I'm about to do something I can't ever recall doing. As of tomorrow, I am officially taking one month off from seeing "movies for pleasure." I carefully worded that phrases within quotations because I will of course be watching films for the month of April and the early days of May. But that will be restricted to films I'll be analyzing for the two research projects I'm currently working on. I have a little less than a month to complete both of them, and starting Monday I will be moving into the next stage: writing, writing, writing. I've spent months reviewing literature, organizing ideas, and brainstorming. Now it is time to put these ideas into action and see where it takes me.
I mentioned in a previous post that I hope to continue updating this blog with rough sketches and ideas for my projects, and I fully intend to follow through with this. I will also be seeing my last "movie for pleasure" this evening (Grindhouse) and reviewing it within the next couple of days. I would also like to write a short piece on another film I recently watched (Dressed to Kill (1980)). But other than these two entries, this blog will be be concerned with two subjects: Myth and Jungian Archetypes in Contemporary American Cinema, and Digital Cinema and its relation to "Film Language." For the Myth in Cinematic Narrative project, I will be focusing a great deal of my anlysis on Batman Begins (2005), a film which I believe reflects a deeper struggle in its depiction of the hero myth and how we (the collective) relate to "the hero" in a post 9/11 America.
For my Digital Cinema / Film Language project, I will be writing a great deal about Miami Vice (2006), a film that has been written about quite extensively in the blogging realm, which has partly inspired my decision to focus my analysis on it. As many others have said, the film offers a wide variety of ideas and topics for discussion in relation to digital cinema, classicism, and visual narrative. And I hope to contribute to that larger discussion.
As always, I welcome any and all comments. With these topics, there are an infinite amount of places to go, and I would love to read about other individuals' perspective as I begin shaping my more focused research questions and intellectual puzzles. After May 7th, I anticipate moving on to reviewing more films and writing commentaries about topics other than digital cinema and hero narratives. But until then, this blog will be all about hero myths and digital dream-weaving in contemporary American cinema.
2 comments:
Ted - be sure to check out my "Reflections on Inland Empire" series for my thoughts on Lynch's conscious reworkings of film language for the digital age. Part 1 is the most relevant to this.
I'll save comments on your piece for your blog. I cannot emphasize enough how much I've been looking forward to Inland Empire. It's a shame I won't be able to use it for the paper; I've read a lot of great blog writing about the film being shot on digital video and how this affects its spatial and temporal relationships.
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