Blogs #3

Amy Globus has a fantastic piece called "electric sheep" which combines beautiful or disturbing images (whichever way you take it) with a beautiful and disturbing soundtrack at the same time.  The piece involves an octopus maneuvering its way through seemingly impossible curves and corners in glass tubing and as the music and octopus keep making its way through, it just seems to suck you in.  The soundtrack played is called "wrecking ball" by Emmylou Harris, it is a very eerie song, which is why the combination of the two made the piece so interesting. There is a line in the song that just seemed to fit absolutely perfect, it goes "We've got no where to hide, we got no where to go.", in my opinion this line fits the octopus's situation perfectly.   During Julie's lecture, it was brought up about how the combination of editing sound and image can bring up many different complex multiple meanings.  Interpreting this, one could take the combination of the octopus with this track as a struggle for the octopus to find its way, another way they could have taken it is how beautiful the octopus's design is and how it really doesn't even have to struggle for survival.  Either way the soundtrack has an immense impact on it.

Another especially interesting piece to me was the Deeparture film by Mircea Cantor.  One reason I found this film especially interesting was the extreme potential danger that could be involved, and actually ended up to be what I was waiting for while watching this.  What happens is there is a wolf and deer stuck in the same room with each other with nothing in it except white walls, and everybody knows that wolf and deer do not live with each other, it just keeps you on the edge of your seat because you're always waiting for a potential attack.  The entire time you feel an uneasy tension between the two but for some reason the wolf never decided to attack the deer.  I think the wolf doesn't attack because of it's surroundings, it didn't feel safe in it's environment so it didn't attack.  This film has no sound, which actually probably added more effect to it than if there was sound.  Another reason I think this had no sound is so you can actually feel the tension between the two, it's like as if you're watching it you can feel your heart beat.  You can feel the tension just looking at the animals faces without any sound. Adding sound to this film probably wouldn't have been a good idea because it wouldn't have the same effect.  So comparing this film to "electric sheep", I can conclude that some films need a soundtrack to influence what is going on, and some don't  

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