Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Lessons of Darkness






Manifesto is an assignment that initiates the dialogue between inside and out. It starts the conversation with your own definition of what it is you're doing in design, art, social practices, or theater. It keeps the topic from wandering in directions unproductive to your cause. A manifesto is both political and personal; public and private. Any other content is up to the group. Lots of forms are possible: poetical forms, confessions, dream analysis, situationsist practices, rants, dialogues, interviews, screeds, incendiary tracts, position papers, blogs, photo blogs, video blogs. See Werner Herzog's manifesto or his documentary "Lessons of Darkness" below.



NEWS


 

Minnesota declaration: truth and fact in documentary cinema 

"LESSONS OF DARKNESS" 


1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants. 


2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. "For me," he says, "there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail."

Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time. 


3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable. 


4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination. 


5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization. 


6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts. 


7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue. 


8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can´t legislate stupidity." 


9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down. 


10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn´t call, doesn´t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don´t you listen to the Song of Life. 


11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile. 


12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue. 


Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota April 30, 1999

Werner Herzog 


source: http://www.wernerherzog.com/main/de/html/news/Minnesota_Declaration.htm



Other manifesto resources:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ymyiRXCszc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI3f5-Vdi7g

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYiNNeESu94




http://www.pugwash.org/about/manifesto.htm

Manifesto





Manifesto of Surrealism.


Movement launched in Paris in 1924 by French poet André Breton with publication of his manifesto of Surrealism. Breton was strongly influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Freud identified a deep layer of the human mind where memories and our most basic instincts are stored. He called this the unconscious, since most of the time we are not aware of it. The aim of Surrealism was to reveal the unconscious and reconcile it with rational life. The Surrealists did this in literarature as well as art. Surrealism also aimed at social and political revolution and for a time was affiliated to the Communist party. There was no single style of Surrealist art but two broad types can be seen. These are the oneiric (dream-like) work of Dalí, early Ernst, and Magritte, and the automatism of later Ernst and Miró. Freud believed that dreams revealed the workings of the unconscious, and his famous book The Interpretation of Dreams was central to Surrealism. Automatism was the Surrealist term for Freud's technique of free association, which he also used to reveal the unconscious mind of his patients. Surrealism had a huge influence on art, literature and the cinema as well as on social attitudes and behavior.

source: http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=292
 



other resources:

http://www.screensite.org/courses/Jbutler/T340/SurManifesto/ManifestoOfSurrealism.htm








Group URLs

Here are the first of the URLs ...be sure to follow each others blogs. 

Nice work!

Al


The Mad Hatters (9 members)

The GE Show (13 members)

Team Venture (11 members)

The Pink Pansies (12 members)

Leaps and Bounds (14 members)

The Right Angles (10 members)

The Fourth Wall 

Buffet Productions
http://buffetproductions.blogspot.com

Where's Sofie? (7 members)
http://ifucamy.blogspot.com

Team Redundancy Team Wednesday Rainbow Department Ninja Force Guild 7
http://trtwrdnfg7go.blogspot.com