Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan’s latest blog–“Rolling Through Time“–reunites her with former K student John Baxa in a conversation about an animated short feature John helped create. That short is titled “Ball” and is about time. Or is it memory (its power and limitations)? Or aging? Play or death? All this in a three-minute animated short? Of course, suggests Siu-Lan and John. It’s a matter of layers (certainly a part of What Shapes Film) as well as all that a viewer brings to the experience (the story is in the eye of the beholder). Enjoy your own encounter, to which you bring…what?
Three or four viewings evoked for me two poems, one by Wislawa Szymborska and the other by K’s own Con Hilberry. The poems are related to each other and to the animated short, though the three differ, especially in the feeling of their endings. The poems are shared below.
John graduated from K in 2009. He majored in psychology and earned a concentration in media studies. He recently completed a Master’s degree in entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon. His short has no speech or text. Layers of image and music are everything. The music, somewhat ironically, is titled “Words.”
Still Life With a Balloon
(by Wislawa Szymborska, from Poems New and Collected 1957-1997, Harcourt, Inc., 1998)
Returning memories?
No, at the time of death
I’d like to see lost objects
return instead.
Avalanches of gloves,
coats, suitcases, umbrellas—
come, and I’ll say at last:
What good’s all this?
Safety pins, two odd combs,
a paper rose, a knife,
some string—come, and I’ll say
at last: I haven’t missed you.
Please turn up, key, come out,
wherever you’ve been hiding,
in time for me to say:
You’ve gotten rusty friend!
Downpours of affidavits,
permits and questionnaires,
rain down and I will say:
I see the sun behind you.
My watch, dropped in a river,
bob up and let me seize you—
then, face to face, I’ll say:
Your so-called time is up.
And lastly, toy balloon
once kidnapped by the wind—
come home, and I will say:
There are no children here.
Fly out the open window
and into the wide world;
let someone else should “Look!”
and I will cry.
Memory
(by Conrad Hilberry, from Until the Full Moon Has Its Say, Wayne State University Press, 2014)
Everything that was—touch
football in the street, Peggy
McKay in the hay wagon,
Miss LaBatt’s geometry, the second
floor in Madison, where
one daughter slept in a closet.
Is any of this true? Nightgowns,
glances, griefs existing nowhere
but in this sieve of memory.
Newspaper files, bank accounts,
court records—nothing there.
It’s gone, except for these scratchy
words—blackbird on a branch,
long story caught in his throat.
Believing is not seeing–especially at the movies. Siu-Lan Tan, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology at Kalamazoo College and a very popular blogger for Psychology Today and Oxford University Press (What Shapes Film: Elements of the Cinematic Experience and More), recently wrote two interesting pieces on perception … or rather, perhaps, misperception. The most fundamental illusion of the movies is obvious (except this reader never realized it until he read Siu-Lan’s blog), and that is the illusion of motion. Pictures don’t move even though things seem to move in the movies that I watch. From that revelation the blog moves (no pun intended) to differences in perception among different animals (an outcome of natural selection driven by survival). Take birds. Their perception has evolved to be much more sensitive to moving stimuli (compared to humans). Good for snatching prey, good for avoiding becoming prey, and good for safe high-speed landings into small nests. Not so good for a summer flick date night. That explains why Siu-Lan titled that blog: Why You Can’t Take a Pigeon to the Movies: A bird’s eye view of film. Not long after she wrote that mind-bending delight, Siu-Lan posted a second blog on the subject of perception–this one focused on a viral music video by the band OK Go. The title of that piece: Is the Writing on the Wall? A musical tribute to Gestalt psychologists. Turns out the writing was NOT on the wall (though you could have–and did–fool me). Siu-Lan skillfully connects the video’s visuals with the song’s words (I needed someone to do that because I was too busy following the moving–but, remember not really moving–pictures to even register the lyrics. Siu-Lan writes: “The music is not just an accompaniment to the collage of optical illusions and paradoxes, but an integral part of the work. The song is about miscommunication that can go on in a relationship. (Or is the idea of two people really ‘getting each other’ merely an illusion?)” Hmmmm. Anyway, check out both posts. You gotta see the OK Go video. Of course, you won’t be seeing what you’re seeing.