#and rainer michelle i love you forever

[funkylittlebats]

I just finished taz grad...... woaw

[ropebuny]

could you please post a list of kinky movies???

other than Secretary cause I already know that one haha

I actually haven’t seen that one yet ! it’s been on my watchlist for forever, I need to get around to watching it. and I haven’t actually seen many kinky or erotic movies unfortunately, so pls ignore how bad this list is but. I did my best ok. also pls keep in mind I haven’t seen every single one of these listed movies yet but I added them because their descriptions seemed to fit in here

bloodsisters: leather, dykes, and sadomasochism (1995) dir. michelle handelmann

videodrome (1983) dir. david cronenberg

crash (1996) dir. david cronenberg

from beyond (1986) dir. stuart gordon

good boy (original title: meg, deg & frank) (2022) dir. viljar bøe

belle de jour (1967) dir. luis buñuel

blue velvet (1986) dir. david lynch

the night porter (1974) dir. liliana cavani

venus in fur (2013) dir. roman polanski (🤢🤢🤢🤢)

venus in furs (1969) dir. massimo dallamano

sleeping beauty (2011) dir. julia leigh

the slave (1969) dir. pasquale festa campanile

liza (1972) dir. marco ferreri

the laughing woman (1969) dir. piero schivazappa

the forbidden photos of a lady above suspicion (1970) dir. luciano ercoli

the punishment (1973) dir. pierre-alain jolivet

successive slidings of pleasure (1974) dir. alain robbe-grillet

the story of o (1975) dir. just jaeckin

crimes of passion (1984) dir. ken russell

tightrope (1984) dir. richard tuggle

seduction: the cruel woman (1975) dir. elfi mikesch, monika treut

tie me up! tie me down! (1989) dir. pedro almodóvar

female misbehavior (1992) dir. monika treut

bitter moon (1992) dir. roman polanski (🤢🤢🤢🤢)

basic instinct (1992) dir. paul verhoeven

bound (1996) dir. lilly & lana wachowski

strictly speaking (1998) dir. kirk demorest

tops & bottoms (1999) dir. christine richey

first love (2004) dir. matteo garrone

s&m judge (2009) dir. erik lamens

be my slave (2012) dir. tōru kamei

kink (2013) dir. christina alexandra voros

wetlands (2013) dir. david wnendt

folsom forever (2014) dir. mark jensen

mr. leather (2019) dir. daniel nolasco

saint-narcisse (2020) dir. bruce labruce

divinely evil (2020) dir. gustavo vinagre

I cut your flesh (2020) dir. samhel

the pleasure of rope (2015) dir. bob bentley

fetishes (1996) dir. nick broomfield

venus in furs (1995) dir. maartje seyferth, victor nieuwenhuijs

new love in tokyo (1994) dir. banmei takahashi

the bedroom (1992) dir. hisayasu satō

beyond vanilla (2001) dir. claes lilja

the piano teacher (2001) dir. michael haneke

salon kitty (1976) dir. tinto brass

the duke of burgundy (2014) dir. peter strickland

pvt chat (2020) dir. ben hozie

in the basement (2014) dir. ulrich seidl

leap year (2010) dir. michael rowe

fruits of passion (1981) dir. shūji terayama

o fantasma (2000) dir. joão pedro rodrigues

a snake of june (2002) dir. shinya tsukamoto

islands (2017) dir. yann gonzalez

querelle (1982) dir. rainer werner fassbinder

sex, lies, religion (1994) dir. annette kennerley

love (2015) dir. gaspar noé

moonlight whispers (1999) dir. akihiko shiota

cruising (1980) dir. william friedkin

trans-europ-express (1966) dir. alain robbe-grillet

[hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff]

WHAT CAN MOVIES teach us about writing?

I think about this question a lot, in part because I have the unique luck to teach a graduate workshop called Creative Critical Writing in the Media Arts + Practice program in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. The intention of the class was to loosen up our PhD students as they embark on their dissertations. Faced with an immense project that requires integrating critical theory with their own particular art practice, my students sometimes freeze, especially with regard to the writing portion of the endeavor. Even bold artists are prone to headlong retreat, letting a sea of other voices overwhelm what they might have to say about their own work.

The writing workshop shakes things up a bit. It is willfully impractical and playful; I refuse to discuss how to make an argument, cite a source, or review the literature. In place of citation, we shamelessly borrow and steal. And rather than consider bolstering a disciplinary system through proper academic behavior, we revel in undoing, unmaking, unraveling. We talk about voice by whispering and screaming. We feel the punch of punctuation. We chant our favorite words until they dissolve into meaninglessness. We get a little feral and we write and write and write.

And, because we are within the cinematic arts, I bring out the movies. This is one of the best parts of the workshop. Below, I offer a few examples of how we borrow techniques from moving images to catalyze and even reimagine our writing practice.

Erase!

“Automatic Writing” | William Kentridge | 2003 | 3:00

South African artist William Kentridge has created a series of short animated films in which he draws a scene with charcoal, then smudges and erases portions of the picture, captures a film frame, and then redraws over the rubbed out image, before capturing yet another frame. Through this painstaking process of sketching, erasure, and redrawing frame by frame, a world emerges and then fades away, only to materialize again, but changed. Traces of the past remain in the flux of marking and making.

Our example in class is Automatic Writing, Kentridge’s beautiful 2003 film in which we watch the play of appearance and dissolution as the artist conjures buildings, a fountain, a living room, and a nude woman, among other things. Images and scenes appear and then dissolve into the next sequence, the black marks rubbed to a dull gray. At one point, the only movement in a room stuffed with furniture comes from the flickering fins of fish in a bowl. The film also includes abundant amounts of handwriting — words, scribbles, diagrams — and it is as if we are moving through the quickly paced reveries of a distracted mind.

After viewing Automatic Writing, the participants in the workshop talk about the artist’s process, which suggests the messiness of writing, to be sure. We also discuss the technique of automatic writing, derived from Surrealism, in which writers register their thoughts without pausing for a set amount of time, allowing the unconscious to reveal itself. But more than either of these motifs, the film seems to embody the mercurial flow of writing, the ways in which writing can only be achieved through the fundamental act of putting pencil to paper (or fingers to keyboard). Further, while we may sit down to write something — a poem about love, perhaps — if we let it, the writing will scurry elsewhere. Kentridge may know where he is going, but moment by moment, the drawing is in a state of becoming indelibly tied to what was previously on the page. And it is this becoming-writing that is so magical. Finally, the film underscores the idea that erasure may be as significant, if not more so, than the writing itself. This is a challenging lesson for academic writers, who are encouraged to go long and dense. But elision and cutting away can render a lean, or perhaps elliptical, piece.

Limit!

“A Man and His Dog Out for Air” | Robert Breer | 1957 | 2:00

The flowing contour drawing created by American animator Robert Breer in his extraordinary 1957 short film A Man and His Dog Out for Air restricts its perspective to a small area of the screen, revealing only a tiny bit of the world at a time. As the constantly moving, black hand-drawn lines morph and twist, they begin to disclose an entire streetscape, and slowly, we glean that there is indeed a man and a dog out for air. However, the setting and our characters appear only through a limited point of view, ever so gradually.

The visual illustration of how to restrict point of view is another welcome tool for writing. Breer cleverly narrows the horizon in his film to pique our interest; we are called on to solve the mystery of the story unfolding before us. In fiction, this technique can bring us in close to characters as we witness only what they see and hear. In nonfiction, we can be limited to the view of our narrator, and to powerful effect. The world becomes quite close and intimate.

Look!

“Hand Movie” | Yvonne Rainer | 1966 | 8:00

Filmmaker, dancer, and choreographer Yvonne Rainer has made an extraordinary collection of films, the earliest of which is simply titled Hand Movie. Created as an experiment, the eight-minute piece was shot in 8mm black-and-white film in 1966 by fellow artist William Davis and features footage only of Rainer’s hand held up in front of the camera. The hand begins to move, with the fingers bending, wrapping, pushing, and rubbing throughout the full duration of the film. The hand gradually transforms from a familiar body part to some strangely contorted and even grotesque shape before resolving back into its simple hand-ness. It is nearly impossible to watch Hand Movie without feeling the hand’s movements in your own body.

Inspired by Rainer’s focus, what can you discern through absolute attention to one thing? It may be a part of your body, or it may be some other material object. Can you bring discipline and extreme patience to the act of looking at what is before you and writing what you perceive? Can you let go of assumptions, names, and categories and let the thing’s thingness become strange and new to you?

Stop and Circle!

“Play>>” | Liisa Lounila | 2003 | 5:00

One of the most dazzling cinematic techniques in recent film history involves slowing time down in order to circle a specific moment. Time, in a sense, becomes space. Known as bullet-time, the filmmaking technique was perhaps most famously used in The Matrix in 1999, when Neo (Keanu Reeves) dodges a bullet, which he sees coming toward him in slow motion, while the camera arcs up and around him in a balletic swoop. To create the bullet-time effect, filmmakers stage an array of cameras around the scene to be filmed, often in a semi-circle. The cameras are triggered simultaneously, capturing an instant on each. Then, in post-production, the images from each camera are stitched together and — voila! — a single moment in time can be moved through spatially. We travel around the scene, sweeping through the space of a moment.

Bullet-time has a rich history prior to The Matrix, from the sequential images captured by photographer Eadweard Muybridge to the playful distortions of time and space in the music videos of Michel Gondry, but for our purposes, it serves as yet another visualization of a writing technique. In class, I use the work of Finnish video artist Liisa Lounila, who has made a handful of intriguing bullet-time short films using pinhole cameras. In Play >> (2003), for example, the camera seems to prowl through a gathering of young revelers carousing at a party. However, the celebration remains eerily suspended in time. We move, but nothing else does in the scene; through this meandering, however, we have time to learn more about the quiescent scene around us.

Translating bullet-time to our writing, we can analogously stop a scene and move through it more slowly, stepping outside the flow of the narrative in order to reflect and elaborate. We can also shift our attention, moving from one topic or object to another, or shift point of view, examining the world from changing narratorial perspectives. Imagine walking through the scene in slow motion and looking around the slowed unfolding of the event: what else might be visible?

Steal!

Removed | Naomi Uman | 1999 | 7:00

In her 1999 film Removed, filmmaker Naomi Uman took a segment of found porn footage, painted nail polish over everything but the images of the nude female bodies, and then doused the polished footage in bleach, thereby removing only the unpolished imagery. The result is a porn film in which the body of the woman disappears. In its place is a writhing, pulsing washed-out shape, the absence that conditions the rest of the image. Removed lets us see the footage anew; things that we may have ignored in the unadulterated imagery now become visible.

How can we use this technique in our writing? Of course, appropriated texts provide rich resources, and the borrowed form is a well-known device in both fiction and nonfiction. In addition, Uman’s clever play of covering one portion of the image and then dissolving a different segment suggests a manner of both safeguarding and destroying our source material. If you appropriate a piece of text, what elements can be “covered” and the rest “dissolved”? And how does removal forever change what remains?

Many writers cheerfully sit down and write without a problem. However, some of us can use a little help in the form of techniques that defamiliarize the writing process. Through tactics culled from fellow artists, we can step outside of our habitual approaches and play a bit, and perhaps see the world ­— and write it — anew.

¤

Holly Willis teaches classes in writing, film, and new media in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.

¤

Banner image from Automatic Writing.

The post Teaching with Film appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2FDTHNh

[how2to18]

WHAT CAN MOVIES teach us about writing?

I think about this question a lot, in part because I have the unique luck to teach a graduate workshop called Creative Critical Writing in the Media Arts + Practice program in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. The intention of the class was to loosen up our PhD students as they embark on their dissertations. Faced with an immense project that requires integrating critical theory with their own particular art practice, my students sometimes freeze, especially with regard to the writing portion of the endeavor. Even bold artists are prone to headlong retreat, letting a sea of other voices overwhelm what they might have to say about their own work.

The writing workshop shakes things up a bit. It is willfully impractical and playful; I refuse to discuss how to make an argument, cite a source, or review the literature. In place of citation, we shamelessly borrow and steal. And rather than consider bolstering a disciplinary system through proper academic behavior, we revel in undoing, unmaking, unraveling. We talk about voice by whispering and screaming. We feel the punch of punctuation. We chant our favorite words until they dissolve into meaninglessness. We get a little feral and we write and write and write.

And, because we are within the cinematic arts, I bring out the movies. This is one of the best parts of the workshop. Below, I offer a few examples of how we borrow techniques from moving images to catalyze and even reimagine our writing practice.

Erase!

“Automatic Writing” | William Kentridge | 2003 | 3:00

South African artist William Kentridge has created a series of short animated films in which he draws a scene with charcoal, then smudges and erases portions of the picture, captures a film frame, and then redraws over the rubbed out image, before capturing yet another frame. Through this painstaking process of sketching, erasure, and redrawing frame by frame, a world emerges and then fades away, only to materialize again, but changed. Traces of the past remain in the flux of marking and making.

Our example in class is Automatic Writing, Kentridge’s beautiful 2003 film in which we watch the play of appearance and dissolution as the artist conjures buildings, a fountain, a living room, and a nude woman, among other things. Images and scenes appear and then dissolve into the next sequence, the black marks rubbed to a dull gray. At one point, the only movement in a room stuffed with furniture comes from the flickering fins of fish in a bowl. The film also includes abundant amounts of handwriting — words, scribbles, diagrams — and it is as if we are moving through the quickly paced reveries of a distracted mind.

After viewing Automatic Writing, the participants in the workshop talk about the artist’s process, which suggests the messiness of writing, to be sure. We also discuss the technique of automatic writing, derived from Surrealism, in which writers register their thoughts without pausing for a set amount of time, allowing the unconscious to reveal itself. But more than either of these motifs, the film seems to embody the mercurial flow of writing, the ways in which writing can only be achieved through the fundamental act of putting pencil to paper (or fingers to keyboard). Further, while we may sit down to write something — a poem about love, perhaps — if we let it, the writing will scurry elsewhere. Kentridge may know where he is going, but moment by moment, the drawing is in a state of becoming indelibly tied to what was previously on the page. And it is this becoming-writing that is so magical. Finally, the film underscores the idea that erasure may be as significant, if not more so, than the writing itself. This is a challenging lesson for academic writers, who are encouraged to go long and dense. But elision and cutting away can render a lean, or perhaps elliptical, piece.

Limit!

“A Man and His Dog Out for Air” | Robert Breer | 1957 | 2:00

The flowing contour drawing created by American animator Robert Breer in his extraordinary 1957 short film A Man and His Dog Out for Air restricts its perspective to a small area of the screen, revealing only a tiny bit of the world at a time. As the constantly moving, black hand-drawn lines morph and twist, they begin to disclose an entire streetscape, and slowly, we glean that there is indeed a man and a dog out for air. However, the setting and our characters appear only through a limited point of view, ever so gradually.

The visual illustration of how to restrict point of view is another welcome tool for writing. Breer cleverly narrows the horizon in his film to pique our interest; we are called on to solve the mystery of the story unfolding before us. In fiction, this technique can bring us in close to characters as we witness only what they see and hear. In nonfiction, we can be limited to the view of our narrator, and to powerful effect. The world becomes quite close and intimate.

Look!

“Hand Movie” | Yvonne Rainer | 1966 | 8:00

Filmmaker, dancer, and choreographer Yvonne Rainer has made an extraordinary collection of films, the earliest of which is simply titled Hand Movie. Created as an experiment, the eight-minute piece was shot in 8mm black-and-white film in 1966 by fellow artist William Davis and features footage only of Rainer’s hand held up in front of the camera. The hand begins to move, with the fingers bending, wrapping, pushing, and rubbing throughout the full duration of the film. The hand gradually transforms from a familiar body part to some strangely contorted and even grotesque shape before resolving back into its simple hand-ness. It is nearly impossible to watch Hand Movie without feeling the hand’s movements in your own body.

Inspired by Rainer’s focus, what can you discern through absolute attention to one thing? It may be a part of your body, or it may be some other material object. Can you bring discipline and extreme patience to the act of looking at what is before you and writing what you perceive? Can you let go of assumptions, names, and categories and let the thing’s thingness become strange and new to you?

Stop and Circle!

“Play>>” | Liisa Lounila | 2003 | 5:00

One of the most dazzling cinematic techniques in recent film history involves slowing time down in order to circle a specific moment. Time, in a sense, becomes space. Known as bullet-time, the filmmaking technique was perhaps most famously used in The Matrix in 1999, when Neo (Keanu Reeves) dodges a bullet, which he sees coming toward him in slow motion, while the camera arcs up and around him in a balletic swoop. To create the bullet-time effect, filmmakers stage an array of cameras around the scene to be filmed, often in a semi-circle. The cameras are triggered simultaneously, capturing an instant on each. Then, in post-production, the images from each camera are stitched together and — voila! — a single moment in time can be moved through spatially. We travel around the scene, sweeping through the space of a moment.

Bullet-time has a rich history prior to The Matrix, from the sequential images captured by photographer Eadweard Muybridge to the playful distortions of time and space in the music videos of Michel Gondry, but for our purposes, it serves as yet another visualization of a writing technique. In class, I use the work of Finnish video artist Liisa Lounila, who has made a handful of intriguing bullet-time short films using pinhole cameras. In Play >> (2003), for example, the camera seems to prowl through a gathering of young revelers carousing at a party. However, the celebration remains eerily suspended in time. We move, but nothing else does in the scene; through this meandering, however, we have time to learn more about the quiescent scene around us.

Translating bullet-time to our writing, we can analogously stop a scene and move through it more slowly, stepping outside the flow of the narrative in order to reflect and elaborate. We can also shift our attention, moving from one topic or object to another, or shift point of view, examining the world from changing narratorial perspectives. Imagine walking through the scene in slow motion and looking around the slowed unfolding of the event: what else might be visible?

Steal!

Removed | Naomi Uman | 1999 | 7:00

In her 1999 film Removed, filmmaker Naomi Uman took a segment of found porn footage, painted nail polish over everything but the images of the nude female bodies, and then doused the polished footage in bleach, thereby removing only the unpolished imagery. The result is a porn film in which the body of the woman disappears. In its place is a writhing, pulsing washed-out shape, the absence that conditions the rest of the image. Removed lets us see the footage anew; things that we may have ignored in the unadulterated imagery now become visible.

How can we use this technique in our writing? Of course, appropriated texts provide rich resources, and the borrowed form is a well-known device in both fiction and nonfiction. In addition, Uman’s clever play of covering one portion of the image and then dissolving a different segment suggests a manner of both safeguarding and destroying our source material. If you appropriate a piece of text, what elements can be “covered” and the rest “dissolved”? And how does removal forever change what remains?

Many writers cheerfully sit down and write without a problem. However, some of us can use a little help in the form of techniques that defamiliarize the writing process. Through tactics culled from fellow artists, we can step outside of our habitual approaches and play a bit, and perhaps see the world ­— and write it — anew.

¤

Holly Willis teaches classes in writing, film, and new media in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.

¤

Banner image from Automatic Writing.

The post Teaching with Film appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2FDTHNh via IFTTT

[topmixtrends]

WHAT CAN MOVIES teach us about writing?

I think about this question a lot, in part because I have the unique luck to teach a graduate workshop called Creative Critical Writing in the Media Arts + Practice program in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. The intention of the class was to loosen up our PhD students as they embark on their dissertations. Faced with an immense project that requires integrating critical theory with their own particular art practice, my students sometimes freeze, especially with regard to the writing portion of the endeavor. Even bold artists are prone to headlong retreat, letting a sea of other voices overwhelm what they might have to say about their own work.

The writing workshop shakes things up a bit. It is willfully impractical and playful; I refuse to discuss how to make an argument, cite a source, or review the literature. In place of citation, we shamelessly borrow and steal. And rather than consider bolstering a disciplinary system through proper academic behavior, we revel in undoing, unmaking, unraveling. We talk about voice by whispering and screaming. We feel the punch of punctuation. We chant our favorite words until they dissolve into meaninglessness. We get a little feral and we write and write and write.

And, because we are within the cinematic arts, I bring out the movies. This is one of the best parts of the workshop. Below, I offer a few examples of how we borrow techniques from moving images to catalyze and even reimagine our writing practice.

Erase!

“Automatic Writing” | William Kentridge | 2003 | 3:00

South African artist William Kentridge has created a series of short animated films in which he draws a scene with charcoal, then smudges and erases portions of the picture, captures a film frame, and then redraws over the rubbed out image, before capturing yet another frame. Through this painstaking process of sketching, erasure, and redrawing frame by frame, a world emerges and then fades away, only to materialize again, but changed. Traces of the past remain in the flux of marking and making.

Our example in class is Automatic Writing, Kentridge’s beautiful 2003 film in which we watch the play of appearance and dissolution as the artist conjures buildings, a fountain, a living room, and a nude woman, among other things. Images and scenes appear and then dissolve into the next sequence, the black marks rubbed to a dull gray. At one point, the only movement in a room stuffed with furniture comes from the flickering fins of fish in a bowl. The film also includes abundant amounts of handwriting — words, scribbles, diagrams — and it is as if we are moving through the quickly paced reveries of a distracted mind.

After viewing Automatic Writing, the participants in the workshop talk about the artist’s process, which suggests the messiness of writing, to be sure. We also discuss the technique of automatic writing, derived from Surrealism, in which writers register their thoughts without pausing for a set amount of time, allowing the unconscious to reveal itself. But more than either of these motifs, the film seems to embody the mercurial flow of writing, the ways in which writing can only be achieved through the fundamental act of putting pencil to paper (or fingers to keyboard). Further, while we may sit down to write something — a poem about love, perhaps — if we let it, the writing will scurry elsewhere. Kentridge may know where he is going, but moment by moment, the drawing is in a state of becoming indelibly tied to what was previously on the page. And it is this becoming-writing that is so magical. Finally, the film underscores the idea that erasure may be as significant, if not more so, than the writing itself. This is a challenging lesson for academic writers, who are encouraged to go long and dense. But elision and cutting away can render a lean, or perhaps elliptical, piece.

Limit!

“A Man and His Dog Out for Air” | Robert Breer | 1957 | 2:00

The flowing contour drawing created by American animator Robert Breer in his extraordinary 1957 short film A Man and His Dog Out for Air restricts its perspective to a small area of the screen, revealing only a tiny bit of the world at a time. As the constantly moving, black hand-drawn lines morph and twist, they begin to disclose an entire streetscape, and slowly, we glean that there is indeed a man and a dog out for air. However, the setting and our characters appear only through a limited point of view, ever so gradually.

The visual illustration of how to restrict point of view is another welcome tool for writing. Breer cleverly narrows the horizon in his film to pique our interest; we are called on to solve the mystery of the story unfolding before us. In fiction, this technique can bring us in close to characters as we witness only what they see and hear. In nonfiction, we can be limited to the view of our narrator, and to powerful effect. The world becomes quite close and intimate.

Look!

“Hand Movie” | Yvonne Rainer | 1966 | 8:00

Filmmaker, dancer, and choreographer Yvonne Rainer has made an extraordinary collection of films, the earliest of which is simply titled Hand Movie. Created as an experiment, the eight-minute piece was shot in 8mm black-and-white film in 1966 by fellow artist William Davis and features footage only of Rainer’s hand held up in front of the camera. The hand begins to move, with the fingers bending, wrapping, pushing, and rubbing throughout the full duration of the film. The hand gradually transforms from a familiar body part to some strangely contorted and even grotesque shape before resolving back into its simple hand-ness. It is nearly impossible to watch Hand Movie without feeling the hand’s movements in your own body.

Inspired by Rainer’s focus, what can you discern through absolute attention to one thing? It may be a part of your body, or it may be some other material object. Can you bring discipline and extreme patience to the act of looking at what is before you and writing what you perceive? Can you let go of assumptions, names, and categories and let the thing’s thingness become strange and new to you?

Stop and Circle!

“Play>>” | Liisa Lounila | 2003 | 5:00

One of the most dazzling cinematic techniques in recent film history involves slowing time down in order to circle a specific moment. Time, in a sense, becomes space. Known as bullet-time, the filmmaking technique was perhaps most famously used in The Matrix in 1999, when Neo (Keanu Reeves) dodges a bullet, which he sees coming toward him in slow motion, while the camera arcs up and around him in a balletic swoop. To create the bullet-time effect, filmmakers stage an array of cameras around the scene to be filmed, often in a semi-circle. The cameras are triggered simultaneously, capturing an instant on each. Then, in post-production, the images from each camera are stitched together and — voila! — a single moment in time can be moved through spatially. We travel around the scene, sweeping through the space of a moment.

Bullet-time has a rich history prior to The Matrix, from the sequential images captured by photographer Eadweard Muybridge to the playful distortions of time and space in the music videos of Michel Gondry, but for our purposes, it serves as yet another visualization of a writing technique. In class, I use the work of Finnish video artist Liisa Lounila, who has made a handful of intriguing bullet-time short films using pinhole cameras. In Play >> (2003), for example, the camera seems to prowl through a gathering of young revelers carousing at a party. However, the celebration remains eerily suspended in time. We move, but nothing else does in the scene; through this meandering, however, we have time to learn more about the quiescent scene around us.

Translating bullet-time to our writing, we can analogously stop a scene and move through it more slowly, stepping outside the flow of the narrative in order to reflect and elaborate. We can also shift our attention, moving from one topic or object to another, or shift point of view, examining the world from changing narratorial perspectives. Imagine walking through the scene in slow motion and looking around the slowed unfolding of the event: what else might be visible?

Steal!

Removed | Naomi Uman | 1999 | 7:00

In her 1999 film Removed, filmmaker Naomi Uman took a segment of found porn footage, painted nail polish over everything but the images of the nude female bodies, and then doused the polished footage in bleach, thereby removing only the unpolished imagery. The result is a porn film in which the body of the woman disappears. In its place is a writhing, pulsing washed-out shape, the absence that conditions the rest of the image. Removed lets us see the footage anew; things that we may have ignored in the unadulterated imagery now become visible.

How can we use this technique in our writing? Of course, appropriated texts provide rich resources, and the borrowed form is a well-known device in both fiction and nonfiction. In addition, Uman’s clever play of covering one portion of the image and then dissolving a different segment suggests a manner of both safeguarding and destroying our source material. If you appropriate a piece of text, what elements can be “covered” and the rest “dissolved”? And how does removal forever change what remains?

Many writers cheerfully sit down and write without a problem. However, some of us can use a little help in the form of techniques that defamiliarize the writing process. Through tactics culled from fellow artists, we can step outside of our habitual approaches and play a bit, and perhaps see the world ­— and write it — anew.

¤

Holly Willis teaches classes in writing, film, and new media in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.

¤

Banner image from Automatic Writing.

The post Teaching with Film appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2FDTHNh

[marcusssanderson]

50 Meaningful Quotes That Will Help You Stay on Your Path

Our latest collection of meaningful quotes that will help you move forward on your journey.

Struggling to stay on your path? Feeling like you’ve lost sight of the person you want to be?

It’s okay. Many of us go through a phase in life where we feel lost, aimless, confused and alone.

There are many reasons why you could be falling out of touch with yourself.

Maybe you’re buying into other people’s ideas of what you are supposed to be or should be doing rather than what you want to be doing.

Or maybe you are not living your own life because of someone else’s expectation.

No matter what your reasons are, it can be undone.

You have the power to get out of this lost state and create a life you love.

Although it might be easier said than done, you can regain your focus and access your confidence, natural and potential abilities.

You can find yourself by reconnecting with what you love and taking action on it, going on an adventure so you can see and experience the world with fresh eyes, and challenging yourself to get out of your comfort zone.

Besides, there are signs all around us that can inspire you to move forward on your path.

You just need to listen up and pay attention.

Also, you can reach out and ask for help.

Whether it’s a friend, mentor, life coach, or counselor, there are many people who can provide the insight you need to move ahead.

Here is our collection of meaningful quotes, meaningful sayings, and meaningful proverbs that will help you stay on track and open up your potential to truly accomplish that which you set your mind to.

Meaningful quotes that will help you stay on your path

1.) “Nothing will work unless you do.” – Maya Angelou

2.) “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle

3.) “Mistakes are part of the dues that one pays for a full life.” – Sophia Loren

4.) “To be lost is as legitimate a part of your process as being found.”– Alex Ebert

5.) “The optimist sees the rose and not its thorns; the pessimist stares at the thorns, oblivious to the rose.” – Kahlil Gibran

6.) “Challenges are what make life interesting. Overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.” – Joshua Marine

7.) “Better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing flawlessly.” – Robert Schuller

8.) “Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.”– Henry David Thoreau

9.) “Basically, I was so worried about what everyone else was thinking, I forgot about what I was thinking.” ― Lisa M. Cronkhite

10.) “If you feel lost, disappointed, hesitant, or weak, return to yourself, to who you are, here and now and when you get there, you will discover yourself, like a lotus flower in full bloom, even in a muddy pond, beautiful and strong.” ― Masaru Emoto

How to Fight Through the Worst of Times | Michael Crossland

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Meaningful quotes to help you find yourself

11.) “The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere, is to be nowhere.”– Michel de Montaigne

12.) “Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise.” – Alice Walker

13.) “Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die today.” – James Dean

14.) “And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” – Abraham Lincoln

15.) “You got to go down a lot of wrong roads to find the right one.”– Bob Parsons

16.) “Just because someone stumbles and loses their path, doesn’t mean they’re lost forever.” ― Charles Xavier

17.) “When you’re feeling lost, take heart. It’s just your brain gathering the information it needs to make good decisions.” – Josh Kaufman

18.) “Some beautiful paths can’t be discovered without getting lost.”― Erol Ozan

19.) “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” – Aristotle

20.) “You’ve got to find yourself first. Everything else will follow.” ― Charles de Lint

Meaningful quotes for when you feel lost

21.) “Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.” – Confucius

22.) “Life’s burdens are lighter when I laugh at myself.” – Jonathan Lockwood Huie

23.) “The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge.” – Bertrand Russell

24.) “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”— John A. Shedd

25.) “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” – Albert Einstein

26.) “When all else is lost, the future still remains.”– Christian Nestell Bovee

27.) “You just decide what your values are in life and what you are going to do, and then you feel like you count, and that makes life worth living. It makes my life meaningful.” – Annie Lennox

28.) If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never have it. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place.– Nora Roberts

29.) “Not all those who wander are lost.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien

30.) “Getting lost is just another way of saying ‘going exploring.” ― Justina Chen Headley

Meaningful quotes to help you stay on track

31.) “Life is a process. We are a process. The universe is a process.” – Anne Wilson Schaef

32.) “Don’t be seduced into thinking that that which does not make profit is without value.” – Arthur Miller

33.) “I just want people to take a step back, take a deep breath and actually look at something with a different perspective. But most people will never do that.” – Brian McKnight

34.) “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” – Kierkegaard

35.) “There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”– Anaïs Nin

36.) “No matter how much light I carry within me, there will always be times of feeling lost, being confused, seeking direction. It is the way of the human heart.” – Joyce Rupp

37.) “People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.” – Thomas Szasz

38.) “It’s a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy.”– Lucille Ball

39.) “It is not true that everyone is special. It is true that everyone was once special and still possesses the ability to recover it.” ― Criss Jami

40.) “Stay focused, go after your dreams and keep moving toward your goals.” –  LL Cool J

Other meaningful quotes to inspire you

41.) “You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself.”– Alan Alda

42.) “Life is just a chance to grow a soul.” – A. Powell Davies

43.) “The most decisive actions of our life… are most often unconsidered actions.” – André Gide

44.) “Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.” – Elbert Hubbard

45.) “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”— John A. Shedd

46.) “Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” – Maria Robinson

47.) “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.”– Maya Angelou

48.) “Everyone goes astray, but the least imprudent are they who repent the soonest.” – Voltaire

49.) “The only journey is the journey within.” – Rainer Maria Rilke

50.) “Sometimes when you lose your way, you find YOURSELF.” ― Mandy Hale

Which of these meaningful quotes was your favorite?

Due to life’s uncertainties, we sometimes feel lost, worthless and lonely. But no matter what reasons might have caused you to lose sight of yourself, you still have the power to create a life you love.

You have the ability to regain your focus and set yourself on the path to success and happiness. Hopefully, these meaningful quotes will help you find yourself when you’re feeling lost.

Did you enjoy these meaningful quotes? Which of the quotes was your favorite? Tell us in the comment section below. We would love to hear all about it.

The post 50 Meaningful Quotes That Will Help You Stay on Your Path appeared first on Everyday Power.