the junkies scratched up some film

01.14.08

upon watching To the Beat and attempting to record my response (i.e. thoughts, feelings, utter confusion, etc...) towards it, i was re-reminded about how hard it is to qualify these and many other things through language. hence (some thousands of years later) the creation of music and movies. movie: a delicious blend of audio and visual components, precisely spliced together to create the picture as a whole. or, the Idea, as a whole. a barrage of ideas, perhaps, portrayed not as spoken words, but instead as images on a screen, in your mind, on the back of your eyelids, in your dreamspace. wherever these ideas originate from, it proves lucky for us, the audience, to be able to visually see and then mentally interpret what is beyond that of language, perhaps the most insufficient of all qualifiers...

anywho, i thought that To the Beat was a very interesting blend of reality and fantasy (or perhaps, more correctly, reality and un-reality), that opposition being the abstract nature of the representation of the story. the opening scenes were incredibly interesting, and i found myself becoming very comfortable with the red linear entity that stayed consistent in the background, much as you would with a character in a narrative. i thought that the music was a bit too intense during the beginning of the movie, and therefore lost some of its impact and/or climactic capabilities throughout the film. yet still, this intertwining of visual montage and auditory (specifically musical) stimulation led to me wondering during the film: which came first, the chicken or the egg? the music or the movie? i settled on the option of music, assuming that the musical piece was recorded, and then the visual pieces were edited together to 'fit' the music, although created, more than likely, completely independent of anything at all.

this concern led me to ponder the idea that i really have no idea at all how a film like this comes into being. or at least the techniques that spawn it. there were a few parts that i was able to distinguish (i.e. that is just paint and oil, that is layering and scratching, etc...) but on the whole, i'm still largely unsure of how most of those images got to be the way they did on a small reel of film. one image in particular being the vertical white lines that move horizontally across the screen, dancing from left to right, in and out of frame. honestly, i cannot fathom how this is done. i also found myself wondering about the less abstract portions of the films, namely the real life picture images. are they family photos? are they personal to the filmmaker at all? if so, was this film actually intended to be/have/tell a story? if not, where might one find random pictures like these, and for what specific reason did those particular photos get used? again, subjective to the story of the film, which may or may not be an abstract idea in and of itself.

my most potent internal theme stemming from this film: disassociation.



[i am going to go ahead and apologize in advance (of the rest of the blogs, at least) for my intentional efforts at un-capitalization. since being a young child, i have been strongly against any and all capitalistic efforts in almost every sense, which has therefore led me to prefer letters in the lowercase form... haha, just kidding... but seriously though, i hope it doesn't offend anybody...]