Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Natural or Seizure-like?

The entire Alone Life Wastes Andy Hardy consists of loops of actions and sounds from previously made films. At once, I noticed the connection to Manovich's work on loops. The mini loops really did seem like natural movements seen and done in everyday life, especially in the very first scene. The boy hugging, squeezing, and kissing his mother somtimes didn't even seemed like he wasn't on loop. Our actions are oftentimes repetitive on a microtime scale and also on a more macro level. This makes me consider how time usually is considered as longer periods and how we can forget the slight things that happen in microseconds or just really small amounts of time. That amount of time is so minute to us that we're oblivious to it. Yet, this movie emphasizes everything about those microsecond actions and sounds. Repetition of these intervals brings forth these tiny motions and shows the natural nature of repetition and loops. Just as Manovich's essay discusses, loops are not elementary in media form, they are a part of complicated, sophisticated, and modern technology also. They are also part of nature and have existed pretty much forever.
The analytical part aside, I've never felt that a film could ever seem so long to me even though it was short. At the beginning, I understood the purpose to the film, especially after reading Manovich's work. But watching such small repetitions for 15 whole minutes became pretty frustrating. Especially when the singing and sounds came into play, the reptitions became rough for my ears and eyes. Also, by the end the loops were somewhat longer and involved things such as full foot movements back and forth, back and forth. At this point the actions were no longer so natural to me and they became actual loops to me as if the player were broken. There were also loops right at the cuts of editing which were so far from natural that it made me feel like if I were epileptic I was going to seize! Overall, the point of the film fit well with the previous reading, but it was too long and by the end I couldn't wait for it to stop.

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