Welcome, ENG 1131, Section 1801 students, to the blog supplement to our Fall 2012 semester course. As you'll recall from both the introductory class and the syllabus outline, each student will be required to post on this blog once a week in response to course readings, discussions, and screenings. In order to post you will need a gmail account. Once you send to me your gmail addresses (but NOT passwords) I, as the blog administrator, will assign posting privileges to students. You will then be able to access the blog through your gmail account and post at your convenience.
For this week's post I would encourage you to consider the film we watched last night, Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966) in relation to your recent readings from Critical Terms for Media Studies and Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Attempt to answer some or even all of the following questions:
-- McLuhan writes of the power of the camera "to be everywhere and to interrelate things." How is this concept made manifest in Blow-Up? How does the main character bring disparate elements, events, and people together through his photography? How does the main character exercise power over the world through photography, and how is that power undermined over the course of the film?
-- How does Blow-Up depict what McLuhan identifies as the photographic (and perhaps cinematic) camera's tendency to "turn people into things"? What does the film depict as the consequences of such a transformation?
-- Though photography is often associated with a pure "capturing" of the external world without adding, subtracting, or revising it, McLuhan writes of photography as a producer of illusion or fantasy. In what ways does the main character of Blow-Up produce both documentation and illusionism through his work as a photographer?
-- In his essay "Image" from Critical Terms, W.J.T. Mitchell writes of "contradictory tendencies" arising from the relation between images and media. Such contradictions include images as representational or referential yet also abstract, as strictly defined yet also jumbled. Where can such contradictions in the possibilities of the image be seen in Blow-Up, and what do they suggest about the nature of photography, cinema, and any media that disseminates information through images?
-- Mitchell writes, "[A]ll images, no matter how public and concrete their staging, are mental things, in the sense that they depend upon creatures with minds to perceive them." How is perception portrayed in Blow-Up? How is the main character's perception of the world around him, of his relation to other people, of his understanding of photography, challenged by the mystery he uncovers in the images produced in the park?
