My Ears are Bleeding

Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi portrays documentaries at its worst. One of the main objectives of a documentary film is to keep the audience’s attention and to make your film appealing.  Reggio fails at both of these aspects because he fails to recognize that there are different types of viewer’s learning. Some viewers are auditory, some are visual, and some learn by reading.  

 

Reggio utilizes sweeping camera motions with vast nature shots capturing grand cannons, foggy mountains, and the rolling plains. But wait, Reggio also uses a soundtrack produced my Philip Glass: a minimalist musician. The same sound ringing in the viewer’s brain over and over and over. This tends to put off the viewer from watching the film because of the monstrosity resonating from the speakers. There are no words other than the title for basically the entire film and there is no narration. This puts off the viewers who learn by reading because of the lack of words. The horrible sound coming from the documentary and no narration puts off the auditory viewer. The visual learner likes the sweeping shots of nature; however, the mind-numbing soundtrack distracts the visual learner from seeing the film’s nature shots in all their glory.  So most of the viewers get bored and annoyed after ten minutes because the sound is agitating and there is no narration to keep people’s attention. 

 

I understand Reggio uses the fact the viewer cannot focus to support his main message of how the human race is going to crap, but how can the viewer understand that message when they end up turning off the film and walk away? I also understand that not everyone hates minimalist music, but most of my cohorts hate the soundtrack as well.  So from the exclusion of most learning types, how can Reggio present his argument when people turn off the film or fall asleep? We should submit Reggio to his own torture and see how long he lasts before falling asleep or opening up an internet browser.

 

 

Koyaanisqatsi. Dir. Godfrey Reggio. New Cinema, 1982. DVD

Carter: The Plastic Grip

As Werner Boote adheres his face to the plastic fabric and deeply inhales that plastic smell, I can note the very same smell that radiates from pool toys or a new shower curtain. As he tears away his face from the fabric and moves his hands over it, I can feel the same rough-but-slippery surface and hear the fingers scratching the surface. Within the film, scenes show rays of light hitting the plastic giving the eye all of the bright colors and shapes.  Plastic Planet plays on the senses of the audience which keeps their attention.  

Boote takes advantage of the audience’s experiences with plastic because he knows almost everyone living on Earth encounters plastic on a daily basis. He knows the audience recognizes how it feels, looks, smells, and sounds.  Boote inhaling the plastic essence in the film triggers a memory of the audience which brings them to playing in the pool, or taking a shower hiding behind a new shower curtain. Everyone knows that smell. I love that smell. Showing the colors and shapes keeps their minds attentive because people like to look at things that are bright and colorful. Boote wants to keep the attention of his audience, aside from using his wit and charm, by utilizing our senses so he can feed his argument of plastic being detrimental to our health and to the world. That plastic smell that I know and love is killing me slowly or making me infertile. That touch of plastic is giving me cancer by absorbing the harmful chemicals. The sight of plastic is no longer just my bright-colored shower curtain or a fun-shaped pool toy, the current sight is the expanding landfills or the ocean covered in plastic. The true reason Boote plays the senses card is because no one can escape the plastic grip.

 

Plastic Planet.Dir. Werner Bootes.2011

Carter: The Koolaid Hangover

Jesus camp: A camp where children of the corn are made.  I’ll get straight to the point. I am not a very religious person but I believe in tolerance and understanding.  Two ideals not even approached in Jesus Camp.  Children that go to this camp are thought the ways of Jesus Christ and that they have a mission: to bring Jesus back to America. These children are brutally put through sermons where they’re taught that there is nothing other than extreme Christianity and the fallacy of science. The scary part is that they truly believe what they are being fed. These children of the corn rock back and forth, some cry, others go straight up to strangers and proclaim that Jesus loves them.

 

 

As the ministers put it, this generation is very important; a beginning of a movement.  These ministers are creating “Jesus’ Army” to take back America in such a way that is compared to Hitler’s Youth or the Taliban. There is no tolerance for other religions or ideas in Jesus’ Army. The reigning-supreme idea is Christian nationality. What happens when these children grow up?  The children in Hitler’s youth didn’t have the chance to grow up and they still released hell’s fury helping the Nazi’s ethically cleanse away the Jews. The Taliban’s children grew up and flew planes into the World Trade Center.

 

 

 

 

What about our own corn children in America with their ideas of intolerance and war? Will a faction of future America be so extreme it commits acts of terrorism against other countries? Will they try to cleanse out other religions to be obsolete? One can only hope not. 

Works Cited:

Jesus Camp. Dir. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady. Magnolia Pictures, 2006. DVD.