Raul Ruiz says, "In front of my house, wind would move the trees. At a certain point the wind would blow with such regularity that one had the impression the trees were frozen in place, bent over in the same direction ... that moment of immobility gave the impression that movement and its opposite were not contradictory. ... This oscillation [between constant mobility and sudden immobility] gradually gave a new feeling to the scene: when everything moved about one only saw immobility, and vice-versa [sic]. I told myself this was a good way to photograph the wind" (140).
I quote this text by Ruiz because I think it says something both about the photograph (the media he is talking about in here) and film. Of course, filming the wind, it's constant movement and the way it changes the landscape) is a way to film something invisible (like how we film invisible men by the way the haystacks dent to denote his body). To think about the body of the wind in a photograph versus a film is interesting too.
Of course, a person who loves the wind, and as a person who utilized the wind in her Mystory when I talked about Pocahontas I think it's fascinating to try and signify something that is not visible to us. But what about the wind's wind?
In the movie Stay, a film kind of about a mentally distressed artist who can somehow predict future events, the artist is sitting in his lecture class listening to an art historian talk about some Goya paintings. The art historian says that although one cannot paint the wind, one can paint the wind's wind. I always thought that was an an awesome analysis, not only because it made sense, but also because it didn't make any sense at all. There is, for me, something uncanny about it.
We can see the wind's wind when we observe the way that smoke flows, for instance, as the art historian says. But there comes with this phrase a desire to think about a double invisibility: If one cannot photograph the wind, how can one photograph the (logically twice-removed) wind's wind? This is where Ruiz's process along with a kind of time-lapse comes into play, I think, to get us closer to the answer to this question.
Stimson stipulates that "in the first attempts to use serial photography to capture motion and narrative sequence, the aim was not to reproduce life as experienced in time but instead to see what cannot be seen by the naked eye, to see what can be seen only when time is stopped ... the camera was brought in to give visual testimony to what the eye on its own could not see by disarticulating the sequence of events, by breaking the narrative apart" (95).
This quote leads us to the instruction for this blog because it highlights the way that time lapse sequence photography allows for the invisibilities, for the gaps, for the stains of the wind and the wind's wind to show through somehow. This process, unlike but also so much like Ruiz's photographic methods, allows us to get closer to our desire to see the wind (so we can paint with these colors that Pocahontas sings about -- because we can sometimes actually see the wind in the movie).
Instruction: For this part, you need two cameras (one has to have the ability to take videos). Turn your flash off because that usually slows down the process of fast action photography. Put your camera's settings on the "sports" feature - since sports are often filled with fast-action movement, the sports feature allows for a very fast shutter speed that captures someone in motion (a little bit opposite of photodynamism). Some cameras or camera apps allow for sequence shots to be taken by just the click of one button, some cameras you have to keep clicking the button for the camera to take a series of photographs. Figure this out on your individual camera setting. Then, either wait for a windy day or utilize the power of an electric fan to simulate the wind, and take action shots at the same time that you take the video. Analyze the video side-by-side with the sequence shots: what can you see that you couldn't before?
Bonus instruction: Take the photographs out of sequence and then look through them again. What changes have occurred? Do you notice something different?
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