Watchings

24 October 2010 • watchings
tags: animals, brain, cinema, comedy, conscience, death, documentaries, drugs, fantasy, fiction, hallucinations, killers, love, mathematics, murder, music, nature, particles, perception, politics, science, sound, space, television, time, tv series

• Fringe, Seasons 1-2 (2008-2010)
J. J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci

• Человек с киноаппаратом / Man with a Movie Camera (1929) [watch]
Dziga Vertov

• Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly

• The Ghost Writer (2010)
Roman Polanski

• El Abecedario de Gilles Deleuze. A de Animal (1988) [watch]

• Some Like It Hot (1959)
Billy Wilder

• Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Sidney Lumet

Silent but deadly [or why I can't think clearly]

10 October 2010 • out of context
tags: brain, death, killers, murder, music, sound, television, tv series, waves

—So you think that music killed these people?
—Not music per se. Could you help me with this please, my dear?
—What about this? Would that work?
—Figaro? Perfect!
—We’ve known for some time that different sounds affect the brain in different ways.
—Look at my brain waves on the monitor.
—They’re smoothing out.
—Harmonic music reduces neural activity.
—Which is why we think more clearly when we listen to it, as opposed to this… Dissonance. Look… Look at my neurons.
—We get it, Walter. Can I turn this off now?
—Oh, sorry. You see, the point is this, that with this type of auditory phenomenon, taken to its ultrasonic extreme, can be fatal, and the way it affects the brain, it could well have induced some type of vegetative trance before death.
—Which would also explain the trauma to the inner ear.
—So we’re looking for some kind of deadly music box?
—No, it’s ultrasonic, so you wouldn’t be able to hear it, the frequency’s too high.
—Silent but deadly.

Fringe, episode 2 season 3.

Watchings

20 September 2010 • watchings
tags: cinema, earth, fiction, love, music, television, tv series, vampires

• The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
Nicolas Roeg

• The Pirate (1948)
Vincente Minnelli

• True Blood, Season 3 (2010)
Allan Ball

• Sons of Anarchy, Seasons 1-2 (2008-2009)
Kurt Sutter

• Misfits, Season 1 (2009)
Howard Overman

Más bonito que el silencio

26 July 2010 • out of context
tags: quotes, silence, tv series

“Si lo que vas a decir no es más bonito que el silencio, mejor no lo…”.

Enjuto Mojamuto by Joaquín Reyes

Watchings

25 July 2010 • watchings
tags: civilization, comedy, documentaries, fiction, humour, psychogeography, space, television, tv series, video, walking

• Nip/Tuck (2003 – 2010)
Ryan Murphy

• London (1994) [watch]
Patrick Keiller

• The IT Crowd. Series 4 (2010)

Labels are for cans of tuna

24 June 2010 • out of context
tags: labels, quotes, television, tv series

“Labels are for cans of tuna, not people.”

Nip/Tuck (Season 5, Episode 16: Gene Shelly) by Ryan Murphy

A series of blips

24 June 2010 • out of context
tags: patterns, quotes, radio, television, tv series, waves

“I was tracking radio waves from deep space. For years, we heard nothing but static, and then, one night, a series of blips. You know what defines intelligence? The ability to create patterns.”

Nip/Tuck (Season 5, Episode 7: Dr. Joshua Lee) by Ryan Murphy

Get lost!

24 May 2010 • watchings
tags: fantasy, fiction, science, television, tv series

…and today I’ve discovered the truth about something that I was suspecting from some time ago: Lost is not a contemporary intellectual science fiction tv series, it’s a christian soap opera…

Fragmentation, meta-narrative, liquidity and blood

6 May 2010 • watchings
tags: analysis, cinema, comedy, fantasy, fiction, humour, television, tv series

When I was a little girl, I was already fascinated by the moving image, but I loved films and TV series than were not exactly for kids, I don’t mean ‘adult films’, but I was more interested in Gene Kelly and Moonlighting than in the typical films for children. Some years later, I had a flatmate who one day told me that my ‘problem’ is that I’m a post-modernist. I’ve never seen myself as a post-modernist, or as anything else, but the truth is that some of my personal obsessions are very related to post-modernism: fragmentation, codes, meta-narratives, the absence of an objective truth, etc. And in a way I think that the films and TV series that fascinated me as a kid were quite post-modern.

Musical films as Singing in the Rain (1952) or Les Girls (1957) and TV series as Moonlighting (1985-89) play with concepts, gags and narratives which in the visual context of a child living in the Eighties were quite absurd and strange. Obviously, in the Eighties existed films much more ‘post-modern’ than that, but I didn’t know about its existence until years later, and we should remember that Singing in the Rain, Les Girls and Moonlighting were mainstream/commercial products, not experimental pieces. The thing is that now I realized that I liked those audiovisual products because of its fragmentation and its meta-cinematographic aura.

Nowadays, I don’t think there’s anything in the TV comparable to Moonlighting, but we have Lost, maybe the paradigm of fragmentation, or I should say better the paradigm of liquidity —if, as Zygmunt Bauman states, we live in a ‘liquid time’, I guess that we need some liquid audiovisual products. Lost could be described as a quantum soap opera: first it was the flashback, then it was the flashforward, after it was the time travelling and now we have the parallel realities. Even if in some moments the script is really mushy and touchy-feely, it’s also fragmented, ambiguous and remarkably liquid —fortunately, I think that we are getting over those classical flat narratives in which good is good, bad is bad and there’s nothing more in between; real life is much more complicated than that.

The truth is that although I don’t see Lost as a masterpiece, right now mainstream TV (is there a non-mainstream TV?) is much more interesting than mainstream cinema. A film from the Fifties like Singing in the Rain is much more ‘iconoclast’ that any of the blockbusters of the recent years, but in the television we are watching some interesting changes.

My favourite TV series right now is True Blood. I know, I know… It’s kitsch and excessive, but it’s also a surrealistic mix of everything you can imagine, name any genre! Drama, comedy, action, adventure, crime, horror, science-fiction, romance, eroticism… It can jump from the most tacky to the most gory in a second with an astounding audacity and self-confidence. Have you ever watched before a bloody Viking vampire murdering in jogging suit, flip flops and with tinfoil in the hair because he was having some highlights done? It’s quite hilarious. And even everything is extravagant and way-out, at the same time it has an astonishing natural/realistic quality. Thanks to True Blood, TV vampires (really lame until now) are not just post-mortem, are also post-modern.