2 reflections / aleia murawski

the hysterical alphabet:

Kapsalis explained that the project became a six year process of looking at and reading from historical and medical text. Most of the information, being true, was shocking and uncomfortable; however, the presenters did an excellent job at making it digestable and playful. I instantly found the collaboration to be extremely interesting, especially that it was a project initially between just Kapsalis and Corbett, and then it was later extended toward Danny, who supplied the visual element. It is an interesting collaboration to go from her originally responding to text, John responding to her writing, and then Danny responding to their project together. 

My immediate reaction to the event was that the presentation was really well-constructed. In contrast to earlier lectures I have attended this year, it was organized and captivating. From the beginning, when they turned on their lights and turned down the rest of lights, they commanded our attention in a respectful manner. 

I was immediately impressed by the narration. Kapsalis's voice is the prefect amount of dark, humor, and intensity. Her writing was also both playful and critical. She carried the audience well from one letter to the next, and there were really nice moments of added drama through unexpected narration (either on its own or paired to imagery) and moments of pausing and recollection (which offered a nice disruption to the linear quality of moving through A to Z). 

I had two favorite moments. One was when she said 'so many rising wombs back then" against the montage of hot air balloons. This is just one example of when I found the media and the language to really complement each other. My other favorite part was when she was referring to two letters, or characters, specifically. It was the part about the neighbor hysterics, and she said something like "and one day they were soon to be reunited again as neighbors." I thought visual here was especially striking, because it took me a moment to understand what was being abstracted by all of the light and smoke, and then to see two figures hanged was quite terrifying. I really appreciated these moments when the text and visual responded to each other, at times simultaneously, and other times working as variables that were answering each other. 

This presentation had a really great layering effect as well. I thought the visual layering in the film was effective, along with the layering of audio (both analog and digital) as well as this recorded and live-performance layering. It helped elevate the drama and keep the audience more involved in the show. I agreed with the quote at the end that, this intent to keep it both recorded and live made it more about the performance to be included in and less about being a film or something to just watch. 

the material of distance 

Jean Epstein's early film theory 

modern aesthetic experience:

I found this lecture to be quite scholarly, to a degree that made me appreciate the speaker's dense knowledge of the subject, yet, also made me feel incredibly disconnected. It was a really well-informed lecture; however, the speaker used so many direct literary references and quotations from Epstein's work, and since I had no introduction to his work or methodology before his presentation, I was lost immediately into this lecture. 

This was presentation was centered around Jean Epstein's film theory based off of his work "Le Cinematographe de L'Etna." This document was about being the process of work being seen, not read, emphasizing on the significance of "sight." This made me think about the kino-eye or our conversations in class about montage... It is about the significance of looking and positioning moments. Epstein, specifically, is concerned about moments of magnituted and distance, the perceiver and the perceived, and "theory of close-up" (atoms of images delivered with particular force). He also had an interest in taking the subconscious and using that towards making quantifiable tests. I had a difficult time relating this back to his thesis, but my attempt at the material is that he studies Etna because, other than it being a spectacle as imagination, it represents specific cultural mythology that he wanted to explore. He uses cinema to overcome the sublime and uses technology as a mediation of distance. I thought the presentation was interesting; nevertheless, I struggled to follow it. Other than his consciousness of modern experience delivered by the technological and his rejection of romanticism, I felt like my mind was exploding like a volcano the entire time.