Saturday 3 October 2015

Breaking Cinema: 1 blog post & 20 key points of the focus...


Breaking Cinema is a podcast project I have been developing and, for a good chunk of that development period, I have struggled to figure out what is the project's specific focus.

An idea sitting in your head is useless - write it down!


What follows are twenty concise points I collected together to help myself and the other project members to understand the specific focus of Breaking Cinema which is now emerging as I get ever closer to fully nailing it down...


1) The bigger picture 
2) Constructive 
3)"Human beings are very complicated things. They live in several dimensions at once, not just one. And if they try to live just in one, they warp themselves horribly.”- Olaf Stapledon, Four Encounters, 1983 
4) Five-dimensional thinking a.k.a. lateral thinking 
5) Film history, analysis, criticism and appreciation can take care of themselves 
6) Holistic = transdisciplinary 
7) “The world we perceive is an artificially constructed environment whose character and properties are as much a result of unconscious mental processing as they are a product of real data.” - Subliminal: The New Unconscious and What it Teaches Us, 2014:50 
8) Willful blindness a.k.a. the art of ignoring reality 
9) Reflective 
10) “I am not a good man and I’m not bad man. You know what I am… I am… an idiot! With a box and a screwdriver, passing through, helping out, learning.” – The Doctor, Doctor Who: Death in Heaven, 2014 
11) Homo sapiens are the best and the worst thing about the planet Earth 
12) “[In the future], the Internet will disappear… you won’t even sense it, it will be part of your presence all the time.” - Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google 
13) Engaging with content is anything but passive 
14) “All of us want to bury our heads in the sand when taxes are due, when we have bad habits we know we should change, or when the cars starts to make that strange sound. Ignore it and it will go away – that’s what we think and hope. It’s more than just wishful thinking. In burying our heads in the sand, we are trying to pretend the threat doesn’t exist and that we don’t have to change. We are also trying hard to avoid conflict: if the threat’s not there, I don’t have to fight it. A preference for the status quo, combined with an aversion to conflict, compel us to turn a blind eye to problems and conflicts we just don’t want to deal with.” – Margaret Heffernan, Wilful Blindness, 2012:211 
15) Hybrid 
16) "Until eight weeks old, every fetal brain looks female - female is nature's default gender setting" – Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain, 2006:36 
17) Creativity 
18) ‘Listen’ – if you re-arrange the letters it becomes ‘silent’ 
19) “my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose. So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein, - more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.” – Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 2003:49 
20) Us 

Concise is quite an achievement for me!


To understand these twenty points in context with one another, check out Breaking Cinema with a Selfie Stick: Constructive Film Studies & the Point of my Podcast.

More coming soon.

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