AIDS and Disability

Week of 11/7-11/10

Just this past week we analyzed the film “Philadelphia” and the encounter of AIDS in a discriminatory, judicial battle. Tom Hanks plays the role of the protagonist, and because his business partners believe he has AIDS and is a homosexual, they try to fire him based on these beliefs. But Tom Hanks eventually wins the court case and falls victim to HIV. Back in a time where little was really known about AIDS, the reality that a virus doctors couldn’t explain was a scary one. They knew AIDS could be transferred through sexual means, but they didn’t know how it could be prevented or stopped. Even in the film, Denzel Washington’s character holds some qualms about being Tom Hanks’ counselor because he thinks the doctors will find out that AIDS can be transmitted through the skin. So what is the relation of AIDS and disability?
With AIDS, just like disabilities, one may feel shameful of having procured this illness. The shame is linked to an imputation of guilt, and sometimes even flushes out an identity that might have remained hidden from friends, family, and co-workers. This brings about isolation, harassment, and persecution because, back in the early 90s, they did not fully understand. Inside of normal sex, AIDS suggests a sexual deviance from that norm—a disease not only of sexual excess but of perversity as well.
Labels such as “fag” or “queer” show up in this crisis surrounding heterosexual identity and able-bodied identity. Compulsory heterosexuality is intertwined with compulsory able-bodiedness; but only because these systems depend on a queer/disabled existence that can never be contained. In combining queer theory with disability studies, there is hope that the norms of sex will disappear over time, since the combination of the two could exacerbate the authority that currently besets heterosexual/able-bodied norms. Queer/disability studies can continuously invoke the inadequate resolutions that compulsory heterosexuality and able-bodiedness offer us. This critical queerness and disability could, and will, collectively transform the uses to which queer/disability existence has been put by a system of compulsory able-bodiness.

Disability and Feminism

Week of 10/31-11/6

This week I thought it would be interesting to appeal to the gender based ideas and notions about disability, specifically how feminist theory is transformed by it. My girlfriend was wondering if the issues surrounding disabled people also recognized disability in identities that reflect women. Our talk took the issues of feminist theory and categorized methods and perspectives that could be used to delve deeper into disability studies, even though feminist theory may live in the assumptions that particularizes and narrows a theory, even though doesn’t really do much to broaden into the academic and scholarly world.
After using the Disabilities Studies Reader, Rosemarie Garland-Thompson writes another useful chapter on this topic. She states that her juxtaposing of disability and feminism invokes and links two notions fundamental to the feminist movement. The first is integration, which suggests achieving parity by fully including that which has been excluded and subordinated. The second is transformation, which suggests reimagining established knowledge and the order of things. In her allusions to both these concepts, she sets the project and study of disability into a relation of feminism that supposes it between intellectual work and commitment to creating a more just, equitable, and integrated society.
So what does feminism disability studies approach as topics? For one, it tries to foster a more complex understanding of the body and its cultural history. Disability, like gender, is an issue that pervades all aspects of culture, especially in its institutions, social identities, practices, historical communities, and shared human experience of embodiment and normalcy. So in a way, feminist theory introduces the ability/disability system as a category of analysis in all topics related to feminism. The critical areas in which critical inquiries are the most profound can be found in the domains of representation, the body, identity, and activism. She finds that the particular espouses the partial and provisional. But such an intellectual habit can be informed by disability and acceptance. To embrace disability and feminism, to embrace the flawed body of disability, is to critique the normalizing fantasies of wholeness, unity, coherence, and completeness of something that centers around contradiction, ambiguity, and partiality incarnate. Disability issues, like gender issues, are all around us, we just have to know where to begin to unravel these issues to understand what it truly means to be fully huma

Complex Embodiment and Galehead

Week of 10/24-10/30

This week’s entry is dedicated to my friend who said to me in a conversation, “I’d rather be dead than disabled any day”. That just sent off an alarm in my head. The statement seemed off-handed, but he undoubtedly has a perspective on what it means to be able-bodied. So playing the devil’s advocate, I started to think, “What does he deem as disabled”? A certain ideology comes from his kind of thinking, one that centers on ability and its relation to human capacity. And what is the measure of his ideology of the human body and ability? To my friend, ability is the ideological baseline by which humanness is determined, and as such, thinking as someone having lesser an ability makes him or her seem lesser than human. Is there any way to bring disability out of the shadow of the ideology of ability, and to illuminate disabilities of its kinds, values, and realities? Here is where a complex theory of embodiment comes into play, in a way that defines ability as the fear of disability. It becomes a revolving point in which all our central actions of ability circle around, something that determines whether or not ability gives or denies human status.
According to Professor Linden in the Disabilities Studies Reader, reversing negative connotations of disability, like my friend exemplified, is not an easy task. But once it becomes identified as a positive identity, the extent of the ideology of ability collapses. But it is here we find that some people would say, in changing the ideology of disabled people as a positive identity it also changes disability into ability, instead of doing away with the meanings entirely. Inevitably, disability is regarded as a paradox in this sense.
If we question these sorts of theories of complex embodiment, it makes it possible to move forward in arguments currently about social construction, identity, and the body. Take the Galehead hut in the Appalachian Mountains for example. It became a big controversy when they were forced to make the hut accessible to people with disabilities. Even though the hut is at the end of a long trail through the mountains, people with disabilities still want to be able to access the hut at one of the stops. So if they can make it through a tough trail on a wheelchair, why do they need a ramp for building access? This example exposes the ideology of human ability, one that demands that people with disabilities always should be presented as able-bodied people as much as possible. This reveals how constructed our attitudes are about identity and the body.

In the Eyes of the Beholder

Week of 10/17-10/23

This week, it has been brought to my attention that when people do not fully comprehend a situation, they tend to stare. When I was walking through Copley with some friends, this idea of staring was clearly apparent. There was a disheveled looking man, maybe a veteran, on the side of the park there with a sign that read “Missing Leg, in need of change”, and all people really did was stare at this man and walk past. And if anything, these were stares of judgment and contempt. Applying this to the Disabilities Studies Reader, I found a specific chapter by Rosemarie Garland-Thompson on the act of beholding and the assigning of value we give to it. Staring is a communicative gesture, no doubt. But where does the act of staring at a disabled person become a positive occurrence rather than a negative one?
According to Thompson, a stare is a response to someone’s distinctiveness. And these stares are an important factor in interpreting our relationships internally and externally. Many people that stare at others find themselves in an uncomfortable position because of a relationship that Susan Sontag fleshes out as a “repulsive attraction”. But rarely its because people think other people are ugly. Take the man without a leg: I do not think people were staring at him because they found him to be particularly ugly; I just believe they did not know how to look at him in the appropriate fashion. So the reactions are decidedly negative ones. According to Harriet Johnson, what people usually see when they look upon someone disabled, especially if that person is on the streets, they see unbearable pain, insurmountable adversity, and a desire for a normalcy. She would rather have people look upon these “repulsive attractions” as merely unremarkable encounters. In doing so this allows her audience to find common ground between who they are staring at: someone with a live as uninteresting as theirs. In doing so, these strategic staring encounters do away with Sontag’s worries of stigmatizing.

On The Use of the Disabled in Photography

Week of 10/10 – 10/16

My roommate is in an Emerson’s history of photography class, and he was showing me some examples of work one night. After seeing a selection of photos, I made him stop at one that showed a Chinese man in a wheelchair. The photograph was taken by a man named Victor Chin, and apparently he contributed most of his work to an exhibition that focused primarily on disability in photography. After doing some research on my own, I encountered his web blog entitled “A Digital Awakening”. His pictures are primarily taken with a positive outlook on disabled culture, which isn’t always the case when viewing disabled artwork. There are pictures of what I assume is himself sitting in wheelchairs and trying to do things that normal people can do, like getting on the subway. My thoughts of a positive spin of the disabled drifted to the extreme opposite, where I have encountered the disabled in a negative light in photography. What I thought about were the many circus flyers and posters that take someone’s disability and change it into enfreakment or unnaturalness.
In The Disabilities Studies Reader, chapter 37 deals with the oppressiveness of the disabled in photography and what that represents as a culture and for our society. David Hevey explains that there is a constructed oppression toward disabled photography. Either they are represented in the work as “meaningful or meaningless bodies”. And he goes to say the disabled is only meaningful if they serve to convey polarized anchors of naturalist humility or terror. Basically, as long as they are trying to show the truth about disability, it doesn’t matter what light they are shown in. Famous artists, such as Arbus, Winogrand, and Mohr, only use the disabled as a subject to flesh out their thesis or embody the work. And to this matter, Hevey says its as if these photographers’ spirits can be summed up as pure manipulation of the disabled person’s image. The problem lies in the fact that the disabled “emerge like a lost tribe, to fulfill a role for these photographers but not for themselves.
Throughout history, disabled people’s role solidifies the “weird” against the “norm”; they are used as a symbol of enfreakment or the surrealism of all society. It is only through progressive works of art, or in this case, photography, that we may see the oppression of the disabled break their representational stigmas of fear, loss, or pity, and replace it with notions of hope and normalness.

Erevis Cale and Narrative Prosthesis

Week of 10/3-10/9

During this week, I encountered a topic that we covered and discussed briefly in the first week of class: the perspective of disability in a narrative context. I am currently reading a series of books by Paul S. Kemp called The Erevis Cale Trilogy, and what I have discovered is the disability is very much prevalent in the representation of characteristics between certain characters and as a jumping off point for discursive metaphors. For example, a character named Azriim—one of the main antagonists in the book—is blind in one eye. This disability emphasizes the villainous aspect the author is trying to achieve. Not only does this lead to a breakdown the structure of a character that desires not to embrace normalcy, but it also becomes a metaphor signifying a social and individual collapse of the character.
In chapter 21 of The Disability Studies Reader, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder cover this topic of disability in a narrative context. They call it “narrative prosthesis”, a thesis which centers around the idea of people with disabilities being the object of representational treatments, a two-fold aspect found both in the literary notions of character models and literary devices related to the body and mind. This serves as a symbolical symptom on the studies and interpretation on the body, defining the “able” bodied as merely average and having no “definitional core”. On the other hand, the “disabled” are labeled as being “outside the norm”, and in literary schemes this makes it easier to discuss the overbearing physical and worldly “weights” normally attributed to an interesting protagonist or antagonist. Thus, Kemp’s character of Azriim, is assumed to be created upon a prescriptive analysis of a physically, and therefore spiritually, overburdened character.
But surprisingly, narrative prosthesis doesn’t need to always be viewed in a negative light. A positive view of disability in literature takes away the notion of it historically being a crutch in which stories convey “representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight”. Instead, this dependency creates disability as a foundation, and not as a crutch. Mitchell and Synder state: “…disability is foundational to both cultural definition and to the literary narratives that challenge normalizing prescriptive ideals” (277). Disability in characterization and metaphor become a trivial prosthetic in which literature, and more importantly culture, heavily relies upon.

"Radio" and Autism

Week of 9/26 – 10/2

Over the weekend, my girlfriend and I watched the 2003 film Radio, starring Cuba Gooding Jr., and inspired by true events in 1976 in Anderson, South Carolina. What made this movie something to comment about in my journal is because the story centers around a mentally challenged man named James Robert Kennedy, nicknamed Radio. The young man drives around in a grocery cart, collecting radios and listening to radios, and yet he talks to know one—he’s a social outcast because everyone insists he has lost his mind. But at this point in time in America, the term “disability” really covered everything structured outside of the norm; though, in Radio’s case, he was autistic—not disabled. After I did some research of my own, I learned that the genetics attached to autism didn’t surface until the early 1980’s, and even then there was little knowledge surrounding the conditions. If anything, autism would be classified under Galton’s theory of eugenics, labeled as a “defective” and under the category that included “feebleminded, deaf, blind, and physically defective”. During the 1970’s and especially after World War II, the elimination of deviance from the norm and human perfectibility were not subjects to be taken lightly anymore, so the result is public isolation. And this isolation really came from not understanding what autism truly was.
Even though we haven’t covered this chapter in class yet or if we will, I went ahead in The Disability Studies Reader and took a look at Joseph Straus’ chapter on autism in culture, thinking this might be an interesting topic to consider for the final paper. Coinciding with Radio, Straus includes a section about autism in music and the way they comprehend and perceive it. He states “autistic listeners may be more attuned to private, idiosyncratic associations than larger shared meanings…[whereas] normal hearing involves the creation of hierarchies, autistic hearing involves the creation of associative networks (547)”. In this sense, rote memory and association constitute autistic hearing, which is a perfect example of Gooding Jr.’s character’s aptitude for radio music. I never knew that this type of engagement of memory and fixity of focus was attributed to autism, but as I recall from class it makes perfect sense in relation to Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man.

The One-Legged Professional Wrestler

Week of 9/19 – 9/25

For this week’s entry I would like to focus on one of the most successful handicapped professional wrestlers in the United States, Zach Gowen. On Wednesday my friend, who is a huge WWE fan and professional wrestling fan all-around, showed me a clip on Youtube.com about this one-legged wrestler named Zach Gowen. In this video, Zach successfully climbs the ropes of the ring using his upper body strength and powerful leg and does a very difficult move called a moonsault. I was intrigued, so I did some research of my own. I found out his career was a social exchange of sorts, one where the outcome outweighed any costs he had to suffer to get there. Using Resource Theory, it boils down to his optimistic interpretation of his disability. People in the wrestling community show him love and respect, and in turn, he gives them a service coming from his heart. Because of the respect and status they show him, he goes all out. There is rarely anyone in the audience that makes fun of how he only has one-leg; instead, they embrace his willingness to overcome odds that would seem career-threatening to anyone else. Especially since Zach is a professional wrester, the cameras are a tell-tale sign to show his non-verbal communication on the screen. Even though pro-wrestling is sometimes over the top, his emotions and reactions are pretty clear. For example, Zach’s kinesics are major insights on how he regulates a fight between his opponent. His posture is more of a body lean on his shin rather than his foot because of his disability. His gestures illustrate when he is going to execute a move, especially when he waves his arms to maintain a balance on one foot. As for facial expressions, he normally shows an astonished and excited face to the crowd after he executes a move, more to show how amazed he is that he just did it handicapped and to get a roaring crowd anxious for more. As for the opponent Zach wrestles, their haptics are centered on making him get discouraged because of his handicap (though it is a staged performance). His opponent usually goes for his good leg, either by kicking it or grabbing it and tripping him up. Even though this sounds unusual and cruel, it really is just for the crowd. It communicates that even though someone might be disabled, people can actually ignore the common misconceptions associated with the term and treat the person with the same respect as someone labeled as “normal”.

Images of the Disabled: Entry #1

During the course of the week, I began to doubt the social model of disability and its positive connotations. More and more I came under this thought that society is the key factor in creating barriers, and more importantly, attitudes toward disabled people. It is not just any attitude though; it is one that is only describable as pure, paternalistic sympathy. For example a man, who had a walking stick and was blind, was crossing the street on the corner of Tremont and Boylston. I just happened to be exiting the Ansin Building and walked over to the corner of the street, and he was standing right there next to me and a couple other college students. Now, just in my own mind I thought ‘here was a man who looked as if he’d definitely had crossed the street on his own plenty of times before’, which is fine. But I also could see the others around me, and I could guess at what they were thinking. When the light turned, a pair of kids took one glance at him and crossed the street, no second thought whatsoever. But then some guy we were standing with actually asked the man if he needed some help getting across to the other side, which logically seems like the right thing to ask. But it was in the way the guy asked the blind man if he needed help that rang of uncaring empathy and almost paternalistic fashion. What surprised me was the blind man simply said nothing. There was no recognition that help was even offered to the blind man: he just crossed the street and made it to the other side with no problem at all. I feel like this example is a kind of commentary on our varied approaches to disability and what doesn’t work. It’s almost as if society thinks of disability as a problem that needs charitable attention on our parts, which is not often the case. Even though this man was blind, he needed no accommodations, because to me, this speaks wonders of how that blind man perceives himself as an “able-bodied” member of society—and not disabled.

The Pastiche of "Mona Lisa"

After looking at Matt Groening’s rendition of Leonardo DaVinci’s work, the “Mona Lisa”, I believe Frederic Jameson would say that this “painting” falls directly into the cultural trend of a postmodernistic work. Stemming from his work entitled “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, Jameson probably would have claimed that this piece of art is characterized by its pastiche and “a crisis in historicity”. Not only is the painting of the original “Mona Lisa” turned into a female from the show “The Simpsons”, but it also is replaced by pastiche instead of parody. The difference between the parody of the “Mona Lisa” and a pastiche of it lies in the fact that a parody requires “a moral judgment or comparison with societal norms”, and a pastiche is “a collage and other forms of juxtaposition without a normative grounding”. The crisis in historicity lies in the fact that Groening’s work merges all discourse into a whole, which is a result of the colonization of the cultural sphere.

Jameson would have also said that Groening’s “Mona Lisa” has an explicit formal and/or thematic choice of the writer and the unconscious framework that the author uses as a guideline. An artistic choice such as Groening’s used to be viewed in purely aesthetic terms, but now they can be recast in terms of historical literacy practices and norms in an attempt to “develop a systematic inventory of the constraints they imposed on the artist as an individual creative subject”.

Questioning Bauer's Masculinity With Dr. Freud

Freud would begin to describe Jack Bauer’s masculinity by looking closely at his perversions and transformations coinciding with puberty. During said time of puberty one undergoes an omnipotence of sexuality that basically alters and then controls one’s needs, desires, and social practices. By taking a look at each of these aspects of Bauer’s life, Freud would be able to determine his masculinity (we’ll overlook the present-day perspective).

Freud explains that many people have phallocentric views, and I would argue the same for Jack Bauer. Even though I have not seen more than two episodes of the show, it seems to me that Bauer is empowered by his sense of masculinity, like most men. And because of this, they are afraid to lose their masculinity to that of another male. This may be apparent in Bauer’s line of work for the US government, where the jobs are often given out in ascending rank format. Any male or female can move up or down in the system, but the higher up an individual is, the more power one receives, and that is seen as phallocentric in itself; Bauer’s masculinity is definitely determined because of his placement in his line of work.

Freud could also say that Bauer’s masculinity is also determined by his relationship with his wife. I don’t really know where they stand with each other, but in the pilot episode it seemed to me that they were very unhappy with the relationship circumstance they found themselves in. Toward the end of the pilot episode, the Bauer’s wife befriends one of her daughter’s friend’s father, and this clues in to something they may or may not be occurring between the two of them. In this way, Bauer’s masculinity could be threatened if the other father somehow seduces his wife. In this way he probably overcompensates for the bad relationship he has with his wife to produce more masculine work, such as killing people and stopping explosions, etc.

As it stands, Bauer’s masculinity is determined by many different variables—all of which seemingly changing in time.

Habermas Visits Rwanda

Habermas would respond to “Ghosts of Rwanda” by first responding to the concept of the public sphere in reference to the transmission of information from the film and how it is received. This documentary-style video is exactly what Habermas would refer to as the media of the public sphere, and that public sphere is something in which people can form a public opinion around. I believe the truth of the matter of the “Ghosts of Rwanda” video lies in the Habermas article “The Public Sphere: A Encyclopedia Article” in which he states: “Though mere opinions (cultural assumptions, normative attitudes, collective prejudices and values) seem to persist unchanged in their natural form as a kind of sediment to history, public opinion can by definition only come into existence when a reasoning public is presupposed.” It is the worldly interest in the affairs of Rwanda that similar interests are formed, and through this a public opinion is made.

So in this scenario, the public sphere can be understood as the sphere of public individuals who have assembled in agreement because of the dire cries for help and support from other nations in the world because of the genocides in Rwanda. “Ghosts of Rwanda” is a perfect example of how political documentaries affect the public sphere, as well as other modes of communication. This allows for other people to join in the functioning public sphere and then join the struggle for Rwanda, since after the public sphere went international it then became a principle to follow.

But because of the world we live in today, Habermas had this to say: “The public, which must now mediate these demands, becomes a field for the competition of interests, competitions which assume the form of violent conflict. Laws which obviously have come about under the "pressure of the street"can scarcely still be understood as arising from the consensus of private individuals engaged in public discussion. They correspond in a more or less unconcealed manner to the compromise of conflicting private interests.” In this way, larger more bourgeoisie organizations have to come up with compromises with the state in order to accomplish their needs, and usually this is achieved by ignoring the public sphere altogether. But they must also maintain to have the continued support of the masses, in it is through this “open” support of the public sphere, specifically Rwanda in this case, in which anything can be done.

Hall and "Law and Order"

The way I see Stuart Hall answer how “Law and Order” affects the audience in terms of ideology comes down to how the show is encoded and decoded. For one, the encoding of “Law and Order” entails a specific message pertaining to the certain “institutional practices” and “organizational conditions” of the production. And with this message, the audience will decode it, constructing that message together to form some kind of meaning to them. And it is in this mode of communication where the most work is done, and sometimes a social identity is formed for a member of the audience.

Also, one must take in how the texts of “Law and Order” are broadcasted, whether or not they are intended to be “open” or “closed” texts. Hall would probably say that the show offers a more “closed” text because “Law and Order” tends to have a more heterogeneous audience since diverse decodings occur more.

But I believe Hall’s overall stance on this topic would be that the role of social positioning of mass media texts by different social groups would be mixed. Some people would tend to have a more dominant reading because the way in which the audience interprets the messages. These typical audience members would be absolute fans of the show, and people who believe that the code is either “natural” or “transparent” (the show doesn’t fall out of the realm of disbelief). The negotiated reading of the show is shared by the audience which allows the message to be interpreted in a very limited way. In this way, the viewers probably accept the show but add their own interpretation to modify their position. The viewers who understand the show but directly oppose the reading accept the last type of reading: oppositional. This may be because of a political affiliation associated with the show or some strong moral value.

Barthes Meets "The Sopranos"

The first quote that I find illuminates the advertising of the last episodes for the "Sopranos" has to do with the denotative message that the audience would perceive. The quote is as follows: "The utopian character of denotation is considerably reinforced by the paradox already mentioned, that the photograph (in its literal state), by virtue of its absolutely analogical nature, seems to constitute a message" (Barthes 277). We can use the "Sopranos" poster as an example similar to a photograph, as it is not a drawing like Barthes goes on to explain the differences of the two in his essay. And just like Barthes mentions, there are many different messages that can come out of these images. Where this coded message resides is exactly what people will ask, and only a close look at the images will they be able to tell. At first glance at just the images, one sees Kevin Gandolfini, the lead character of "The Sopranos" to the right of the poster space in a stark black and white color, dressed in a nice suit and tie, looking off the the left of the space. The next images that might catch the audiences eye, although they may be more insignificant, tend to convey hidden messages that can be revealed in a connotative look of the poster. The background consists of the Statue of Liberty to the left, in tones of black and white, and a flock of flying geese also in tones of black and white.

To begin with a second quote from "Rhetoric of the Image", I believe that the best quote to describe what the audience might first pick up on in terms of connotative evaluation has to do with the visual image of Gandolfini. There is a lot to comprehend as it pertains to the image, and it allows the audience to question the signified of the image and place it in a larger context. The quote is as follows: "...in advertising the signification of the image is undoubtedly intentional; the signifieds of the advertising message are formed 'a priori' by certain attributes of the product and these signifieds have to be transmitted as clearly as possible" (Barthes 270). While the image of Gandolfini is a signifier, there are many different signifieds that one can ascertain from it. In terms of feelings and emotions, one might be that the signified is a sense of sadness, a loss of hope. His eyes seem to be a signifier of their own as well, as they are not looking directly out, but rather they are looking off to the left as if he is looking for something or is thinking. The signified might be a lack of focus, misdirection, or not having any interest. The signifier of the Statue of Liberty might give off the signified as America, the ideals of America, or justice. While the signifier of the geese might represent the signified of leaving for a while or moving on, and seeing as it is the final episodes of the show, it could be just that.

The third quote I chose tends to do more with the linguistic message of the poster. The words "The Final Episodes-April 8, 9PM" and "Made in America" are the only ones that appear on it. Not even the show's name "The Soprano's" appears. This in of itself gives of a clear linguistic message even though the letters aren't there; one is to assume that maybe the show is so popular that everyone would know what it was at first glance. "The text directs the reader through the signifieds of the image, causing him to avoid some and receive others..." (Barthes 275). This statement cannot be more true in this context, as the words help put the picture in context of the signifiers so that a signified can be established. Just the words about the show having its final episodes creates an environment in the poster to help distinguish the messages within. And that is a perfect form of relay between the poster and its audience.

I am the Blair Witch

These quotes that we are meant to analyze in terms of applying them to the "Blair Witch Project" hint at the absence of aura that the film creates. This is exactly what this film exhibits though; in an attempt to throw out all conventional filmwork such as the photography, cutting of scenes, and layout of the story, an aura is built up from the reality the "mechanical equipment" portrays. I don't think anything like "The Blair Witch Project" had ever been created before, so as this is a very original piece of art, that in itself helps emanate some aura of the film.
The first quote states that the "singularity of the shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted for the public". Also, as a result, the aura that the actors convey dissipates. However in the "Blair Witch Project", this is not the case. As much as the camera might be a substitute for the audience, it works both ways for the actors as well. The actors of the film see the same thing that the audience would. So there is a duplicity of viewing, and a different reality is shared by both. And therefore, the audience participates in this aura, which is somewhat reminiscent of the aura one would feel in a performance of "Macbeth" like the quote dicusses. On the other hand, an argument suggesting that the film loses in a sense some of its aura because it is a mechanical reproduction of the art of a Hollywood film is true. Like Walter Benjamin says in his essay "A Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", something that is the product of mechanical reproduction may not touch the actual work of art (in this case the film taking some of the elements of another film), and the quality of the film consequently is lessened.
The second quote I agree with more. Because of the cameraman's work in penetrating reality the way he/she does with the mechanical equipment at hand, its true that the final picture is really "pieced" together, and you get a more "real" outlook in the end; whereas a painter will paint reality as art in a whole. This tends to be less realistic because of the equipment used. In "The Blair Witch Project", not only did the use of equipment like their cameras present a reality through just a camera, but it also had the illusion as if one was perceiving reality through a set of eyes. And that it of itself brought another aspect of reality to the screen.
After analyzing those two quotes, I have come to believe "The Blair Witch Project" is more of an attempt to cut into reality. Walter states "the uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition", and with "BWP"'s attempt to try varying and unique means of photography, the reality created is inseparable from any other work of art. The crew of the film really did try and delve into reality and break it down into something that would translate to the audience in a way that was never really accomplished before. And now with movies such as "Cloverfield" and "Paranormal Activity", this type of integration of reality is being duplicated on the screen. These films are essentially the mechanical reproduction of "BWP", and that being said, those are the movies which lose a sense of aura--not "The Blair Witch Project".

Realism: Classical Hollywood Continuity Films vs. "Tokyo Monogatari"

The term “realism” was created in the early 1800’s in reference to a style of art that elaborated the style of living and everyday life in the nineteenth century. It brought to attention the ordinary things of life and made them extraordinary: a verisimilitude of reality. And even though the realism that we see today in film and film art expands on these concepts, I believe it emphasizes the role of everyday life in a new light; it takes the closely knit characters of this “everyday life” scenario and develops them in attention to the social factors that affect them.

In understanding how classical Hollywood continuity films create a different form of realism than Tokyo Story, one first must point out the contributing factors of realism in these Hollywood films. According to “Film Reference”, some kind of narrative causality constitutes the realism aspects of classical Hollywood continuity films. Since the plot of these films generally center around the protagonists and supporting characters, these individuals are subject to “whims of fate”. And it is through the chain of “cause-and-effect” that the narration is created. So in order to maintain an air of realism in these films, certain technical elements were evoked, such as creating the right costumes of the time period, having extra-diegetic music play over transitions and herald in character action as well as synchronized sound, producing different camera elements (fades, dissolves) to show the correct passage of time, and executing the right spatial continuity (180 degree rule, editing). Even the roles of an individual playing the “hero” or “villain” of these films contributed to its realism, because this certain typecasting was what the audience was looking for.

So what elements of realism did Tokyo Story adapt from this classical Hollywood continuity film style, and what elements separate it from those Hollywood films? Well it seemed there certainly was a unique narration with the elderly pair that decided to visit their grown-up children in Tokyo. But one could argue that Yasujiro Ozu did not intend for this film to convey a narrative at all. It is in my personal belief that this film was more an example of poetry than a narrative. The only thing that Tokyo Story and Hollywood have in common with this “narrative” concept is the idea that the elderly couple were subject to the chain of “cause-and-effect” of society on their children. As for the technical elements, Ozu tends to break the standard concept of what Hollywood would use as elements that convey realism. He tends to use more formalistic shots, rather than ones that stick to the 180 degree rule or the more common shots. Tokyo Story also seems to be in a different wheel of time; Ozu likes to prevent the common lapse of time from occurring, by either showing elaborate shots of the surrounding landscape or virtually stopping time with his ability to manipulate his camera shots. But even though the progression of time separates this form of realism from Hollywood’s, it is realism nonetheless. But what I think separates this realism from all others is his conventional method of ignoring the rise-and-fall action of classical Hollywood films. He contributes what he has to say through his characters and the environment around them, and then he just drops them back off into the world in which they started at the beginning of the movie...as if life never stopped. What a concept of realism.

http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Independent-Film-Road-Movies/Realism-MAKING-MOVIES-REAL.html

robert-frank-lapsenhoitaja

As discussed in Chapter 2 of Practices of Looking, the producer of an image and the viewer that engages it is of the utmost importance when it comes to dissecting an image. In my way of understanding the reading, for one, the producer creates meaning through the image by applying certain codes and conventions that viewer will interpret in their own way. And then secondly, it is also important in which that image is exhibited. In this photograph, I can say as a viewer that it does not and will not speak to me in the same way that it will another person. To me the producer intended for the subjects of the photograph, an elderly black female and a white infant, to juxtapose one another, and this interpellated me to see this image on a level of social equality. The lighting in the photograph is very white-washed, and the female of the photo is in stark contrast to this. Not only that, but the white infant that she is holding in her hands contrasts her dark skin, making this picture seem more unnatural for me. So essentially I see two levels of meaning: one in which the world this female is set in, and two, the situation of holding this infant. Both meanings imply a certain innocence to me, as well as a depth of understanding that color does not matter. The producer of the image created it in black and white, and thus as a viewer, I see it in terms of black and white---there is no gray in between. In the chapter, they discuss how aesthetic judgement about what we consider naturally is in fact culturally determined. And I see this photograph as a breakthrough not only in a social culture for people of different races, but it also speaks to our day and age where race and gender are all considered equal.