"Generation X as a camera set-up". That sounds very fitting, camera "frames" rather than the real thing (whatever that means). But do you not feel that it's just the past, and memory thereof, that is put into frames, a bit like in the Tom Waits song, or does the whole "camera framing" thing still work on you in the present?
Well now - this makes me think of Lev Kuleshov. If you don’t know, he did an experiment in the 1910s where he took a short clip of film off the actor Ivan Mosjoukine staring at the camera and then edited it in between random other sequences, so you’d get mosjoukine and a funeral, then mosjoukine again, then a kitten, etc.
What he discovered is that audiences read different emotions into mosjoukine’s face every time they saw him - sorrow at the funeral, joy at the kitten - even though they were seeing THE SAME IMAGE of mosjoukine every time.
The combination of framing (mosjoukine looking at the camera, thus establishing identification) and montage created a sense of causality. But also the audience instinctively looked for story - expected it.
As I understand it our perception works by our brain making a model of what it expects reality to be and then checking this with the eyes, not the other way round. Our senses give us limited facts about our world. We perceive mostly through our heuristics, our models of the world. We unconsciously frame our own present.
But especially in film, obviously, where we’ve all learnt a common visual language. When an actor is framed far off centre then we experience the frame as unbalanced, creating a sense of loss and expectation of resolution.
Anyway, yeah - I suspect the present is always framed as much as the past
"Generation X as a camera set-up". That sounds very fitting, camera "frames" rather than the real thing (whatever that means). But do you not feel that it's just the past, and memory thereof, that is put into frames, a bit like in the Tom Waits song, or does the whole "camera framing" thing still work on you in the present?
Well now - this makes me think of Lev Kuleshov. If you don’t know, he did an experiment in the 1910s where he took a short clip of film off the actor Ivan Mosjoukine staring at the camera and then edited it in between random other sequences, so you’d get mosjoukine and a funeral, then mosjoukine again, then a kitten, etc.
What he discovered is that audiences read different emotions into mosjoukine’s face every time they saw him - sorrow at the funeral, joy at the kitten - even though they were seeing THE SAME IMAGE of mosjoukine every time.
The combination of framing (mosjoukine looking at the camera, thus establishing identification) and montage created a sense of causality. But also the audience instinctively looked for story - expected it.
As I understand it our perception works by our brain making a model of what it expects reality to be and then checking this with the eyes, not the other way round. Our senses give us limited facts about our world. We perceive mostly through our heuristics, our models of the world. We unconsciously frame our own present.
But especially in film, obviously, where we’ve all learnt a common visual language. When an actor is framed far off centre then we experience the frame as unbalanced, creating a sense of loss and expectation of resolution.
Anyway, yeah - I suspect the present is always framed as much as the past