Who Dat Say Who Dat? - Racial Masquerade

"Who Dat Say Who Dat?" Racial Masquerade, Humor, and the Rise of American Animation by Nicholas Sammond in "Funny Pictures".
Question of whether something can be racist and still funny and if good people can be racist?
Page 136, "Interlocutor" the white character who asks the questions of the minstrel characters in a comedy routine.
"End Men" the minstrel characters who never make sense, conclude with nonsense.
Animation borrows from minstrel shows and makes use of stereotypes as shorthand.
Page 141, "Turkey in the straw" formerly known as "Old Zip Coon".
Page 142, "Pickaninny", the minstrel trickster (such as Felix or Bugs).
Page 144, "confusion between personal and institutional racism" , ie, individual people may not find something racist they they were involved in making, but that doesn't make it not racist.
Page 147, "a trickster character, chased by an enraged attacker, suddenly turns and savages that attacker by shooting him or blowing him up. Rather than being reduced to a bloody mess, the attacker is literally blown into racist black caricature, expressing his abject humiliation at the hands of the animate minstrel trickster.".
Page 148-9, Marx versus Freud on comedy.
Page 149, "The white hand of the animator crated in the animate minstrel a compulsion to rebel against the conditions of its making and destined it to fail in that rebellion. And if that makes for laughter, that laughter is nervous; it is tinged with regret and shame, with guilty pleasure. And it begs the question of who is laughing and how".

Laughter by Numbers

In Funny Pictures
Laughter by Numbers, the Science of Comedy at the Walt Disney Studio by Susan Ohmer
Page 109-111, discusses producing animation on a schedule being in conflict with Disney's desire for high standards.
"Audience Response Institute" or ARI began by Gallup (as in Gallup pole).
Poling guided Disney's production with escalating amount of test viewings at all stages. 

Remainder of "Mining the Home Movie"

Finished "Mining the Home Movie; excavations in histories and memories" edited by Karen Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmermann. Notes on pages 73-286:

Most of book alternates between very short chapter which summarizes an archive or collection or important recognition of home movies and chapters which delve deeper into cultural or theoretical or historical significance/interpretation of amateur or home movies. The book is best read in order as the short chapters tend to give context to the longer ones. Many interesting things said but I don't necessary have quotes/references from every chapter.

Page 70,  "nostodisiac, a stimulant of nostalgia"
Page 76: discusses old (90s and prior) vs new preservation of 8mm film.

Page 83, Quoting Zaldivar: "I found that by having the camera and asking the questions, you get answers. With no objection! ... even though I was close to them, I felt a gap between me and my father. Pretty soon the film became about trying to breach that gap and asking him questions and talking about things we hadn't talked about before". 

[show this article to An]

Page 86, expensive use of "Bewitched" in film opposed to less expensive archival film. 

Page 92, "Florida Moving Images Archive formerly Louis Wolfson II Media History Center"

Page 94, Miami bus tours have tvs with archival films playing. 

Deja View - touring home movies.

Page 116: "Spectators do not come to a film as empty vessels passively waiting to be filled. Rather, they are purposive social actors with specific cultural and historical baggage"

Page 122, Robert A. Nakamura one of two who established Moving Image Archive of the National Museum. 

Page 126, memory is always incomplete. Topaz, a different film about Japanese internment i USA. 

Page 130, first hand description of subjects never being dejected on camera. 

Page 132, "No historical record is ever finished; it is always an open text, continually exposed to revision and expansion.... all history bears the stigmata of its own silences and exclusions". 

Page 134, "Snow Falling on Cedars" and Topaz footage as reference. 

Page 142, Netherlands archive most proud of five rare episodes of 1919 Hollywood star doc. 

Page 148 "home movies have participants rather than spectators"

Page 150 "without the original participants, home movies have no meaningfully reconstructable order. Yet, that does not mean that they have no sense or significance at all"

Page 153, "Films commissioned by the Colonial Institute in Amsterdam"

Page 173-4, documentary paves way for "middle cinema" between industry and government propaganda in India.
Page 176, cost of 16mm in 1970s discussed.
Page 180, "Iqbal Khan reveals his own narcissistic desire to be seen"
Page 181, cyanide used in developing.

Page 186-187, "Our town" or "see yourself in motion pictures" genre described.

Page 194, vinegar syndrome on film described with link to website.
-Post American revolution change in symbolic status/attitude about the mule; interesting bit of history in comparison/relation to racisim. 

Page 222, re: silent film, "Could the absence of local people's voices disclose middle-class attitudes towards the ownership of knowledge and indeed the nature of knowledge itself?"

Page 255, "semio-pragmatic model" - 9 modes named (relates to spectator-ship and text of film)
[good article for Kallie?]
Page 256-7, "In family cinema, the production of the film is not a primary goal. The filmmaker films to play with the camera and its various gadgets. He/she films for the pleasure of gathering the members of the family. ... to look at the camera together testifies to the unity of the familial unit. The family filmmaker's camera functions first as a go-between and only secondly as a recording instrument".
Page 257, The film visualizes how the father used cinema to rule over his family.
Page 258, traumatizing children through filming them.
Page 259, "the home movie does not communicate. Instead, it invites us to use a double process of remembering"
Page 263, "endotic" (vs exotic)
Page 263, "I can position the cameraman as enunciator ... The film then becomes a documentary on the filmmaker".

Page 276, home movies discussed in terms of "national cinema".
Page 277, uses Foucault to discuss gaps in history inherent in home movies.
Page 277-8, feminism: "professional film is masculine while amateur film is feminine"
Page 279, constructivism promoted to 1920s amateurs with "Eisenstein as teh greatest amateur of all time because he used real people and shot on location"
Page 281, "A study in Reds" interesting sounding film about women who live in fantasy communist world.

Ordinary Film; peter Forgacs's The Maelstrom

Read "Ordinary Film" by Michael S. Roth. Talks about Peter Forgacs's film "The Maelstrom".
Page 63, talks about the banal. "The neighbor is oblivious of the boredom he causes (by his home movies) ... he is looking at himself".
Page 65, "real thinking about the ordinary is problematic because of the particularity.
Page 66, "as soon as the home movie is taken out of the environment, it has the capacity to become either senseless or unheimlich (uncanny)"
Page 67, "Understanding and knowledge demand that you move away from intimacy of your relation with any object or event. Understanding may promise a richer experience in the end, but there is a risk in the movement -toward-distance that knowledge entails."
Page 70, "Nostodisiac, a stimulant of nostalgia" 

Mexico home movie archive

Read "La Filmoteca de la Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico" by Ivan Trujillo. Discusses three films of interest that are home movies in the Mexican archive.
Page 59, "The Return", a home movie by rich film exhibitors shot on 35mm in 1930 with family. However, family was angry and suppressed the film. Sat in vault until 1995 when it was released and became a big hit and is treated as Mexico's first fiction feature (silent).
Page 60, bullfighting film from 1940s.

Wittgenstein Tractatus

Read "Wittgenstein Tractatus; personal reflections on home movies" by Peter Forgacs.
Interweaving of quotes from Wittenstein and then expansions from those quotes as they illustrate the rules/patterns of home movies.
Page 51, points out that home movies record happy times but not the reverse. Weddings are filmed but never divorces. 

remainder of "Photography Beyond Technique"

Finished "Photography Beyond Technique" Should check out www.F295.org and www.tompersinger.com

Many short essays. Often are artist statements. Will only comment on some.

"Synthesizing Centuries" by John Metoyer. Rambling statement mostly focused on mythology and Campbell.
page 39, spirit photos, admits most are corny. "Dana Luciano argues that whether the subject is real or fake, it depicts not an object but a world." see www.news.cornell.edu

"memory, Nature, adn Place" by Craig Barber
Page 45/48, good artist statement as pin hole photographer. Make not of it.

"Something Extraordinary" by Jill Enfield
Page 51-53, another good artist statement on wet process.

"Looking Backward, Seeing Forward: Reframing Visual history" by Robert Hirsch.
Page 56, "appropriation is the backbone of what makes artists artists and how civilization advances"
"The narrow view that bona fide photography should concentrate on depicting a subject topographically is a stance that restricts practice by mistakenly equating truth with the camouflaging of beauty and the hand of the maker, thus  undercutting the potential to communicate with complex ideas. .. as a consequence, splendor and technical expertise are now often admonished as showmanship, which is considered a a detraction from a photograph's supposed objective value.".
Page 61, "If I can visualize it, there could be a way to make it happen".

"That Obscura Object of Desire: a brief history" by Stephen Berkamn discusses the camera obscura.

"One Thousand Invented Cameras" by Joe Babcock, maker of many many pinhole cameras.

"Finding Confidence: Combing process with purpose" by Mark Osterman.
Page 94, created a patent medicine salesman character to combine performance, history, music, adn design. Rebuilt old car. Had father and others pose as a "genuine faux Indian".
Page 107, discusses Oscar Rejlander who used the ghost/spirit photos as would a storyteller.
Discusses being accused of steampunk but didn't know what this meant.

"Photograph as Reliquary" by Jessica Ferguson
Page 128, describes cyanotype well.

"Windows" by Tom Persinger
Page 133-135, black, image less photographs.

"Art of Getting Lost" by Brian Taylor
Page 141, "Every musician must learn to play their instrument before they compose their own piece" (Oliver Gagliani)

"There is no virtue in difficulty" by Don Burkholder.
Page 168, criticizes large prints. Says small prints force the viewer to get closer rather than back away.

"Imaginary Whole-Plates or, Notes towards their reinvention of photography" by Alan Greeen
Experiments with using unwashed or unfixed cyanotypes to get a range of colours rather than just blue but they then fade in time.
Page 192, unlike photography, "late Gothic print makers never claimed to be the inventors of their craft"
Page 193, "until now, a photography ... has generally been about anything other than itself: portriats, landscapes ... "
Wrote a book called "Primitive Photography".

Estabrook and Casanave on Photography

Two articles from "Photography Beyond Technique, essays from F295 on the informed use of alternative and historical photographic processes" edited by Tom Persinger.

"Notes on the art of failure" by Dan Estabrook
Page 21, William Henry Fox Talbot, an English photography innovator, devised photography in 1840 to compensate for his inability to draw well, even with the camera lucita.
"If photography was born from failure, then surely it must have always carried failure in its genes"
Page 22024, writer creates false old photos using old techniques and props as fake "found" objects.

"Mystery, Memory, and Narrative" by Martha Casanave
Page 32, pinhole "is this dream or is it memory?"
"No 'shooting' for pinhole photographers! No, we uncover the aperture and allow the light to accumulate slowly." 

Youtube at the End of New Media

Read "YouTube at the End of New Media" by Richard Grusin.
Page 61/63, remediation - youtube is a medium that remediates tv.
Page 64, the end of new media is suggested.
Page 66, "dividuated"
Page 72, problem of "face-to-face"
Page 74, "home movies ... were often recorded by fathers and focuses on .... Christmas, birthdays, and weddings"
Page 77, Patricia Zimmerman on fatherhood home movies.
Page 81-82, "Phatic" - meaningless introductions or apologies which "continue communication although they do not necessarily communicate crucial information".