Thoughts

I found "The Reflecting Pool" to be the most interesting of the films we watched last week. I agree that there is something about the way water reflects, yet distorts images that is so intriguing. The nature sounds and the forest also go along with the calmness and the "rebirth" of the man. However, some things irk be about this film, mainly the quality. The scenery reminds me of the backdrops of waterfalls/forests that you see in cheap restaurants. I think that this may have to do with the fact that somehow video doesn't have the same timeless quality that celluloid film has.

I thought Viola's other work, "Migration," was intriguing in the beginning where everything was so blurred, but after a while I didn't really get the point of it. Harun Farocki's "Eye Machine 1" was also interesting and portrayed how relevant machines are in our lives and brought up ideas of having machines fight wars, not soldiers. However, the film did repeat some scenes and in some cases I couldn't figure out what I was looking at and this made it hard to interpret the film. Pipilotti Rist's “I Want to See How You See” was one of the strangest films I have seen. I’m not quite sure if the film was supposed to be creepy, but the audio certainly made it to be.