Field Report Number One

We have always taken the time to appreciate how the persons' ideas and concepts can be emulated through narrative or documentary film making. Lately we have been discussing the filmmakers' role in the creation and story of the films they are creating.
A film that I found particularly "striking" would be David Gatten's "What the Water Said." When I say striking, I mean intrusive. Never before have I watched something that was so irritating and redundant that I actually had to plug my ears and look away throughout most of it. Although I found it's bombarding acoustics and migraine inducing visuals to resemble that of Chinese water torture, I could appreciate the creative way in which it was made. To create something so "in your face" and really unpleasant to experience is one thing, but to have done that in such a creative way as Gatten had done was pretty interesting. When I learned that he had taken film and thrown it into lobster cages, allowing the creatures and the water to scratch it up and create what I had seen and heard, it didn't make me hate the film any less, but it made me think, "hey, that was actually a pretty cool idea." I wondered what else you could create by taking actual film strips and lodging them somewhere, allowing outside elements to take control of your creative process.
Relating this to a work seen outside the class, viewing Charles Burnett's film, "The Killer of Sheep" inside class as well as outside the class allowed for me to appreciate the film a little more. When I viewed it in class it was a pretty attention keeping narrative, one about which I found nothing bad to say. When I got to see Burnett actually speak and then re watch the film, I found that seeing the film maker in person and watching his work creates a different feel to the whole experience of film watching. Much like reading about what Gatten did to the film in order to create his project, seeing the person who created the project and hear them speak about their work let me feel more a part of the film than I had just watching it in class a few days before.
Sometimes in literature when you learn something about the author that correlates to the book you are reading, you can create a bias towards the opinions he or she is trying to express. This leaves me with the wondering of whether it is best to know about the creator, or keep that mystery alive in order to form your own opinions about the creation. What I have learned about this assignment is that watching a film and judging it on how it looks, sounds, and overall presents itself as is really just a very basic way to watch a film. Going the extra step and learning a little something about it's process or the creator often times improves the experience of the film.