Tic Toc Tic Toc Tic Toc

Run Lola Run demonstrates that life is only valuable when a clock is ticking. Many of us believe that our everyday actions actions result in our future. The choices we make now; what we eat, how much we exercise, how much effort we put into our school work, who and when we will marry; all compose the future. Not many of us think about this concept when we are choosing something from McDonald's menu, are partying the day before a major final, or writing our final research paper the day it is due. Our futures do not exist in the way that Run Lola Run presents them. We do not touch a burger and then pictures flash in our minds of us 20 years later calling Jenny Craig and losing 50 pounds. Nor do we constantly think that our life is inter-dependent on the interactions and actions of others. Many believe we are responsible for ourselves only and that our actions do not affect others' futures.

We do not simply bump into a person and think that their whole life will be different or that our future will change because of this seemingly insignificant interaction. But when a time limit is set, every second suddenly counts. If we oversleep for a final, have 10 minutes to get to class, and jump out of bed bump our toe and miss the bus by a second, that toe could have ruined your academic life. The toe or all the cramming the night before, but as students we are most likely to blame the toe. If we thought of life as a longer span of time with a very real time limit, no longer 20 minutes, but time in years, then every little encounter would be magnified. Every little second would count.

Our perspective of time, of life, of each other would be much different. Life would almost be a race to achieve all the things you want to do, to do it all. Unfortunately, in real-life unlike Lola, we only get one chance. If we get shot, we reminisce, and die, we don't get back up to fix and change all the small interactions. That was it, that was the given lifetime. We don't get another one. We don't get to say "I will do it next time," because time ran out.

A Step Back: Appliying Manovich to Picture Perfect Life

Manovich was able to look into my computer's hardrive very well and summarize it in "The Database." As I was reading it, I was thinking of my music files and the insane amounts of pictures. Personally, with so many databases it is hard to keep track of them all or even truly know what's in them. Part of me wanted to be in denial and say our world really is not ending up like this, but as I kept reading and scrutinizing life and the environment around me, I couldn't help it.
Manovich argues that "The Database" is a way of life that is being more and more popular. He argues that the internet, a collection of more databases through websites (including this one; a database of our thoughts and class assignments), is a growing database with lines and lines of coded data. Having done a bit of web-creating in High School, I can vouch for his theory. But more than just through the internet, facebook, myspace, and even gmail life is becoming a database.
We have databases of images and pictures of a variety of things, that we might not think about the amount of time we have spent behind a lens or infront of a computer. Think about it... So you take a picture to freeze time and preserve a memory, but when do you actually go back to re-experience it, and is your experience a real experience, seeing how for some of those moments you were experiencing it behind a lens? Doesn't re-experiencing the memory through a clip of images within a database change the way you remember it? No longer is the memory preserved through actual living it, but through life through the lens.
Now don't get me wrong, I am not leaving my camera behind, ever! But in a world where preserving seems to be a priority, when do we get to live life without worrying about what future generations will think? If the future is really the reason we are preserving life for.

Life Is A Picture

ChrisMarker’s La Jetée uses the concept of photography as a memory and of the process of living. His snippets are then used to show the larger context; as if life wasn’t a flow of motion but rather still frames captured in a consecutive way. It is almost as if Dziga Vertov critiqued La Jetée in his “Kino-Eye.” La Jetée was… "filmed in a way that sets out the relevant materials one after the other and forces the eyes of the audience to see the consecutive details that they must see. The film camera drags the eyes of the audience… in the most profitable order and it organizes the details into a regular montage exercise" (Kino-Eye. 92). Time traveling and memory are one in La Jetée. They both take place in his adult mind, but also in his childhood reality. The line is blurred between past and present as he is shown his own death.

A Half-Human Camera Man Trapped in Time and Space

Dziga Vertov creates A Man With A Movie Camera to demonstrate the life a camera man, thus he describes it as an experimental film without a script. This film is very confusing because it has so many images, little sounds, and no bluntly obvious sequence.

What it lacked in clarity, the film supplemented in recurring themes and images. For example, the theme of having multiple audiences or witnesses to an event in different times and spaces seeing the same thing yet still reacting in their own way. The camera man witnesses an even through the Kino-Eye, the editor sees the same scene frame by frame in a slower or faster time, the audience in the film’s theater sees the film in their own time, and we watch the audience watching the camera man watching the scene. It is in this forum that time and spaces elapse. We are the ultimate audience witnessing the reactions of another audience, the actions of the camera man, and the original scene. Our eye can witness the bigger picture, reminding us that we are also a part of a bigger picture.

A Man With A Movie Camera demonstrates the human aspect of the Kino-Eye, the camera man. This human-machine breed, the Kino-Eye, was created to record nature and its daily life; thus the recurring images of hands, feet, necks, and all types of body parts. Weddings, birth, death, washing, grooming, a day at the railroad station, working with industry, walking on the street are all part of the city daily life. These occur every day and more than once in the film. The images are short clips but are pieces that in we can connect to a previous experience. Although the film uses few real-life sounds, the ones used also remind us of the importance of noise in our routine and what those sounds represent in our minds.

A sub-theme of daily-life is images of cleaning and grooming. Many images are of people washing up, of cleaning streets, of combing and cutting hair, of polishing nails. Their significance is important and recurring but it is difficult to decipher.

Recurring themes of machinery and industry remind us of the fast-paced place we live in. The factories remind us that machine and man are becoming one. Even the Kino-Eye is a part of this breed. Dziga Vertov reminds us that things can slow down and that humans can have their day at the beach, or in the ocean, or on a carousel, or sports.The audience is shown images of leisure to encourage us to pass through space and into those moments; to remind us that they exist and separate us from machine time.