April 28th Lecture

"Duck Soup" seemed to be more about cheap jokes in each scene. Once the joke was over, the scene was over. There was definitely a narrative to it but not all the shots seemed to forward the story. There were scenes that didn't really push the story forward. For example, the scene where the two spys were playing pranks on the peanut stand guy. The scene was humorous but it didn't push the storyline forward. "The Way Things Go" was a narrative in its own way. It didn't have an obvious story to it, however if a narrative just means that there is a "logical sequence of incidents that take us from point A to point B", then the movie definitely had a narrative to it. You were not capable of getting from point A to point B without going through all the steps of the sequence. It was its own story because everything was connected. I would say these two films are similar because without all the fluff in the middle, you couldn't get the end product. In the "duck soup" film, all the gags seemed to come up later in the film after it had been introduced already. Everything had its way of tieing together to create more laughs. Using Frampton's formula, I would say that the film "Duck Soup" is mostly about the leader who made all the jokes (I cant remember his name, Rufus maybe?), and "The Way Things Go" would probably be about fire and the bottle rocket things they used, or just chemistry in general.

April 7th Lecture

In the film "Natural Features", I noticed mostly the eerie noises. I noticed a lot of faces, the color black, and the act of painting. Based on Frampton's formula for films, I would say this film was about eerie noises because that is what I noticed the most in the film, it seemed to be what occurred most in the film. Visual wise, I would say the film is about faces because thats what seemed to appear most in the film. I don't think it was helpful to my understanding of the film to think of it this way. It was only when I put everything together when I really got a feel for the film and what it might possibly be about. I seemed to get this creepy feeling watching this film in class. I actually thought the exact same thing as someone in class discussed about this film- I got this feeling that there was some kind of psychotic murderer making noises and singing to himself and basically entertaining himself. I felt like this person was into torture, and I got this feeling because they kept showing faces and they would be painted over or deformed in certain ways. You could also hear screams every once in a while in the film, which made it feel like there were people tied up or something in a room nearby. I felt kind of like this person I had imagined in my head had some kind of mental disability because they kept singing and making car noises, etc. The part I found most disturbing was with the family portrait with the eyes all blacked out and I think this was when the singing started up.