Hollywood Gender Genre Bender Thing

[barracuda]

There's a definite psychological tie to early photo processing, memories, and dreams. I find it to be coincidental though. I'd have to imagine that dreamers in the byzantine still dreamt in hazy, greyish, vignetted scenes. The nature of dreams can not have been affected by the nostalgia evoked in lesser photographic technology.

Yeah, it might be a coincidence. Though I'd like to think that designers have understood and coopted some of the visual lessons of the last hundred years, or that some of them might have actually been to see a Gerhard Richter show.





But that may well be wishful thinking. I don't really think our dreams or memories actually do mentally appear to resemble old photographs, but that the symbolic qualities inherent in old photos can function as a neat shorthand for the vagaries of visual memory. What dreams and thoughts and memories really "look like" is a question that is beginning to be answered in a more definitive way, for better or worse:



Interesting that the cat looks at Indiana Jones and sees a cat. The measure of all things, I guess.

It was not always the red plate that washed out - it was any:

Yes, I was sort of responding to the color palette remarked upon by nathan, and pursuing its possible source in a somewhat poetic way, admittedly. These kinds of considerations are obviously just a small facet of the production issues of a movie poster, though.

I hope these discussions of the meaning of visual language aren't too far off-topic for the OP. I doubt they fly any farther afoul, though, than again raising the ominous and ever-gathering specter of the influence of the Ahnenerbe on the plight of the contemporary male.

In any case, thanks for the thread, Jack.

[Luther Blissett]

But that may well be wishful thinking. I don't really think our dreams or memories actually do mentally appear to resemble old photographs, but that the symbolic qualities inherent in old photos can function as a neat shorthand for the vagaries of visual memory. What dreams and thoughts and memories really "look like" is a question that is beginning to be answered in a more definitive way, for better or worse:

Perfectly said. They are a shorthand, and it is very difficult to visually portray any said individual's dream. Especially if we supposedly all dream in different ways.

I feel like I have seen some films come close; at least closer than a polaroid. There is the cheap 70's way of trying to portray dreams, which is still more broadly used, and then there are more elaborate and hyperreal ways, none of which are coming to me right now.

Thank you for posting on my favorite videos, and something that is always on my mind.

I don't think we've gone too far off topic. I just like to help out with my expertise in the visual arts when I can. Like I said, the art of the poster is directed from the top down, and any message that the grande financiers want to convey surely get across. I'm sitting right next to a guy who has worked on tons of movie posters and can answer any questions anyone might have about the process.

[Nordic]

Funny, I was just looking through the flickr stream of a guy I know and came across this, of him with, well, this guy:



Looks like it could use some Cyan.

[Canadian_watcher]

this quality of film is ubiquitous in Canada, where it took until the early 21st century get the colour balance right:

[JackRiddler]

............

Saw Inception again last night (quasi reluctant, at the request of me beloved). Gotta laugh at, "He's militarized his subconscious!"

That's it, exactly. That could be the tag line for all of these movies.

R . U . M . S . F . E . L . D

He's Militarized His Subconscious.
Coming Soon

With Inception I was annoyed again that in these supposed dream worlds, there seem to be more laws of nature more rigidly applied than in the waking world. How does it work that a projection of your subconscious can subdue the projection of someone else's subconscious and put it to sleep in a hold, as though it had a real neck?! What makes any of these non-beings follow the supposed rules?

What a contraption, but watching the silly pieces fit together and finally explode was fun. I decided for sure it was all in DiCaprio's head, the fancy corporate intrigue was just the top-level architecture designed by his daughter, Ariadne, in a plan to incept him with the idea that there is a real world and that it's worthwhile to live in it, to heal his trauma from having persuaded his wife that there is no real world or done something else that cost her life. Maybe the multi-level architecture stuff itself is just an invention for a dream, and a different means is being used to put him through this vision. When he wakes up, in the scene after the end of the movie, he's probably 20 years older and in an institution.

Of all those movies, and I'll say this without a doubt even though I'll never see a bunch of them, the only one that gives a feeling of dreams as they are is Shutter Island.

It's not supposed to make sense, Nolan!

.............

barracuda, re: supposed "off-topic" concerns. Are you kidding?! Keep it up, and the rest of you. It's an honor to inspire such thoughts.

We may never know again what dreams were like to our ancestors in their closer-to-natural state. If that's the right way of even thinking of it. We may never know again what anyone was like before the advent of industrially mass-reproduced ubiquitous moving images, let alone back before the scientific and media revolutions began to demystify the world.

Has anyone thought to ask the last tribespeople untouched by this civilization whether they dream in black and white, or sepia, or Polaroids, or whether it's even "like a movie" or story or more like just tactile, or whether they even distinguish between wake and dream...? Surely someone thought to do that?

....................

Finally, morgan. I was almost going to give answers after your first post, about which sex has actually been targeted by eugenics in the real world, not to mention rape and violence and imputation of objecthood without consciousness or sheer immutable otherness (as in many a movie poster), and to have a laugh at how someone says goddess and your first thought is some obscure SS unit (apparently not run by women). But then came the part about how a "mass revolutionary movement" is either male or female, really obviating any need. Just how does that work? No, don't bother. Please. The example you picked as the "only" "successful" "female" movement is a marvelous example of tunnel vision and projection. Maybe marvelous is not the word. At any rate, unique. Do let us know if you can think of any "successful female" one-party dictatorships that massacred millions of people. You may have a case ready to explain why the Nazis or some such were actually "female."

.

[brekin]

This thread really hits on something that prevented me from completely
letting go with Inception. So many of the dream sequences were so
completely undream like. I don't know how others dream but for me
dream images are usually not super crisp and in high definition cold stark
colors.

The obligatory turning on the fog machine for a dream sequence and putting
a soft focus seems rather cliche, but it does help create the impressionist feel
of an actual dream.
All the time and money spent on Inception seemed to never acknowledge the obvious
that the more realistic you make dreams, the less dreamlike they are.
I was reminded of that passage from Borges in Dream Tigers:

Dream Tigers
J. L. Borges
Argumentum Ornithologicum ::

I close my eyes and see a flock of birds. The vision lasts a second or perhaps less; I don’t know how many birds I saw. Were they a definite or an indefinite number? This problem involves the question of the existence of God. If God exists, the number is definite, because how many birds I saw is known to God. If God does not exist, the number is indefinite, because nobody was able to take count. In this case, I saw fewer than ten birds (let’s say) and more than one; but I did not see nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, or two birds. I saw a number between ten and one, but not nine, eight, seven, six, five, etc. That number, as a whole number, is inconceivable; ergo, God exists.

[Luther Blissett]

My girlfriend is currently watching a video where the idea of requiring publications and printed materials to carry a warning that a photo has been retouched is being discussed, and there is a lot of conversation about how mental the state of young females' body dismorphia and eating disorders are today as compared to even ten years ago. In the past, they are saying, the disease was primarily physical.

[Stephen Morgan]

How can body dismorphia be physical? Isn't it a phenomenon characterised by the misperception of one's body? Perception isn't physical, it's mental.

[Luther Blissett]

How can body dismorphia be physical? Isn't it a phenomenon characterised by the misperception of one's body? Perception isn't physical, it's mental.

I guess what I meant by including the "body dismorphia" before "eating disorders," was to group the phenomena that often, but not always, accompanies the eating disorder as a symptom. I should have rearranged that post, instead saying that, to psychologists who have been working in the field for longer than the advent of digital photography and the flourishing of photoshop, body dismorphia is seeming to become more complex, common, and severe. And that eating disorders are now including more complex mental components.