For months — years, perhaps — I'd been mourning what seemed to be my
lost ability to provoke. Where I used to spark epic debates with little
more than an unconventional flick of my wrist, I felt it had become all
I could do to craft something — text, image, persona — that people's
eyes slide kind of imperfectly smoothly off, rather than perfectly
smoothly off. How ever to make anything of myself, I despaired, with
such an incapacity damning me to obscurity?
I had my hope renewed in that least likely of all settings, school. My documentary production teacher gave out a slightly nebulous first assignment: make a two-minute short about a person. My first impulses suggested shooting a piece on a local businessperson, but none of the candidates fired me up. Then the teacher announced that we could do documentaries on ourselves, but that it "might be a terrible idea." Instantly, I knew what I needed to do.
The result, Marshall on Marshall, runs closer to three minutes, but hey:
My expectations were low: I just hoped my classmates would laugh at the jokes. In the event of the screening, most of them didn't seem to get the jokes. No sweat; humor's unpredictable. But during the critique, half the class got mad. Like, weird mad, as if I were trying to put one over on them. The other half sounded like they approved, and heartily, but man, that first half. One guy even came up to me afterward and apologized. (What for, I remain unsure.) I hadn't intended it to polarize, but polarize my movie did.
Asked what it was about, I said it had to do with the extent to which interviewer and interviewee must be ontologically distinct individuals. Then a couple people wondered aloud what "ontological" means, so that didn't help. Trying to bring a watering can to the flames, I asked for a whiteboard pen and drew what I thought would be an explanatory diagram:
"Let's take a line, representing a spectrum, running left to right."
"Now let's label one end 'pure fiction,' and the other end 'pure fact.'"
"Of course, nothing is pure fiction and nothing is pure fact, so we'll erase the extremes of the line."
"Now we'll mark off the chunk of the left side, indicating where most mainstream narrative feature films fall. They're not pure fiction, but they're more fiction than fact."
"'Mainstream' documentaries hang out on the right, since they're mostly fact. We'll put quotes around 'mainstream,' since docs are kind of non-mainstream by definition."
"And here's what's in the middle."
Who did I convince? Dunno. But having gotten a taste of cinematic provocateurhood, I'm like a bear who's imbibed human blood: if you want me to stop, get the zookeeper to shoot me.
I had my hope renewed in that least likely of all settings, school. My documentary production teacher gave out a slightly nebulous first assignment: make a two-minute short about a person. My first impulses suggested shooting a piece on a local businessperson, but none of the candidates fired me up. Then the teacher announced that we could do documentaries on ourselves, but that it "might be a terrible idea." Instantly, I knew what I needed to do.
The result, Marshall on Marshall, runs closer to three minutes, but hey:
My expectations were low: I just hoped my classmates would laugh at the jokes. In the event of the screening, most of them didn't seem to get the jokes. No sweat; humor's unpredictable. But during the critique, half the class got mad. Like, weird mad, as if I were trying to put one over on them. The other half sounded like they approved, and heartily, but man, that first half. One guy even came up to me afterward and apologized. (What for, I remain unsure.) I hadn't intended it to polarize, but polarize my movie did.
Asked what it was about, I said it had to do with the extent to which interviewer and interviewee must be ontologically distinct individuals. Then a couple people wondered aloud what "ontological" means, so that didn't help. Trying to bring a watering can to the flames, I asked for a whiteboard pen and drew what I thought would be an explanatory diagram:
"Now let's label one end 'pure fiction,' and the other end 'pure fact.'"
"Of course, nothing is pure fiction and nothing is pure fact, so we'll erase the extremes of the line."
"Now we'll mark off the chunk of the left side, indicating where most mainstream narrative feature films fall. They're not pure fiction, but they're more fiction than fact."
"'Mainstream' documentaries hang out on the right, since they're mostly fact. We'll put quotes around 'mainstream,' since docs are kind of non-mainstream by definition."
"And here's what's in the middle."
Who did I convince? Dunno. But having gotten a taste of cinematic provocateurhood, I'm like a bear who's imbibed human blood: if you want me to stop, get the zookeeper to shoot me.
Is there a correlation between having a sense of humor and
intelligence? Any scientific studies, theories, etc. would be
appreciated. Think this might be fun for a google researcher to look
for.
And conversely, does a lack of sense of humor mean less intelligence?
Posted by: order viagra | April 22, 2010 at 03:37 PM