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Conceptual rightness and fiction: Revealing new truths through fragments in history.

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In contemporary media, images of Arabs often support clichés about faraway societies and dangerous folk. In mass media, the dehumanization of multitudes of people disguises information and reveals little. There could probably be many ways for the Arab community to counter this in the sociology of art and to challenge the popular view when portraying how the West mediates. Akram Zaatari (born in 1966 in Lebanon) and Walid Raad (born in 1967 in Lebanon) did something original when tackling this issue. Instead of challenging the Western media, they presented a vast archive of photographs from the Arab world. The Arab Image Foundation in Beirut (a non-profit organization that collects, studies, and preserves photographs from the Arab world) was the main source for the archive.   [1] Zaatari and Raad both have strong ties with Lebanon and its history of war, resulting in personal connectivity in more ways than just being at York University. The wide-ranging archive presented consisted o...
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Inspired by symbolism in the frame: Takeshi Kitano´s Dolls (2002)

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Figure 1: Takeshi Kitano, Dolls, Sochiku Company Limited, Japan 2002. The film Dolls (2002, Takeshi Kitano) is undoubtedly Kitano's (b. 1947) most visually astounding and painterly film (Harwood, 2017). The film opens and closes with a bunraku performance, a traditional Japanese puppet theatre where dolls act out a chanted dramatic narrative. The bunraku performance in the movie acts out a love-suicide-themed history and serves as a symbolic foundation for the rest of the story. Kitano mentions that the film is allegorical, and one could view it as bunraku in film form (Jagernauth, 2005). A prominent aspect of the main character's story is the couple, tied together, walking through the seasons in an almost aerial perspective. Here, one can compare visual perception to the effects of being in an ethereal space (Pöppel et al., 2016, p. 1). Space and vivid colors are paired, and the absence of shadows is shot in outdoor high-key lighting, creating a dynamic emotion and contra...
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The Moving Portrait: Perceiving personality through watching

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We often think of still images or paintings when we think of portraiture. Freezing a moment and capturing someone's face at a specific time, and perhaps capturing some of that person's essence in that fraction of a second. Between 1964 and 1966,  Screen Tests , a series of short, silent, black-and-white film portraits, was made by  Andy Warhol . [1] Comparing still imagery and painting versus moving images on film as a means of creating portraiture raises questions about the difference in those mediums in terms of how we experience the outcome differently. W hat is the difference in the perceived effect of still versus moving portraiture?    A movie camera rests on a tripod. Warhol uses two one or two lights against a black or white background. [2] He was interested in creating tension with the subject against a neutral background. He was also interested in changes happening with the subject in the duration of the sitting. [3] The camera (not necess...
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The Moving Image as a stream of Consciousness: Analysis of Stan Brakhage´s Dog Star Man

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Stan Brakhage, Dog Star Man (1961-64). One of the most famous works in experimental cinema, and loaded visual stimuli,  Dog Star Man  (1961-1964), by Stan Brakhage, consists of four parts and is thought as a seasonally structured piece that reflects on the history and experiences of man. Prelude is an explosively fast, paced experience. A rapid burst of images showing all the elements of the earth. Organs, birth, a woman´s naked body, trees, burning sun, water, cold and warm landscape. Streetlights at night. Electricity, energy, vibration, other planets, electrical bursts, chaos, and colored light. Layers of images floating on top of each other with electrical-like shots. The experience is otherworldly like, but also, earthly matter and life connecting with the cosmos, with no restrictions when traveling through different dimensions and transcending linear time, making the viewer feel it is all connected. Brakhage takes a somewhat surrealist approach, attem...
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