Blog Entry #1

In class, we have watched two separate music videos directed by Michel Gondry. Both were very artistic and played with the aspect of time. After seeing both for the first time, I was left confused and with no real sense of what the director was trying to achieve. Even after a second time, the meaning was unclear, though it was fairly obvious how complex each video was and how much work went into organizing them. I don’t think I would have been able to understand how the second video, Sugar Water, was done without Gondry explaining that it was a palindrome. After that it was clear to see that while one frame was going forward, the other was going backward but the same thing was happening at the same time in each. To even think of that  concept to me is amazing and to pull it off is even more amazing. 

I found the reading, “The Whole Ball of Wax” by Jerry Salz, that we were assigned to be very interesting. I agreed with a lot of what the author said but found that some claims may not be true in all circumstances. For example, I think that saying that “all those dogmatists, ideologues, academics, and theorists... demonize and belittle art as a gratuitous, semi-mystical, merely beautiful, purely formal amusement” is way to broad because surely it can be true for some but there are always exceptions. But one remark that I agreed with was that art can change the world, not in the sense of stopping global warming, as he says, but by osmosis. It can gradually change the opinions of people and greatly influence a society to make a change. I think that is what Salz is trying to say, that art can help people see the change that needs to be made. Until our discussion of the reading in class, I was confused on the comparison made between art and a cat in the last paragraph of the article. However, after hearing other peoples ideas on the meaning, I feel I now understand what the author was saying. He meant that art is not always direct, there is no definite solution and it is open to all sorts of interpretations. You look at a piece  of art, gather what you believe is the meaning or take whatever you will from it, and from this you connect with the artist, even if your interpretation wasn’t their intended meaning of the piece.

After seeing the two videos by Michel Gondry in class, and seeing the list of some other music videos he has directed, I became more interested in his work, so I decided to do a bit of research on him. I found that he started in music videos for a band that he was actually in, then got noticed by bigger artists and moved on from there. I also saw that he directed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Be Kind, Rewind, two movies which I had already seen and enjoyed. So I watched some more music videos which he has directed like “The Hardest Button to Button” and “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Floor” by The White Stripes and “Everlong” by Foo Fighters and each video was unique. But the one I found most interesting was “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Floor.” Jack White was alone in a dirty house with all of these holograms of other people, of him not alone, but they weren’t really there. He was the only one really there, which fits with the song because its about loneliness.