shameinyourface:

24 City

Dir. Zhang Ke Jia 2007

Second time watching Zhang Ke Jia’s ‘24 City’ I have been highly influenced by the editing transitions he uses to explore the lives of the factory workers who have been made redundant. Cleverly, he keeps the sound from the last scene or begins the sound with a black screen and fades the visual into the sound.

By doing this, the documentary has an added harmony that flows from scene to scene other than sharp cuts.

I have toyed around with the idea of the scenes being cut into short vignettes, to give the same message as a whole film but to divide them into a small collection of films because the story is in my mind divided into scenes instead of a natural visual progression of narrative. However, this felt too abstract and too jarring and although the the scenes are very different and narrative-wise abstract, the idea of vignettes felt too high brown for the story and did not sit right with me.

The transitions used in ‘24 City’ are effective as they subtly divide the individual stories within one film, into tiny pockets of visual and aural information, softly taking the audience in and out of absorbing what is in the film to defining the ways he uses film.

seeingwiththemind:

During Christmas break, I watched Play Time (1967), film by the French director Jacques Tati (1907-1982). This film is considered to be his most daring work even if at the time of its release was a total commercial failure and almost brought Tati to bankruptcy. 

In the film, Tati uses his recurrent alter ego, the character of Monsieur Hulot played by the French director himself, as the central character of the story. Mousier Hulot, a man on his mid-forties with a clean and kind look, appears and disappears in a surreal Paris constructed of straight lines, modernist architecture, and sterile urban lifestyle. Tati presents us with a cosmopolitan city of cold constructions that create a compartmentalized and delimitated human interaction in which modern technologies play an obstructed role in the daily life and natural human activity. Shot in 70 mm, Play Time is notable for its elaborated and detailed sets, which Tati had built specially for the film (known as Tativille), as well as Tati’s trademark use of subtle, yet complex visual comedy often supported by sound effects and a minimal use of dialogue.

What I found more interesting about this film is the “play” that Tati orchestrates between the different planes of perception that exist in our visual experience. Is through stating the delimitation and the line that he breaks its boundaries to create a dialogue not only between the physical space and the representational one, but also to the cognitive plane related to our own conventions and history of seeing. The use of reflections and the material delimitation, the play of perspective, and the repetition of compositions and objects are some of Tati’s psychological puzzles and tricks that make this film a labyrinth of visual amusement.