Widescreen Black & White Movies

I don’t use Facebook to follow my cousin who had a great barbecue yesterday. I follow groups where people are fun or inspiring.

In a group about movies today I found a great question :

“Widescreen Black & White Movies?”

For a cinema lover it means something, because black & white movies are NOT widescreen. Silent movies and anything before 1940s are black and white and Cinemascope began in the 1950s.

Let’s make is simple : old movies are in 1.33 format, 4/3, the shape of old TVs.

We could study… recent films shot in 4/3, like on this page : https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/10-great-modern-films-shot-43-academy-ratio – like :

But I chose the other option for my article, Widescreen Movies (the modern format) shot in black & white.

This means something. The format is modern but the director chose “no color”. It’s often absolutely gorgeous – I don’t really know why.

What did we find?

Hud, Manhattan, Lola, Jules & Jim, La Dolce Vita, The Innocents, The Hidden Fortress, Andrei Rublev, L’Avventura…

You can Google it to find pages like : http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2015/20-black-and-white-films-with-the-most-beautiful-widescreen-composition/

Well, it’s a funny interesting way to explore cinema with your lover.

The structure/pattern here is cool :

Where else do we find this mix : something new (widescreen) with something old (black & white)? What does it bring?

Thanks for reading!

 

 

Photography : odd things in a rainy spring morning

…and few droplets in a cold spring morning

It’s a blog about tools for the mind, with rushes, about management, or poetry, or writers, musicians. These days it’s about photography, you noticed?

After a bad night of insomnia, I walked for half an hour under the rain with my cam. Caught droplets. Had fun with colors and points of view. Here are the droplets :

 

Boring Bokeh

What’s bokeh? I ask Wiki :

It is the aesthetic quality of the blur produced in the out-of-focus parts of an image produced by a lens.

Look at the “blurry magic” behind the girls, pleasing your eyes :

 

Google it and you’ll find plenty. I’m the first to use it, because it’s easy, it underlines textures, it gives depth, etc. Here are four strips I made from my own pics. It’s an aperture game : Little blur on the wife portrait. A big blur on branches. A way to soften clouds, or to shine the little star :

 

Like HDR, this effect became rapidly a dogmatic and systematic feature for portraits. “Oh I bought a new cam look at this splendid bokehhh”. There’s even a fake bokeh on smartphone now!

It’s beautiful, but I always wonder about cattleness. I wonder. And I immediately want to do the contrary. Maxing the aperture to keep everything sharp (1) or making everything blurry (2). Just to see. So there!

 

The tool is easy to catch and put in your toolbox : What is it you do because it’s cool and everybody does it? What if you DON’T, just to see what happens?

 

Thanks for reading!

Snakeness

One cool thing with English is the way you add “-ness” after every word. I knew kindness and quietness, but I was amazed by the existence of “togetherness”, and today I wonder about what’s better : animality or animalness?

We don’t have this in French, and we say “the fact of being together” for “togetherness”.

A few days ago I took this picture of a snake, but I didn’t get the snake (where’s the head, the tail?), but I surely got its snakeness!

“The quality of being a snake”, or a set of qualities? An energy, a texture…

Sometimes you do it on purpose, but sometimes it’s an accident. For example, with this bud, I caught a lizardness, no?

 

Then I wondered about what makes a picture :

Do you want to show a thing, or it’s thingness?

 

What is it we catch? How to do it? What do you think?

Thanks for reading!

“Great” photography & Pompier painters, part 2/2

It’s the same pattern for photographers.

First, this little thing. The world of Internet is full of “gorgeous” photos, like this sunset and this glass ball. But you won’t find anything like this in the world of good photographers.

Fishing Boat at Sunset, Wells-Next-The-Sea, Norfolk

 

Open a book of masters of color photography (Shore, Eggleston, Herzog, Leiter…). This is NOT what they do. The gorgeousness is elsewhere than in the result of pushing cursors (very colored, very sharp, big bokeh, etc).

It can puzzle you, or make you feel the mood of a place, or anything.

I know that it becomes the philosophical problem of “Beauty”, but in this article I extract the comparison.

On the left is a Venus, she’s perfect, like in porcelain, on the sea, doing an arty movement with her hand, and little angels are gazouilling around. It’s pompier, mythical, boring. On the right is Olympia, she’s a whore, she watches you (you’re the client). Both come from the same time.

Alexandre Cabanel (Montpellier, 1823 – Paris, 1889) La Naissance de Vénus, 1863 Huile sur toile, 130 x 225 cm Paris, musée d’Orsay, inv. RF 273 © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt (sdp)

 

Now take a “splendid” pool (with a big logo on the bottom, which is a sign of bad sign), and then Stephen Shore’s pool. Which one is a good picture?

Palms reflecting in swimming pool at sunset, Maldives

 

Thanks for reading!

 

“Great” photography & Pompier painters, part 1/2

Ce qui est trop parfait met Dieu en colère
“What is too perfect makes God angry”

 

Academic Art is the art and artists influenced by the standards of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts. In the 19th Century, the French called it “l’art pompier”, especially historical or allegorical ones. It derives from the helmets with horse-hair tails, worn at the time by French firemen, which are similar to the Attic helmet often worn in such works by allegorical personifications, classical warriors, or Napoleonic cavalry. It also suggests pompeux (“pompous”).

Pompier art was seen by those who used the term as the epitome of the values of the bourgeoisie, and as insincere and overblown.

(Thank you, Wikipedia)

These painters (like Gérôme or Bouguereau) had a splendid technique, but they stayed in History, in this Pompier catégory : boring and perfectly made.

Pollice Verso *oil on canvas *97,4 x 146,6 cm *1872

 

Now I admit there’s a guilty pleasure watching these guys’s works. But this is NOT what you want to study for months, right? Which I did with Manet…

There’s a pattern here : an annoying dance between “It’s splendidly made” and “It’s nowhere inventing here”, no emotion, just technique…

If we agree with the core of Arts (“What’s new here?”) – and that there’s nothing new here – we can watch this pattern/structure in other places, like photography. This will be the part 2!

Thanks for reading!

Photography : Walls & Windows of France

Photography : Walls & Windows in Lille, France, Easter 2019

 

Photography : Animalness 3/3

Photography : Animalness 3/3

Photography : Animalness 2/3 – Mean Birds

Photography : Animalness 2/3 – Birds

Photography : Animalness 1/3 – Abstracto

Photography : Animalness 1/3 – Abstracto

Photography : French Cemetery in Spring, 4/4

Photography : French Cemetery in Spring, 4/4

“Do it on your cam” – Are you a photographer or a computer tinkerer?

No effects : “Do it on your cam” – Are you a photographer or a computer tinkerer?

Photography is a great hobby, and we all do it differently.

Digital and Big Giga SD cards allow us to take thousands of pictures. Then, for each, we can play a long time on our computer, pushing/pulling cursors for light, sharpness, special effects and filters. That’s fun!

In a way, I’m sure that we all realize one day or another that… it’s too much.

I heard many times about how photographers “invent” limits to reframe their Art. You have, as often, to invent some fruitful limits to climb into a higher level of… requirement.

Some go back to analogue, films. It’s expensive (you have to buy film rolls), therefore you really, suddenly, have to THINK before you trigger. It’s good to think about what we do!

What I chose to do is to know my cam enough to take the picture I want to get, without spending time to “fix” it on my Macintosh.

Thus, I often take the picture I want to get. I have to think about frames, grain, color, darkness and light, shadows. I don’t touch it, then. I sometimes reframe a bit, or add a little sharpness, that’s all. No filter, no color alteration, no RAW, etc…

I took these pictures today.

Voilà. The tool is yours : what will you… decrease, limit, in your Art-Too-Much? When you’re too rich on something, what do you stop, or choose 2%? What for? What would you win?

Thanks for reading!

Photography : French Cemetery in Spring, 3/4

Photography : French Cemetery in Spring

Stages of how men explained the world

For no reason, here are some chronological stages of how men explained the world

1. Animism : The belief that objects, places and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence.
2. Totemism : The tendency of definite social units to become associated with objects and symbols of emotional value.
3. Religion : A cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, world views, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, or spiritual elements.
4. Mythology : A folklore genre consisting of narratives or stories that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or origin myths. The main characters in myths are usually gods, demigods or supernatural humans.
5. Science : A systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.

 

Then we can have fun to extract the structure of these stairs, just to apply it on another field.

Or pick up a theme, for example : “Animals”. Totems and first gods (or Egyptian myths) are often animals, then they become human-like, but have natural assets (Zeus and thunder) or sidekick animals.

Or you can fight this, telling that it’s nested and layered, that science uses mythology’s names, for example, or that one comes before the other.

Or you can watch the concept of stories : in religion, most people believe the stories, some think it’s parables. In early centuries, myths were already seen has stories which contains a knowledge.

Have fun!

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

Photography : French Cemetery in Spring, 2/4

Photography : French Cemetery in Spring

Photography : French Cemetery in Spring, 1/4

Photography : French Cemetery in Spring

Learning by weaving

As a bookseller, I hear sometimes this phrase from a mother, about her child :

– He doesn’t read.

This is a screens generation, so it happens all the time! I answer the simple way :

– Buy him books, anything, about what he loves!

Trivial, but true. The little guy will, with a little luck, find it interesting. Something interesting in a BOOK? Really?

The structure here is simple : to learn something, weave it with a subject you already know, or an interesting field.

To gain vocabulary in English, I never learned lists (boring), but I bought American books, short stories (Carver, Caldwell), or actors’ biographies (Warren Beatty, Karl Malden). I underlined words or idioms I didn’t kknow…

Like the British red string :

The ropes in use in the royal navy, from the largest to the smallest, are so twisted that a red thread runs through them from end to end, which cannot be extracted without undoing the whole; and by which the smallest pieces may be recognized as belonging to the crown.

Use a red thread of passion or knowledge into your learning process. If you have to learn German, complete the process with the autobiography of (and other books about) your favorite German director (Fassbinder? Herzog?). Or subjects.

It’s “interesting”, it’ll weave, therefore you’ll learn with efficiency.

Where else to use this?

Thanks for reading!

 

 

Words : Friends/Enemies?

Words : Friends/Enemies? This subject covers many disciplines and would need a few books to study, so, let’s say it’s a pack of seeds for a conversation.

We all meet this idea that words are reductive. They are put on things like stickers, making them simpler than they are.

It’s this idea that when you “labeled” at thing, it become true, then it’s fixed, and cages are not far.

It happens all the time, even on the lowest levels, like “Is this good or bad?”. It’s much more complicated, probably…

Words prevent things and events to be seen as complex, changing, moving and trying.

When you learn another language, you keep noticing weird things, like the fact that a word in one language never completely fit a word in the other one. Each word is charged culturally, and I own a 400 pages book only on this subject!

Travail in French is not exactly Work or Labor (proof is you have two words where only languages have one – Arbeit, in German). Labor contains a part of suffering and difficulties, right? Etc…

Now let’s have fun with Frontière : Frontier, Border, Bounday. Oh well…

Knowing this, I wrote this article because…

I watched my cat, who was watching me. I was asking myself (like many of us) :

What does she think? – and what does she think, since she does not use words in her head?

 

Hmm we blog, we talk, we email, we text, we share our day at dinner time : words are huge. Our thoughts are made of words!

Then I went to this area : Words are friends. They are powerful and pleasant tools, and there’s nothing better in life that a good conversation on a balcony with your best friend you have (with a glass of wine, of course). Words become, then, vessels for intelligence, sparkling ideas : friendly tools we use as virtuosos. Time flies.

…knowing that they are tricky and labeling

Find your good partner, talk about this : “Are words our enemies or our friends?”.

I’ll ask Wittgenstein, waiting for you answer in the comments.

Thank you! Thanks for reading!

Intentional Maladjustments & Braiding Assessments

Here are a few pictures where I put the cursor incorrectly. Maladjustments.

Too much grain from too big ISO. Unfocusing. Underexposing. Motion blur from opening too long. Overexposing…

Et tout ça intentionnellement ! Of course, most of the time, it’s intentional…

AndI wanted first to write an article from it, something like :

In what other fields do we (or could we) invent intentional maladjustments? Poetry? Teaching? Architecture? Why? What does it bring?

 

I think it’s one of the core of this blog. My state of mind does this all the time. I watch a bunch of pictures, and it’s automatically weaving : I braid assessments, from the simple (I like it/I don’t) grow branches of analysis : How is it made? What does the photographer want? And in the hole pack, where’s the structure/pattern?

And a few more, probably, but I stop here because it’s three. A braid – in French, c’est une tresse…

The structure I show here is : intentional maladjustments.

The guy who invented penicillin shows another structure : serendipity, or fortunate discovery – which is very amusing to explore, leading to one of the most pleasant quote I ever found (from Pasteur) :

Chance favors the prepared mind

 

I finish with this question : how do you use this “mental gymnastics” process (the game of finding structures)? Why is it useful? When could it be useless, or even harmful?

In front of Art (example : “The Unhinger” : Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (1863) is a MESS), do you just plunge into it, finding beauty, or do you immediately want to read about it or meet the artist, to understand what he wants (in him/for you)?

Have a nice day!

 

 

The traditional version of this story describes the discovery as a serendipitous accident: in his laboratory in the basement of St Mary’s Hospital in London, Fleming noticed a Petri dish containing Staphylococci that had been mistakenly left open was contaminated by blue-green mould from an open window, which formed a visible growth. There was a halo of inhibited bacterial growth around the mould. Fleming concluded that the mould released a substance that repressed the growth and caused lysing of the bacteria.

Wrong Way Up and… the game of “finding structures”