Heyo!
Last week I had holidays all week. I finally got to travel to Helsinki (with a trip through Tampere and Turku first) to meet my buddies. It had been two months since I last stayed there. I had planned to visit Helsinki more often, but an excuse and so on.
So I spent all week with my friends and I liked it very much :). I also shared some quality time with my one and only electric guitar and watched awesome flick called "Drive". It used a lot of techniques I'd like to use if I'd ever make a movie. Like telling a story without much dialogue.
After that truly enjoyable week, as I returned to Virrat, it actually felt more like homecoming than my trip to Helsinki, to the city where I have lived for almost twenty years, almost my whole life. Weird.
Perhaps Virrat has grown to me more than I realize. And I've always adapted to new fast.
Still I asked myself; what is home?
My pal suggested a more subjective answer: home is wherever one feels it is. True, but a bit obvious too.
I myself thought that home is a place where a human being "becomes" herself.
This leads to conclusion that in Virrat I have already become something and I continue to transform. And that sounds about right.
Like U2 puts it in a song of theirs:
"House doesn't make a home".
Random notes:
* We have to make a 40 minute presentation about composition of the movie "Fisher King" by Terry Gilliam. Not too bad, but I would have rather watched "Raging Bull".
* Also in the making is a 10 page essay about alternative screenwriting.
* And a list of scenes of our first screenplay of which we have already made a synopsis.
* And our group has a growing interest of start working with our own off-school projects.
* So yeah, a lot of stuff goin' on, and a lot more I can't write about now.
* I dyed my hair last week, for the first time in my life. Now it's once again this weird reddish colour.
* I cut my own hair. It shows.
* I also took two new piercings to my ears. I like 'em very much.
* At last I have a working television in the house. Not that I have watched it.
(I had a two month break from television before I traveled to Helsinki. When at home I opened it up to watch something while eating. I closed it after 15 minutes and noted to myself: "still nothing")
* I attended to a Halloween-party last night. Good times, conquering the dance floor dressed as a Nazi officer.
* Weather's cold 'n wet here... :(
That's it for now.
J
I have listened a lot The National for a while now. Perhaps it's a phase. A kind of phase were you listen to music about (as pastemagazine.com puts it) "the search of love, continually increasing paranoia, fractured relationships, the deterioration of youthful innocence and a generally bittersweet world", all the while being happy yourself.
Or I'm just a melancholic person.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KehwyWmXr3U
torstai 27. lokakuuta 2011
keskiviikko 12. lokakuuta 2011
About gender in film
G'day!
This could appear to you as a bit of odd post. A mixture of societal anger and philosophical curiosity. But sometimes I think stuff like this and my blog is about 50% about stuff I think about (3 abouts in one sentence! Success!), the other 50% being about stuff that happens to me. So... Expect more of these sometime in the future.
This is going to be a difficult subject to handle. After all: we are raised into our genders since childhood and it's perhaps one of the strongest identification points in ourselves.
Anyway, I'm just going to scratch the surface here. Gender roles go way back and I'm not really a professional in this. But... the subject came up today and I feel like talking of it. Even though I have talked about it many times before. Perhaps I write more about it someday.
People are different and unique in their own right and regardless of the gender. However it seems that men have much broader scale to express themselves within. This is best exemplified by how women are represented in films.
A few months back I was attending to a lecture about film industry and its relation to other aspects of culture. One of those other aspects was gender. In films, most women fall into few categories:
(I can't remember them all now, but I'll update as soon as I get my hands on my notes)
1. The Love Interest / The Sex Object
2. The Femme Fatale
3. The Loving and Wise Mother
4. The Innocent Child / The Cutie
5. The Big Momma
Of course there are exceptions, like Sarah Connor in Terminator or Ellen Ripley in Alien. But could we categorize all the male roles in films into 4-7 roles? I doubt it. We'd need about 20, at least.
Let's try. Here's all the roles for men I care to remember at the moment.
1. The Heroic Hero
2. The Tragic Hero
3. The Villain
4. The Comic Relief
5. The Boss
6. The Traitor
7. The Coward
8. The Mastermind / The Scientist
9. The Brawn
10. The Mentor
11. The Rival
12. The Father
13. The Ladies Man
14. The Smart Mouth Kid
...
And so forth.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jpmoore/men-ups-manly-men-in-classic-pin-up-poses
Rise to equality is difficult process. To overcome old societal differences between genders while minding the genetic differences. To achieve this we should pay more attention to the ways society subconsciously alters our perception of men and women. Like the roles women play to us and how they are represented. These are in a way more dangerous differences than the more tangible ones, because our "defenses" aren't up. We take it as it is.
When I studied to matriculation examination I read a comic book about philosophers. I liked it. But the ending was truly surprising. The book basically said that everything you've read so far has been from the perspective of men. Almost all great philosophers are men, they inspected the world from their manly point of view, and some of them even disliked women and doubted their intellectual ability. There have been great female thinkers as well, but they have been knowingly pushed aside by their male counterparts. So, congratulations! You've read a comic book about philosophers of history, but know shit as all of it is compromised by peers and historians lynching the thinkers representing the other 50% of the people because of their gender.
I fucking loved the ending.
J
A lovely song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj5RUNLQBQE
This could appear to you as a bit of odd post. A mixture of societal anger and philosophical curiosity. But sometimes I think stuff like this and my blog is about 50% about stuff I think about (3 abouts in one sentence! Success!), the other 50% being about stuff that happens to me. So... Expect more of these sometime in the future.
This is going to be a difficult subject to handle. After all: we are raised into our genders since childhood and it's perhaps one of the strongest identification points in ourselves.
Anyway, I'm just going to scratch the surface here. Gender roles go way back and I'm not really a professional in this. But... the subject came up today and I feel like talking of it. Even though I have talked about it many times before. Perhaps I write more about it someday.
People are different and unique in their own right and regardless of the gender. However it seems that men have much broader scale to express themselves within. This is best exemplified by how women are represented in films.
A few months back I was attending to a lecture about film industry and its relation to other aspects of culture. One of those other aspects was gender. In films, most women fall into few categories:
(I can't remember them all now, but I'll update as soon as I get my hands on my notes)
1. The Love Interest / The Sex Object
2. The Femme Fatale
3. The Loving and Wise Mother
4. The Innocent Child / The Cutie
5. The Big Momma
Of course there are exceptions, like Sarah Connor in Terminator or Ellen Ripley in Alien. But could we categorize all the male roles in films into 4-7 roles? I doubt it. We'd need about 20, at least.
Let's try. Here's all the roles for men I care to remember at the moment.
1. The Heroic Hero
2. The Tragic Hero
3. The Villain
4. The Comic Relief
5. The Boss
6. The Traitor
7. The Coward
8. The Mastermind / The Scientist
9. The Brawn
10. The Mentor
11. The Rival
12. The Father
13. The Ladies Man
14. The Smart Mouth Kid
...
And so forth.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jpmoore/men-ups-manly-men-in-classic-pin-up-poses
Rise to equality is difficult process. To overcome old societal differences between genders while minding the genetic differences. To achieve this we should pay more attention to the ways society subconsciously alters our perception of men and women. Like the roles women play to us and how they are represented. These are in a way more dangerous differences than the more tangible ones, because our "defenses" aren't up. We take it as it is.
When I studied to matriculation examination I read a comic book about philosophers. I liked it. But the ending was truly surprising. The book basically said that everything you've read so far has been from the perspective of men. Almost all great philosophers are men, they inspected the world from their manly point of view, and some of them even disliked women and doubted their intellectual ability. There have been great female thinkers as well, but they have been knowingly pushed aside by their male counterparts. So, congratulations! You've read a comic book about philosophers of history, but know shit as all of it is compromised by peers and historians lynching the thinkers representing the other 50% of the people because of their gender.
I fucking loved the ending.
J
A lovely song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj5RUNLQBQE
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