So this week, we continued on to finish the time-twisted, mindboggling film that is Memento. As stated before, one of the most noticeable elements of the movie was how as the movie progressed further and further backwards, the scenes were getting shorter and shorter. It was almost as if it was race to the start rather than finish. The entire class was dying to know what had happened and who the real and infamous “John G” was. Was it Natalie? Was it Teddy? Who is who? What was the significance of Sammy’s role in the story? My first thought was that Teddy was actually a good guy whereas Natalie was the real John G, manipulating Lenny’s short-term memory to work in her favor. Yet as the storyline traveled backwards, the truth revealed that everyone was “John G”—including Lenny, himself. Lenny was both John G and Sammy. He replaced his own memory and accidental murder of his wife with that of a made-up character—one which he thought to be real and not him, of course. Yet in reality, his wife survived her attempted murder by another, unidentified John G and Lenny, in trying to protect his wife, was badly beaten to the point that his memory was incredibly damaged. And the days afterward, Lenny, who would always give his diabetic wife, insulin shots, gave her an overdose of insulin, thus killing her. After the death of his wife, Lenny went on a wild rampage and search for the supposed killer. And it turns out that both Teddy and Natalie manipulated Lenny’s memory to work in their favor. Both wanting revenge, Natalie was able to get Lenny to capture and punish the suspected murderer of her husband while Teddy, or Officer John G, used Lenny to kill elusive and infamous drug dealers and criminals. Lenny was simply a puppet for Natalie, for Teddy, and for himself as he continued to create lies and new memories and new stories in desperate search for the truth—or whatever he wanted to be the truth.
After we finished with the film, we then moved on to observing time in a linear perspective. For one class, we were assigned to read Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards and do the given exercises. What I found to be the most interesting and slightly challenging exercise was the up-side down drawing in which we were instructed to replicate a drawing of a man as he was shown upside down. We were to do this by following all the lines and observing their relations and interactions with other lines. Overall, this reading proved to be both fun and engaging in that it provoked us to create a shift in the flow of information in our brains from the logical and empirical left hemisphere of the brain to the creative and visual right side of the brain. For the following class, we were prompted to move around Monty and observe both lines from nature and lines from man-made objects. It was challenging in away because though St. Mary’s is a school fully immersed within a natural and eco-friendly environment, it was hard to find lines other than the ones that outlined trees, leaves, vines, and stones. Yet within those categories I found different types of lines such as the varying lines that create different shapes of leaves and trees or when bugs or bees would fly by. We then moved as a class down to a small part of the woods where we were instructed to observe and draw the natural setting using the hand-eye technique in which we were to coordinate our eyes with our hands as we carefully observed every inch, every line, and every detail of the outline of the object all the while not looking down at our papers or hardly looking at it at all. This too was challenging and even a little frustrating but in the end, we were able to enhance our hand-eye coordination. Lastly we moved to the drawing studio where we observed and drew to stools placed together. We created a basic drawing in which we then cut out the free or negative spaces and recreated the drawing using those spaces onto another paper. In doing so, this proved that line and space are inseparable and related because line exists within space—just as time exists within space as well.
We then were to read Ways of Seeing by John Berger. This excerpt was very fascinating from the start with its opening statement proclaiming that “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes it can speak”. This quote outlines the premise of this excerpt which basically talks about why and how we connect and associate visual aspects to concrete objects and social constructs or ideas. Berger used the Key of Dreams by Rene Magarite, an early 19th century surrealist painter, to further delve into this thought of how and why we make such a visual associations to the world around us and what constitutes and classifies an object or even color, like the color red, to be the word “red”. In researching this idea online, I found two pictures relating to this idea of seeing and associating. In the first, it is picture of oranges but in different colors. The second, it displays the names of colors but they are printed in colors other than the colors their names imply. This further leads me to ask the question as to why an orange is specifically orange, “blue” is blue and not “green” or why “red” is red and not “yellow” and who mandated color names to be associated with specific visual elements. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this excerpt and I agreed most with author when he said that “Images were first made to conjure up the appearance of something that was absent”. We all see things differently but we’ve created a universal medium for seeing alike. Because of society, we are conditioned to see “red” as the color red and an apple as an “apple” as well as the color red or an orange as the color orange. Yet regardless, everyone experiences and is free to associate things differently for the world around us as well “art [cannot] be understood spontaneously [and simultaneously]. It is meant to be widely and creatively interpreted. Yet this leads me to question, “Why do we need to make associations?” and “how do people come to an agreement that “red” is red and “blue” is blue?
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