8/14/17 10:29 AM
\"Oh Yeah\" -Foxygen, 2012
When you visualize your memory
Where is the camera?
Do you see yourself from above, in sweeping crane shots, or in vertigo zoom?
Or is the camera set in your eyes?
Taking POV shots of what you saw
ignoring everything else going on out of frame?
For me, the fondest memories are in third person
Tracking shots on the day I gave my first love poem to a girl
Crane shots on the day that very same girl made curry for me
Slow dolly zoom on the day that we sat on her back porch, smoking cigarettes to the sound of old new music I curated
A high angle shot of the day I came back from a Virginia Woolf moment at the lake to my roommates making pizza for all of us
The first person memories have an unsettling duality to them
Most are banal, making coffee yesterday and watching the news
Driving to work and seeing a woodchuck
But some of those shots are malicious, torrid images
Close up of the last moment I hit the tree, the camera of my memory looking down and unbuckling
Single shot sequence of the last moment I saw my godmother in her hospital bed, frail and fed by a tube
A hazy lap dissolve of the last moment of high school, when I had finally gotten to meet people who liked me and realizing that it would be over in weeks
Slowly, as time goes on the film editor in my brain makes re-cuts
Taking triumphs of dissociation and turning them into first person failures
On good days I find myself examining the cinematography as the film is being made
Making shot lists in my mind
Trying to Kubrick my way into a happy thought
When you shoot a scene in third person, you get context
You see both characters moving, both facial expressions
You can see what the world around them looks like
Their dialogue becomes a small part of an entire scene
Camera movement makes the viewer perceive quickness of tempo and the grandness of the horizon
For me, it\'s about analyzing my own perspective
Meta-theorizing my way into understanding