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So, as some of you may know, me and Casey go play DDR just about every Friday afternoon. As some of you might not know, Casey is insanely good at DDR.
It was funny last Friday, though… There were a couple of new interactions that happened. First, we gave the Pump it Up machine a try… It has 5 buttons instead of 4 like DDR. Later on, Casey gave Doubles on DDR a try. Doubles is where you use both pads and have to dance across the whole machine.
Now, Casey is insanely good at singles/versus DDR but I noticed that he was having trouble with the other two. So, we got into a short discussion…
Normally, Casey doesn’t even think about the DDR pad when he’s playing, but it was obvious that on the 5 button game and on the doubles he was having to look at his feet sometimes and and think about what he was doing.
This seems like a good example of going from Ready-at-hand and Present-at-hand. We disagreed on what it was that was becoming Present-at-hand though…
Was it his mindset/DDR knowlege? Or was it the pad? Or was it his feet? I argued that it was the pad because it was the tool he was using to play the game. Especially on the 5 button machine, he had to consciously focus on the buttons because he wasn’t used to where they were. But in the end, we weren’t too sure.
Anyway, that is all for today.
So I asked this in class, but I wanted to open it up on the forums.
“Can we do semiotics, can we talk about it, without using phenomenology to explain our understanding of the text?”
Jeff’s comment was that’s how they thought about it in the 60’s but they realized there was a missing piece is assuming the signifier connected directly to the signified in an obvious way. But we now know that way is not so obvious. Yet, I believe there were some people who maybe disagree and that there is a bit of separation. If that’s true, please let me know because I’m having an impossible time of separating the two ideas in my head. I feel like at this point semiotics is just a way of looking at phenomenology, you know: things as symbols or representation that connect meaning and message from a supplier to a receiver. Like how UPS delivers my birthday ( november 12th 
) cookies from my mom to my house.
..jaMEs
As I was not fully quenched by Kickasola, I read the user comments on IMDB, a few other critics and blog posts. Here are a few things that I found interesting.
Roger Ebert:
Roger Ebert is no Kickasola but I found a few things interesting in his critique of the movie. It starts with the sentence “Here is a film about a feeling.” Then he talks about Kieślowski’s style as below.
“He is drawn to coincidence and synchronicity. He is little interested in focusing on a character hurling from point A in the first act to Point C in the third. He is fascinated by Point B, and the unseen threads linking it to past and present. His films can be mystical experiences. He trusts us to follow him, to sense his purpose, to leave the theater having shared his openness to a moment. The last thing you want to do after a Kieślowski film is “unravel” the plot. It can’t be done.”
Slavoj Žižek:
For the few of us who cannot sleep unless we unravel the message, I found that this small snippet almost paraphrases it. It’s an excerpt from an essay titled “The Forced Choice of Freedom” written by Žižek.
“The perception of our reality as one of the possible, often even not the most probable, outcomes of an open situation, this notion that other possible outcomes are not simply canceled out but continue to haunt our reality as a specter of what might have happened, conferring on our reality the status of extreme fragility and contingency, implicitly clashes with the predominant linear narrative forms of our literature and cinema.”
Joseph G. Kickasola
I am pretty sure this guy was stalking Kieślowski. I am absolutely stunned by both by the quantity and quality of nuanced observations and interpretations he provides us. He situates his interpretation based on the author’s previous works (references to The Decalogue), life (French and Polish politics), lifeworld (Kieślowski’s attitude towards old people) and through his own judgements as well. This, we all agree, is by no means a simple task and Kickasola has done a kick-ass job. (Sorry couldn’t resist it!)
And here is where I start whining. I have one huge issue with this article. He beautifully states of what I think is the paradigmatic glasses we need to be wearing while watching Kieślowski’s movies.
“… the essence of the film hinges on the experience of watching it, not simply on an understanding of its story, characters, and use of metaphor.”
After stating this, he does exactly the opposite – explains the story and provides rationalistic explanations to the characters’ traits by contextualizing them with respect to the metaphors and motifs of religion, spirituality, politics and philosophy. It does help us understand the movie better but aren’t Kieślowski’s movies meant to evoke? Does one need to have a rational understanding to “feel” it better? If Kickasola is trying to do that, then he is essentially at logger heads with Kieślowski.
Kickasola paraphrases Kieślowski’s attitude towards this by saying
“This type of abstract, nonverbal “rhetoric” can be very persuasive…”
In other words, to me it feels like Kickasola attempts to help us understand a movie that the director did not want us to understand in the first place.
All said and done, I do not deny the fact that knowing about the director’s life, his works, his beliefs, the metaphors and motifs used in the movie and Kickasola’s interpretation of them have definitely enriched me to understand the movie. But the answer to the question whether it has helped me to feel it better is NOT a big resounding yes!
PS: I wonder how Pauline Kael would have critiqued this movie!
I immensely enjoyed and appreciated ‘The Double Life of Veronique’ on so many levels but my immediate reaction after the film finished was ‘huh?’ and that I wanted to watch it again. I understood (well thought I understood) the main story line and the nuanced dramatic devices such as the clear ball and the symbolic emphasis on sex and death used throughout the film. However, there were still so many questions I had that were unanswered, for instance, what was the deal with Veronique agreeing to lie in court for her friend and was the piece of string related to her death some how?
Reading Kickasola answered many of my queries (turns out the part about Veronique lying for her friend in court was part of a subtext that had to be cut which is why it didn’t really fit in overall). Yet at the same time Kickasola raised more questions and brought out the cynic in me as I found many of his comments suspect and unconvincing. I tend to find myself feeling slightly sceptical when academic writers start using jargon that confounds the message rather than clarifies it. Was he just reading too much into the film or were the complex layers and meanings completely intended and decided upon by the director? For instance the theme of vision and new beginning is inferred purely from Veronique removing Alexandre’s glasses from his hand in the hotel room scene at the end. Also, the comment about the anonymous phone call being interpreted by postmoderns as “a recognizance of the interstitial image and a critique of the medium” (p.252) is not discussed or elucidated at all.
Maybe I am missing the point and I should just appreciate and accept what the author interprets in the film but it keeps making me think of when I had to read ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Bronte for my English literature class at school. There are so many interpretations flying around of the book, one of which is a Freudian psychoanalytic reading which was predictably about sex and repressed desires. It just didn’t seem to make sense that people were reading Freud into Bronte’s book when he wasn’t even born when it was published so the author obviously had no intention of symbolizing the Oedipus complex in Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship.
I guess all this just comes back to the issues we have been raising in class, how much as a critic we are able to bring to the table and interpret a ‘text’ and how much we look to the author and their intention or even if that matters. Either way, I really loved the film and have been thinking about it ever since as it is a poignant and thought-provoking work of art. The director Kieslowski can include me with the fifteen-year-old girl he met in Paris (p.244) in being profoundly affected by the movie.
So I’ve been struggling with this issue in my head since the Mulhall article on Aliens. And now after reading another film critique, I have to ask myself. “When is a movie just supposed to be a movie?”. I found myself several times when reading Mulhall underlining things and saying to myself, “No, that’s just how horror films work.”
Now this is not to say the same for the Double Life of Veronique and it’s review. But why do we as critics have to always find something? I guess I see it like if you’re looking for trouble you’ll find trouble. Are we really finding things the director put in to make us think about life and philosophy? Or, and this is what I think too often, are we creating that narrative for ourselves, and ignoring the true intensions of the author.
Again, I don’t want to take anything away from the Kieslowski’s work or his intensions, because I believe some of the metaphors mentioned in the Kickasola article where in fact intentional. But where do we draw the line between someone just trying to make an entertaining horror flick and someone trying to make social commentary about feminism. I don’t know many feminists, but I don’t remember them lining up to go see Alien. I do remember a bunch of Sci-Fi geeks with half beards and pony tails outside the theatre though. Hmm…
Maybe if there was a film that was just an empty room with a clock ticking and the second hand was moving backwards. Now there’s a film with MEANING!
..jaMEs
So here’s another video to try to bring some of the concepts we have been talking about together for the past couple of weeks into a juicy video that we can also laugh at: it’s the walk off scene from Zoolander. This is one of my favorite movies ever, and it’s for a lot of reasons that I won’t put here. Anyways, enjoy the video, and there’ll be my post after it.
Using Zoolander as a Synopsis
There are many different reasons for using Zoolander, and I’ll just start with the facts that David Bowie and Michael Jackson are represented in this video, so we’ll use that as a baseline. Also, since we just finished talking about men’s fashion, I’ll take a brief (haha – there’s a pun if you watched the video) look into this.
So Derek Zoolander challenges Hansel to a walk-off as a way to prove that he’s still got the skills to be the best male model out there. He struts his stuff in what I can only imagine to be designer red leather clothes that he can easily throw off to the crowd, as the clothes end up augmenting his skills as a model. They empower him to be better at his craft: male modeling. They are also his identity (mer-man!), as he has known nothing else in his life besides modeling. He’s got the perfect complexion, and also “his hair looks really really good with gel in it”, and the clothes become his second skin, as he becomes super comfortable in them – they are his work after all. They also show the viewer that this second skin that he wears all the time, coupled with his physical prowess, make people think that he is really, really not intelligent. Derek wants kids to be able to read good, too, and that’s a healthy aspiration for anyone to have. The film also shows Derek trying to overcome what he knows and his clothes make others think he is as well, which is what I also got out of the men’s clothing reading. There is more to people than what the clothes they wear, even though this is the only readily accessible access point to their lifeworld. I wonder how we can compare these male models to real male models – what differences would we end up finding?
So also, why do I keep end up talking about clothing and interpretation in this class? This is a central issue I believe is at play in my capstone, and the only way for me to begin to understand a theoretical viewpoint is for me to keep expressing it out loud to everyone.
And Hansel is trying to earn a living, but he’s just as scared of other male models too, which says volumes about the total package of clothing and body posture. That says a lot about phenomenology to me, how bout you?
Also, we should get a chance to bring everyone together to watch this: it’s loaded with different aspects for us to take to the critique table.
(^^)V
As some of you may know, I’ve been trying to cram so that I can speak intelligently to Scott McCloud when he’s here next week. I just finished his first book, Understanding Comics. It was amazing.
First of all, let me say that one of the primary reasons I found it compelling was its format. Unlike many other ‘theory books’ Understanding Comics is more or less a comic book. Panels and word balloons… the whole shebang.
A lot of people hear me saying things like, “Too many words” and “I can’t read”. It’s kind of a joke, but it’s kind of not. The way my brain works, I can only pick up every other paragraph of a paper before my mind starts wandering. Probably not something to brag about in a blog for a class that requires a 10 page paper at the end. Anyway, as a comicker (one who makes comics) myself, my brain was better able to soak in the contents of this book, and, unlike most of the papers I’ve read, my mind has been blown.
Even though it seems at first to be a ‘comic about comics’, McCloud really gets to the root of comics on a psychological, subconscious, theory-rich level.
How is this relevant to this class (besides being awesome)? He’s got a chapter called “The Vocabulary of Comics” which boils down to visual iconography and how we interpret those icons… I’d like to call this semiotics.
He has another chapter called “Blood in the Gutter” which is about how we interpret the space between the panels in a comic based on our own experience. People will ’see’ the comics in different ways even though they see the same panels on the page because their own experiences creates the closure between the panels. Phenomenology?
Anyway, my conclusion is that Scott McCloud is a genius and I’m looking forward to reading his other two books. I highly suggest reading at least this first one to anyone.
Two disclaimers:
- I sometimes happen to be a bit of a cultural determinist – I see most things as culturally relative.
- Perhaps I am drawing too much upon the ethnography as harmful panel from CHI 09, but here goes.
My main problems with some of the ethnomethodological theory espoused in the Smith reading mostly come in two parts.
Ethnomethodology claims to focus on the “learning how members’ actual, ordinary activities consist of methods to make practical action, practical circumstances, common sense knowledge of social structures and practical sociological reasoning analyzable and of disovering the formal properties of commonplace, practical common sense actions ‘from within’ actual settings, as ongoing accomplishments of those settings” (68). The foundation of my problems with this passage is the lack of regard for the extreme subjectiveness of the verbiage tossed about here. Words such as “common sense” and “practical” are quite value-laden. What is common sense and practical to one person is not necessarily that for another person. These notions vary within culturally similar groups, let alone between culturally different groups. For instance, a good friend of mine is a spectacular event planner. What is common sense knowledge for her regarding how to organize workers and put together an event is baffling to me.
I find the notion that one can make common sense knowledge regarding social structures bizarre because social structures are only common sense to those that agree with them. The institution of slavery might have been common sense to many people within a time when slavery was socially acceptable, but the notion of human beings as property is not common sense within American society today. However, there might be places within the world today where women are considered property. Common sense is subjective. This makes ethnomethodology very susceptible to ethnocentric analysis.
My next annoyance with ethnomethodology is the argument that it is necessary in order to examine the common place, the ordinary or the actual. (And this is the part where I acknowledge I’m thinking beyond the Smith article and back to CHI) This annoys me because it gets set against ethnography as though ethnography does not look at the everyday or the actual. Ethnography has a tradition of examining all aspects of phenomena. It is to be a thick description of everyday life. I will grant that at least within anthropology the discipline of ethnography has tended to be correlated with studying the “other” and thus it could be viewed that something different is required to study social structures from within. However, it is my belief that ethnography is a good method for studying the social and the cultural from within and many scholars now are working in such a manner.
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