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So I often find I have many notes in the margins of our readings commenting on some statement or claim the author has made that I don’t agree with. But I do not get so bothered by them most of the time to feel the need to vent about them. For some reason I do feel that need with this piece (very possibly influenced by the knowledge that I have’t been on here for a while and need to post something). Sadly though I know I am not critiquing this piece in any sort of one vein, which would be good practice for class, but I just didn’t have quite that much time on my hands.
My first note (and realistically it is likely only this late because I was feeling over whelmed while reading before this) is on page 9, toward the end of the continuing paragraph from the previous page, when Davis notes as if its a second thought, something note very important at all, “right down to the very shape and bearing of the body itself.” Well of course. The way someone carries them self can nearly completely refute the feeling their clothes would give me, no matter what setting we/ I/ they are in. If I see a man in an expensive suit standing on a side walk corner, waiting for traffic to let him walk, standing aloof from the crowd around him, looking at his blackberry or snidely looking down at some begger down the block I will think a million degreee different from if I see the same man on that same corner in that same suit bending down and happily playing with/ petting some dog among the crowd while he engagingly talks to its owner. Bearing and manner speak volumes about people; as much or more than their clothes do.
The next note I have on the reading to complain about is probably very personally driven. On page 12, about in the middle of the first actual paragraph, Davis notes again as some sort of after thought (in parenthesis no less!) “some of whom truly are artisits,” refering to the people who design the fashions being discussed. Of course some of them are real artisits, really it should be said all of them are real artisits! There is no clothes designer one could sit by and watch them puzzle out some new idea or way to cut something, some new pattern to use in a novel way, that you could say is not an artist. How could you sit by someone who is sketching out idea after idea after idea (so very like any one of us) and say it is not their artistic process?
The next note is a very small one, but one that again was perhaps a particular sting because I felt it more personally; on page 15, again about half way into the first actual paragraph, Davis says that “our intuition says no,” referring to the tiny differences possible in clothing that can make it difference enough to be a fashion or not. Of course a tiny difference in a garment can make all the difference. Take a knee length skirt vs. a mini-skirt. Merely a difference in hem length, they can even be made of exactly the same fabric, same number of pleats, same colors, even standing right next to each other, even match them with the same shirt! And you will get a radically different feeling about them. The mini-skirt is flirting and suggestive, the knee length skirt is conservative and possibly strict feeling.
Maybe all these previous notes really woke me up, or just got me going, because on the last real page(s), 16nd 17 I have three complaints. I will do my best to wrap them up quickly though.
The first one is actual in the notes of pages 16 and 17, it was a complaint until I read the note on page 17 and now it has tuned into perhaps a smaller complaints about misunderstanding/ Davis being unclear. In the note on page 16 Davis notes that there was not fashion in civilizations of old, such as Egypt and China. This is either a gross point of not having done the homework/ research, for China had VERY stringent fashion rules, or else it is unclear to me how “fashion” is being used, for in the note on page 17 Davis calls a possible example of first fashion “an institutionalized fashion cycle.” So would the fashion rules of ancient China be merely an institution, or would it not have been as it is now, a communication method they would have used to note (if nothing else) how much they cared to pay attention to the fashion rules of court or the market place?
The second note on these last pages is on 17, bottom of the end of the paragraph from page 16, where Davis notes that we all “[share] a strong collective component.” The point in this paragraph seemed to be that people growing up in the same situations would end up being very similar as people. I have huge arguments with this idea. From my own life I have a perfect example: my cousin and I had nearly exactly mirroring situations in life, with very strong mothers, seemingly very loving fathers when we were young, then abrupt and violent divorces between our parents. I came out very much of the mind “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, Paul my cousin is the greatest victim of the world, it’s always out to get him. We often can’t stand each other because of this huge difference in our reactions to the same situation. So I find Davis’ point here very aggitating.
Finally, my last note on this reading in on page 17, toward the middle-end of the only complete paragraph on this page, when Davis is talking about how the designers of fashion do what they do to give us the populace a way of expressing our selves, how fashion sprouts from their minds as only their attempt to help us truly reflect and express how we really feel inside. What nonsense! Sure, I suppose some fashion may come from this vein, like the militant shoulder pad example used earlier in this piece, but I am not wearing my jeans with the holes in the knees because I feel the need to rebel against the sterility of new jeans, or that I wish to convey that I’m a rough and tumble sort and I wear my jeans out, I just think they get softer with all that wear, more comfortable, and I just think they look fun, with all the texture and roughness.
“Activity theory cautions us that any tool has the potential to transform the activity in which it is used and, reciprocally, that tools have the potential to be transformed as they are used.” pg. 13
This made me start thinking in circles about how the context of something is constantly changing. It makes it very difficult to ever truly understand a situation on top of the different lifeworld problem within design of never being able to understand something the exact same way as someone else understands it. If the context is always changing, then it’s impossible to design for a context. There is always more to learn and more to understand. No wonder design is so difficult and the strategy of working with the ultimate particular was developed. At least at that level there is a smaller net of things to understand because the focus is narrow.
Then there’s the thought here of user interpretation. If the context of design understanding is always changing based on an ever changing context, interpretation of the both the user and the designer is influenced by context, context is influenced by interpretation, and the addition of a new design causes new interpretations and new context… no wonder design = HARD; design = WICKED.
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!
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
In light of the readings for this week, I would like to attempt to “read” the different types of horror used throughout major “horror” video games: Silent Hill 2 and Resident Evil (GCN version). I hope this doesn’t end up being too structuralist, but I foresee that happening, as I am comparing the readings of 2 different, yet similar video games (I wanted to try to go more phenomenological, but we’ll see what happens).
Please also note this comes from someone who plays these games all the time and ends up laughing now when designers try to involve the scare factor in gaming now. Also, I want to point out that I did try the second game I present here before the first one. But I digress.
Also, sorry for any potential spoilers I may give – I’ll try to reduce them so you can experience these games.
Silent Hill (SH)
SH I believe, along with Fatal Frame, are the leading games in the industry that do “horror” best. For this series, “horror” ends up being defined as “psychological horror (thriller)”. The player always ends up being some poor soul, through some sort of magical series of events, gets thrusted back into this town that has cultish origins. Some of the mechanics used to achieve SH horror from the movie industry are: the epic amount of fog (you can barely move down the streets of SH without being enveloped by it), the very cramped corridors, the mise-en-scene (including the characters), the exclusion of most sound in the game, the usage of the static radio, and the obligatory “messed up alternate world of SH”.
All of these aspects of SH create a very tension from the first time one picks up the controller. The main mechanics of the game help to support the immersion of the world and hellp to create this psychological thriller, which is SH horror. The radio is used to let the player know where the bad guys are, and the way it is delivered is super effective at even making me get the chills (I had to put down the game the first time I played it because I got creeped out). Also, the only way for the player to see where he/she is going in most of the game is to utilize the flashlight – which only illuminates a small portion of the screen, but also alerts the bad guys to your presence. So a player could walk around in the dark everywhere, or walk around mostly in the dark but attract all of the bad guys. It’s up to the player.
But that’s only the action aspect of the game. The story itself thrives upon SH horror. The way the characters interact with each other, the way the player creates his map, the way the world is created, and the development of “psycholand SH”, the inverse of the world in SH where the walls are covered with living, and moving blood. That world has its own rules, utilizes flesh for a covering of machines, has lots of creepy bad guys, and also utilizes lots of screaming, moaning, and voices in the background make you want to get out of that world as soon as possible. But unfortunately, about half the game occurs in the creepy world, so one has to build up a tolerance to it. The good news is that once you have played through one version of SH, you have a good tolerance in you to withstand the others.
Resident Evil (RE)
Please ignore the voiceover – this video shows some of the aspects of RE I want you to see.
This clip is from the GCN (GameCube) version of the game. It was enhanced with better graphics and 1 new area from the original PlayStation version of the game. RE is essentially a remediation of the actual camera used in older horror films and it is the main critique many gamers have of this game: the camera is cemented still and will change depending on where the player walks. It can be quite disorienting to some, especially with enemies around, but this adds to the “scare” factor RE tries to play up to: the “cheap scare”. This is a name my sister and I have used to call the type of scare which has the following features: there’s something around the corner and it pops out and tries to scare the audience, it is usually preceded with the removal of sound and then something happens suddenly, or just the usage of blood or lots of shadows to make the audience feel they are in a horror film.
For me, this ends up making a great and a horrible experience. It is great for me as a gamer, as these are the visual language I use to “hack” the design of the game: these cues for cheap scares tell me exactly when to grip the controller, and when I should start singing and laughing when zombies start eating people. Yeah – it’s that predictable (I also watch a lot of bad horror films in my spare time). This added language I have gotten from the movie industry has made me realize where these cheap scares are about to occur, and unfortunately make the game less scary. Also, this game and RE0 were, in my opinion, the best of the series in trying to scare the player, but that’s a story for another day. This type of horror ends up ruining the experience for me, as I am immediately taken out of the context of the game and I just see the images on the screen as just part of a “map”, and not part of a horror world. I also am saddened because many of the tricks they use are awesome the first couple of times, but then end up losing there charm, just as the horror industry does. I also want to challenge the developers to not only utilize this method of utilizing the camera, but trying to really scare (shake me to my core) me, than just situate me in “just another zombie film”.
I would love to keep talking and play this for everyone if we want – it’ll be great to not only reflect on the material in action, but also will get a chance for everyone to see something they can interact with and critique.
Maybe it’s just my eye… but what do you think about the horror trying to be portrayed in these games?
When I was reading for today, I started to wonder, “Is understanding really that important if I find a meaning that isn’t grounded in the artist’s or designer’s intentions?” I like the idea of interpretation based on life-worlds, but the concept of understanding bothers me. If I find meaning in a painting that is personally relevant to me, what does it matter if I took the artist’s intentions into account. Sure I’m not exploring the history of the painting and, therefore, I can’t necessarily infer what the artist meant, but what if I’m not interested in what the artist meant. In some cases I can see where this is helpful, such as art history, or learning from a designer’s solution to a design problem, but that’s not always important.
Also what happens when the meaning of something changes over time based on context? Like in the fashion article, it talked about how the meaning of blue jeans have evolved over time. If I don’t know the entire history of blue jeans, does that mean that I don’t understand that blue jeans are to be interpreted as casual wear in this day in age? If I don’t know that the first person to make blue jeans intended them for rugged-wear, does that mean I am not expressing myself when I wear a pair because I ultimately don’t know what that pair of jeans means?
I also considered writing a post about traveling in a time machine and how understanding anything would be difficult because my life-world would be drastically different than the life-world of a person living in that time. Including that traveling in shorter periods of time would be easier to understand because the context is closer to the context in which my life-world developed. <– But I didn’t for times sake and there’s the gist anyway 
Food for thought: We will all be EXTREMELY aware of the shirts we wear tomorrow.
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