i'm taking a video production class. ART 116: video practice and theory
there are so many things i like about this class. sometimes we watch films and videos. sometimees we talk tech. sometimes we learn to use software at the computers. sometimes we talk about art.
then i go out and look through a camera and decide. i used to be fearful and self conscious of the camera - it alters the experience, i don't want to draw attention to the moment, i don't want to blow it out of proportion, i just want it to be. but yesterday, in the back yard with scarf and sun dapple, all the things i thought about scarf changed, i saw scarf anew. pretty trite, i know, ooh, look at the scarf in the wind, oh, now look how flowers look under its semi transparency. but it's ok for now, while i'm in the beginning.
and today, today we watched something extra special. so special that we almost didn't watch it at all. our TA said, well we were gonna watch this one about a childbirth, but [me and the professor] watched it last night and it was so graphic, so intense, we decide not to show it in class. no no, let us watch, i pleaded. the girl with the dreads seconded. and so we watched, except for student man in his ~early forties, who just kept his head down. see this flim: window water baby moving, by stan brakhage. it's only 12 minutes. i just did a search and couldn't find a free version. it's not the nova childbirth prime time wonder of science extravaganza. it's love and blood and hands and youth and grimace and waiting and tenderness and disbelief and belief.
and afterward, yes it illicited alot of talking. and yes, some about how parts were disgusting, and then the comment, lamenting that we find the image of bringing of life so gross that we are rarely exposed to it, but death we can see time and time again (i know, mostly fake deaths, it's true). and then later, talking with a friend on a different topic, of safe sex, and how it seems many of us (the us i know) are willing to risk disease, lifelong or fatal, but we are so much more careful with the risk of conceiving a child. willing to expose ourselves to the dark of sickness and subject to a fate of medicine, but so much less willing to potentially create new unknown life. oh, great mystery of aliveness