of it. I love nature, I love gardening, I love watching birds, and all of that gets into the work. I just try to be true to who I am and make the work I want to see. I don't have a radical agenda.''
He uses an explosion of color and combines it with a basis in art history. And he insists to do the collage by actual painting/drawing/sticking/cutting instead of digitally, after gluing them down and going over them with different varnishes, he seals the collages in resin.
My Blueberry Nights/ Wong Kar-wai
This is Wong Kar-wai's first english-langueage feature.Wong has always had the eye and the camera tricks for physical beauty, especially the emotions of lovelorn men and women. He is an expert in the use of neon lighting,shadow and colours and he has a determination to purse perfection as much as possible by making every frame a work of art. The start of the film is a time-lapse zoom-in shot of vanilla ice cream melting into a collapsed slice of blueberry pie. The gooey dessert with moody soundtrack on the background works so well together in the full screen of orange and red. This shot lasts more than one minute in order to intrigue viewers into this coincidence of love happening. His choice of the blueberry pie, a kind of food as an introduction makes me think of the saying, ''there is beauty everywhere, you just need to see it.'' As a commercial love-based film, Wong still keeps his unique sense of taste by simply documenting a dessert dish. The angle of this shot looks like we are the actual protagonists being fascinated by the appearing dessert itself- how ordinary yet exquisite a blueberry pie with ice cream could be. It is also the reason why it is time-lapse and zoom-in. When you see something that you cannot take your eyes off, the time of the experience in your perspective will be longer than it actually takes+all you can see is the something/someone in frames of close-up view as if you are standing right in front of them. Apart from telling the main story, I could use some metaphor scenes to explain the emotion/situation that the characters were going through instead of actually shooting the scene (e.g. café, airport...). I believe it will add more narrative colours to the film since it is a indirect way to deliver the story. This also gives me inspiration about how people see things and remember things- they won't see them from a distant (as the third person)but from a really close up view (as the first person). The choice of shooting blueberry pie itself may not make sense but after combining with the love story, viewers could see the connection between them and get the emotions delivered through the (dessert-melting) frames.
He was using film camera to develop and to get inspired by the turquoise colour of the lights coming from windows of a train passing by. He put this scene in the middle of several timelines to concentrate the focus of scene selected and to hint that time has passed/things has changed when some certain things maintain the way it does (e.g. trains passing by everyday with the same timetable) in the aspect of editing/storytelling. The frames starts from male patting female's head to calm her down and the camera changes to a distant shot from the outside of the door , then goes back to the close up patting. The way Wong edited/filmed it gives viewers a boarder understanding of the structure of the scene, fulling viewers up with the beauty he saw as much as possible. It also emphasises its importance in the storyline. Again, the strong contrast of blue neon lights (at the edges of two protagonists' skin and hair) and red cabinets (that they are leaning on) helps to bring even more emotions as the performances has delivered. The camera moved slowly close up to the door and recorded the performance through the two glass as it passed them one at a time- in order to emphasis the scene and introduce viewers as in a third person actually there, peaking through the glass.
032c
032c is a fashion and art magazine published twice a year, the designer Helmut Lang like to keep all the traditions and shades that were good and then re-thought it all. And how Lang systematically deconstructed every assumption about clothing and the way it is worn and communicated gives him the idea to show clothing for men and women in a single presentation. The name came from the pantone system- 032c is the branding colour for this magazine. Under the influence of early German modernism of the 1950's, the designers wanted to have a systematic apporach to life, culture and design.They then realized that the Pantone colour system is actually quite beautiful as a system of understanding. It's an abstract number code, but with a very specific meaning. Moreover, anyone around the world would have understood that, which works better than any languages. The very abstract motivation highlights the atmosphere of the magazine, making it globally unique.
This is an origami game popular among kids in asia. The version of the explanation could be a bit different from what I experienced but I think the idea is to connect my pattern with this game (introduced as a part of my memory). I could use this as a physical carrier of the past and play with the surface of the paper, for example the pattern, the texture, changes between the inside of the origami and the outside of it.
Lolita (perspective of beautiful moments)
Lolita is a 1997 film which is a second screen adoption of the novel with the same name by Vladimir Nabokov. This film is about a mid-aged professor Humbert rented a house owned by a window who has a daughter called Lolita. Humbert was so deeply sexually attracted to Lolita that he married her mother in order to be by Lolita's side. This storyline is controversial due to having a child molester as the male protagonist, however the editing and the performance totally revealed the obsession/heartbreaks Humbert had for Lolita.
The moment Lolita's mother introduced him who Lolita is, Humbert cannot hear or see anything else except her. The camera first focused on Lolita from Humbert's perspective- moving from the bush on the left then slowly zoomed in to his freezing face for 10 seconds to show how Lolita's appearance was intimidated to Humbert at the moment.
Then the editing repeated Humbert's freezing and Lolita with the same position for 3 more times in order to lead the viewers to feel the affection/emotion boosting within seconds:
- 0:33-0:40 zooming into Lolita from Humbert's point of view to nearly full screen of her only
- 0:41-0:43 Humbert's freezing face (camera keeping at the same level of height and same distance)
- 0:44-1:00 Full screen on Lolita's feet- slowing moving to her waist- her face-the book she was flipping through (these were the views that Humbert saw. When people got sucked into someone else's charm, they cannot get enough of them and they want to capture every detail of the person)
- 1:01-1:02 slightly zoomed in on Humbert's face (in order to lead it to a highlight on the next frame)
- 1:03-1:13 slowly and slightly zoomed in (similar to the distance between the camera and Humbert on the previous frame) until Lolita smiled to Humbert (the camera stopped to imply Lolita completely had Humbert by that smile)
The Girl On The Train (0:28-0:32/0:40-0:41)
This is a 2016 film based on a novel with the same name written by Erin Cressida Wilson. It is about an alcoholic divorcée observed the activities of her ex-husband and their neighbour as she traveling across the city by train (which passes by that area) everyday. She became a crucial witness of a missing investigation yet she experienced a struggling process of finding the truth as she cannot trust herself and her so-called memory on the days she drank. The shooting of the leaves flying by hinting that everything went too fast and the girl could be misleading of what she had seen. The full screen of leaves on the trees in time-lapse represents her experiencing everything in slow motion due to her drinking problem. The shaking effects is a metaphor of her mixing memories and her dizzy eyesight. The sunlight covered by the leaves could be a hint of the truth hidden behind these misleading memories and the truth/sun is very intimidating that they could not be ignored.
How Sante D'Orazio Polaroids leaves white space and put the pictures in the middle gives a sense of focus. The size of the photography to the size of the page shows that they were instant film photographs. The annotations of the figure's name at the bottom of the page are all the editor wanted to say and all the audience needed to know. The composition and the photos deliver the rest.