Week 6

Copy Shop

This was a really nice short film to watch. The build-up is done very well. The ending is dramatic and makes sense right before it happens, but is in a very different place tonally from where the film began. When I first started watching, the main questions on my mind were: why does this guy sleep in his clothes, and why is the only thing he does in the morning wash his face? But those questions didn’t matter for very long as I became more preoccupied trying to figure out what was going on. I think one can imagine that there is a commentary trying to be made by the filmmaker here. Perhaps about people leading cookie-cutter lives or trying to be like everyone else. This idea is enhanced further by the fact that the frames of the film are literally from a copying machine.

Meshes of the Afternoon

I’m always trying to extrapolate narrative from media I consume. This short film gave me enough details to make my brain think there was a narrative but not enough for me to actually coherently form a solid idea of what was happening. Because of this, the film was confusing for me to watch, but in a good way. In straddles the line between an abstraction and a more grounded story, so my brain kept on trying to find out if there was an intentional narrative even if there wasn’t one to be found. It seems like the common theme between films this week is a sense of self.

Mothlight

The leaves are pretty.

Simbiosis Carnal

I think this was the film I enjoyed the most this week. Shoutout to using pink to represent male and blue to represent female, which is a refreshing reversion to what the gender association of those colors used to be pre-20th century. I also love how the animator represented in a comical manner all the ways in which woman were/are subjected to sexual chastity and the modern ways in which we are subjected to distorting ideas of love, sex, and relationships.

Something that always bothered me in media, and appears in this film, is the use of either sexual reproduction on the biological level (egg and sperm cells) or heterosexual reproduction between animals in heat (like with the montage of animals having sex) to sort of transitively apply the idea that heterosexual human sex or love is “natural” or shouldn’t be bottled up. While there is nothing wrong with any of these ideas in and of themselves, it does sort of enforce the concept that non-heterosexual human relationships are not something of equal stature on this intrinsic level. It does this by specifying again and again the duality of male and female with pink and blue, gendered animals, etc, in order to say that these things are indisputable in their current forms (ie “it’s only natural”) while specifically not including natural representations of non-heterosexual sex and/or romance. Use of animals specifically to back this idea, while probably not given much of a second thought by the animator, does in fact overlook that homosexual relationships do occur naturally between animals in the wild.

Again, I don’t think the author meant harm in any of this. It’s simply a media trope that we have been subjected to for a very very long time that is almost ingrained in us without realizing it. I did catch the two seconds of a lesbian and gay couple laying with each other near the end of the video, but that felt more like an afterthought rather than an integration into the film itself. If the filmmaker wanted to maintain the scope of the video on heterosexuality, that’s completely fine. I would even be less critical of their use of natural representations that I mentioned previously. But if they want to tack something like that on at the end with the idea that it is enough, then they need to either leave it out instead or rethink their video. Overall, I thought the execution of the animation as a whole was a good choice to represent the amorphous ideas and feelings of sexual and romantic attraction.