Well the video class is off to a quick start as we are shooting video and looking at the FinalCut and Premier Video Editors from Apple and Adobe respectively.  Finished reading chapters 3, 4 and 9 in the text book.  Next up reviews of the papers from the server.

Kinoeye - Dziga Vertov. This boils down to one astute and important concept.  The motion picture camera has the capability to shift us in place and time. This makes it possible to see the truth that we can't experience directly.  Actually a pretty cool idea.   And, in it's time as revolutionary as montage.  The guys politics (which riddle the paper) are interesting to think about, too.  If he only knew what 90 years would bring...

The Ontology of the Photographic Image -  André Bazin. Art is a means to escape death.  Painting and statues came from our need to leave a legacy.  Something that is part of being human. I found the article was a little pretentious and in some areas touched on sarcasm, i.e. The footnotes on page 12.  The author makes the  point that there is a conflict between the realism of a photograph and the style and representation in a painting.  Then he asserts that the very realism of a photograph gives it additional veracity.  Then he uses the term... hallucination... but the point is that the existence of the photograph and logically the cinema is also a fact.  The images captured are a reality that transcend space and time. (Back to our buddy Dziga Vertov) Once something is captured the fact of its existence allows for that existence to be sufficient in and of it's self.  The existence of the original object (person) does not diminish the images value.

Metaphors on Vision - Stan Brakhage. "...yet in these times the development of visual understanding is almost universally forsaken." And that just about sums up his viewpoint. We use the properties of the image to deal with fear.  "The artist has carried the tradition of visual and Visualization down through the ages."  But then Stan charges, "In the present time a very few have continued the process of visual perception in its deepest sense and transformed their inspirations into cinematic experiences."  The point is we deal with the big fears in our lives with images...