Research Response Project 3

For my research I watched the film The Jacket directed by John Maybury. This was the first Hollywood movie for Maybury, who is an independent filmmaker from England. To make this film, Maybury found inspiration in silent fims, and films from the 1960-70's such as The Parallax View.

The interpretation of the film's plot is left up to the viewer, although director John Maybury claims this is not a movie about time travel. The Jacket is a psychological thriller about a man named Jack who is institutionalized because he is believed to have murdered a police officer, but Jack has no recollection of committing the crime. Since Jack cannot remember he is placed in a hospital for the criminally insane. Throughout the story, Jack has dream/flashback-type moments when he "travels" through time and pieces together the crime he was thought to have committed, and sorts out the mysteries occurring in the lives of the people he has been connected with.

I chose a three minute clip of Jack receiving treatment in the hospital. The scene starts off with a long shot of the hospital and then cuts to another long shot of Jack and a few doctors walking down the hallway. The next cut shows three or four doctors and Jack in a room where Jack will receive his treatment. However, Jack doesn't believe the treatments are helping him and he tries to fight back. To illustrate the intensity of the scene, there are quick cuts between Jack, who grabs a straight jacket from the wall, and Jack hitting one of the doctors with the straight jacket. Once Jack has been restrained, the doctor who he hit leaves the room, leaving two other doctors to strap jack into a straight jacket and get him into the drawer. As the doctors are strapping Jack onto the gerny, there is an aspect-to-aspect transition within the scene involving Jack being strapped in and shoved into the draw, and the doctor who was hit in his office talking with another doctor. While Jack is being strapped in, there are multiple extreme closeups of the buckles being buckled. The aspect-to-aspect shots end with a wide shot of a doctor closing the drawer that contains Jack. While Jack is in the drawer there are extreme close ups of one of his eyes, where flashbacks of Jack's life are shown. The scene ends with Jack in another point in time, no longer at the hospital.

Response to James Turrell

Last weekend I went to the ICA to see James Turrell's work at the ICA. His piece was in a separate room in one of the galleries. The piece was a rectangle of a solid shade of red light. From a distance the light looked as if it was being projected onto a wall, or a solid red rectangle moutned onto the wall; nothing too impressive. But when I got closer, I realized that the light was filling a 3-D space. It was interesting seeing the red light as a solid rectangle mounted onto a wall, and then getting close to it and realizing it was something you could put your hands through. Actually being able to see James' Turrell's work at the ICA allowed me to appreciate his work a lot more than I had before.b

Projet 1

This is my response to the research for the Aspects and Elements of Time project.