'Terrible'

[Tom Koerner]

I shot this for TCOM 240, an intro to video class here at Ohio University. My professor believes violence has no place in cinema. I tried to use it to culminate the story well and I believe I was able to give enough visual cues to explain why it occurs - without gore I might add. You can gloss over the poor acting of the vitim: thats me. I'd love to get some of your thoughts on this.

http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~tk262503/demoreel.htm

As an added bonus if you think my project sucks you can watch me stick fire in my face IN SLOW MOTION!!! You'll have to enjoy one or the other.

[Rob Lohman]

I'm wondering why you think this would prove to your professor
that "violence" does have a place in cinema?

[Tom Koerner]

Sorry, that was poorly explained. He fells that regardless of the context, violence used in any video is a cheap way of creating tension. In retrospect, my response to this would only come through if the viewer was familiar with 'Late Rising', by Jacques Prevert, in which the man is hungry and the slices a respectably man's throat in broad daylight, afterwards stealing 2 bits for coffee cream and toast. By contrast, 'Terrible' was almost optomistic; the hungry man was bitter; he took the verbal assault on the beggar as a personal insult because he himself was pondering getting a cup of his own, but he was not bent on ending anyone's life. His main focus was the money; I had storyboarded the murder as accidental, but when i got the footage logged, we didn't have enough to convey that, and my actor had gone back to Findlay.
So basically, my professor should have been familiar with contemporary French poetry. And abolished the time limit. And maybe given me several thousand dollars.
I obviously have no perspective on this; does any of what I was going for come through or does it just make sense to me?

[Joe Carney]

Maybe your professor just doesn't want his students bringing him a lot of 'action and/or horror' shorts? Those genres tend to be a favorite among new video/film students and tend to be very very bad.

While I diagree with the profs statements, working withing forced limitations can be a creative exercise if you let it.

[Robert Knecht Schmidt]

That most analyzed of myths, Oedipus, contains a scene of shocking and senseless violence.

Indignant at being told to move aside from the road out of Thebes by a man in a chariot, the lame Oedipus bludgeons the man to a lifeless pulp with his walking staff.

His vain lack of self-control is expressed in this scene of singular brutality; it encapsulates and exemplifies his nervous condition, symbolically and literally. For Oedipus, so intellectually shrewd that he is able to defeat the monstrous Sphinx and liberate the kingdom, does not recognize that the solution to the Sphinx's riddle is an allusion to his own (spiritually) wounded condition. He knows the answer to the riddle, but he does not know himself (as the inscription on the pediment of the temple of Apollo bids us all to do). Since he does not know himself, he cannot control himself, and how could the definitive defeat in this lack of auto-control be expressed any other way but in the violent scene described?

Violence, when it is not wanton, has a place in cinema, as it does in any art, as it does in reality.

I was unable to download the video clip. RealOne Player calls for an upgrade called video/X-RN-MP4 that is apparently not available through the auto-update feature. I also tried saving it as a mov file, but Quicktime did not recognize the format. What did you use to encode it?

[Rob Lohman]

It's a QuickTime MPEG4 file, Robert. Try renaming it to .MP4 and
open that in QuickTime player. It should play it perfectly.

[Evan Kubota]

"Those genres tend to be a favorite among new video/film students and tend to be very very bad."

I find the obligatory student dramas to be equally bad. The bottom line, you can make a film which reeks irrespective of genre. Saying all action or horror flicks made by amateurs are terrible isn't really saying anything, since the dramas (actually, melodramas) that they turn out are oftentimes worse.

[Lathe Austin]

<<<-- Originally posted by Evan Kubota : since the dramas (actually, melodramas) that they turn out are oftentimes worse. -->>>

But a lot of the problems with dramas is the fact that they use their non-actor friends. I'm not saying that this is the only reason for how they may turn out, I'm just saying that with drama you need dramatic actors. So it's not so much that they lack of good writing, but of the lack of good actors.

[Evan Kubota]

"But a lot of the problems with dramas is the fact that they use their non-actor friends"

They are going to use non-actor friends irrespective of genre, I think.

[Tom Koerner]

Yes they will use their non-actor friends regardless, but dramas by their nature generally depend on the expression of human emotions; not so much necessary for comedy or anything with your standard generic plot twist at the end.