lets just sayy...

appublished:

So How does this kid ALWAYS get the girl in the end again? haha

(Source: messywannabe)

(Source: tonsofphotographyxox)

hyperallergic:

JMW Turner, “Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway” (1844)

Earlier this week, I mentioned the “over the top epic” sense of the word romantic, which I generally derive from my high school lessons of 19th century literary American Romanticism. Romanticism can be a nebulous term to pinpoint exactly, given its long history and location within various fields. The term generally describes movements in the 18th and 19th centuries in western Europe and North America across the fields of literature, politics, and visual arts. Romanticism was a counter-reaction to the rationalism of Enlightenment, valuing the powers of emotion and imagination brought on by the purity and wonder of nature (ie what was understood as God doing His awe-inspiring thing) and human liberty and individualism.

Wikipedia gives a good description of JMW Turner’s romanticism:

Turner placed human beings in many of his paintings to indicate his affection for humanity on the one hand (note the frequent scenes of people drinking and merry-making or working in the foreground), but its vulnerability and vulgarity amid the ‘sublime’ nature of the world on the other hand. ‘Sublime’ here means awe-inspiring, savage grandeur, a natural world unmastered by man, evidence of the power of God–a theme that artists and poets were exploring in this period. The significance of light was to Turner the emanation of God’s spirit and this was why he refined the subject matter of his later paintings by leaving out solid objects and detail, concentrating on the play of light on water, the radiance of skies and fires. Although these late paintings appear to be ‘impressionistic’ and therefore a forerunner of the French school, Turner was striving for expression of spirituality in the world, rather than responding primarily to optical phenomena….

One popular story about Turner, though it likely has little basis in reality, states that he even had himself ‘tied to the mast of a ship in order to experience the drama’ of the elements during a storm at sea.

I find that last tidbit (rumor or not) — such devotion to one’s art that he must experience the heightened drama of nature in order to represent it! — to be the cherry on the romantic cake. I also gotta mention: Turner is referenced in the Rufus Wainwright song “The Art Teacher”, the story of a girl’s childhood infatuation carried on into adulthood, and I find the song, like so many stories of torches carried on loyally throughout life, terribly romantic.

(Source: photojojo)

hyperallergic:

Bill Viola, a still from “Chott el-Djerid (A Portrait in Light and Heat)” (1979)

In his blog film, eyeballs, brain, Benito Vergara gives an interesting account of this video:

Bill Viola’s video is set in a 5,000-square kilometer salt lake in the Sahara Desert that receives 100 millimeters of rain a year, according to Wikipedia. (Chott el-Djerid is also famous for something entirely cinematically different: it stands in for the planet of Tatooine in the Star Wars saga.)

Despite the promise of heat, however, the film begins with shots of snow-blanketed fields in Saskatchewan and Illinois, and it’s only in retrospect that the viewer understands the juxtaposition: different climates, but with a similar visual uncertainty, experienced while you watch a telephone pole shiver in the gray. More accurately, the film starts with nothing but blinding whiteness, while an undefinable shape fades in off-center. We hear a loud rumble, and it’s almost disappointing to realize that it’s probably just a truck passing by. (The soundtrack is fascinating throughout, all hiss and howl and subterranean growl.)

The camera hardly moves, except to zoom in on occasion*, and this is Viola’s most explicit reference, as it were, to the technological. Otherwise the audience’s eye is equated squarely with the video camera’s lens, and this, I think, is crucial to one of Viola’s main points: that our act of seeing these natural impossibilities are in fact largely unmediated….

This alien shimmer of heat renders the Tunisian landscape pulsing and unstable, rock formations like clouds of ink. You watch as a truck drive into a field of ripple; the effect is almost unsettling, as if the vehicle is about to dematerialize once it passes through.

A human figure walks diagonally towards the camera — except that it starts as a mere dot, a mote growing larger until we realize what it is — then it stops being a dot. Throughout Viola’s video, objects merely hover at the border of our understanding, between the familiar and unfamiliar. This alienating effect is repeated with a red truck, but without (literally) a frame of reference in terms of perspective it appears to glide across the horizon.

What Viola seems to be interested in is the instability of our visual comprehension of the world around us. But this unearthly beauty isn’t necessarily the product of artifice from the editing room — which is where film, particularly in its early experimental years, has interrogated individual perception. In Chott el-Djerid, it’s nature itself that messes with your eyes.

(Source: photojojo)