Literally My Final Response

All The Memory in the World, as I interpreted it, is a reflection on how we associate ourselves with images, it is a reflection on our relationship and our reliance on images in general, as a concept. So much of what we see and do on a daily basis in current society relies so heavily on the fact that we can burn images permanently onto a medium for people to see forever. Olenick cleverly, and cheekily hammers home this point by giving us a series of images to rely on in order to understand the points that he is trying to make. I believe that he purposely chooses a lot of clips from films that we are familiar with as well, counting on our recognition of them as a reference to how much emphasis we place on their existence. Now, more than ever, since the creation of the camera (although you could argue that paintings and things like that did the same thing, its not really the subject of Olenick's work), we would be nowhere without being able to use these as a point of reference. One of the images that stuck out to me, although it might not be as obvious to anyone who hadn't actually seen the movie in which the clip he is using comes from, is when h e overlays a clip of Julianne Moore's character in "I'm Still Alice" looking at pictures in her book of memories. The movie is about a woman struggling to deal with her oncoming alzheimer's, and in such a way, makes these images one hundred times more important to her. She, more than anyone is relying on these images as her only reflection on the world, although we are all a vicim to it in one way or anther. One quote from of the films we watched earlier, about the reenactment of John. F. Kennedy's assassination said something similar to the themes in this film very well when the actor playing Kennedy said, "We exist in a time where I exist to you only in a series of images. I am not a man, but a series of images." And while this quote applies very specifically to the point that their own film was trying to make, it holds true with any kind of image in general. Everything that we see on a screen or on a canvas is simply one moment preserved in time, or one series of moments preserved in time, but what it represents is simply that: a representation, and nothing more. It is what we perceive it to be. And we cling to these images because it gives us some sense of control over what we try to grasp as our own physical reality. In his own reflexivity, Olenick overlays these ideas over different clips from different films, both old and new (it doesn't matter, they are all preserved) . In one clip, he shows a man working in a darkroom developing film, here the character says, "here, I'm in charge." Being able to store and categorize these different images gives us control. 

The voice acting did leave something to be desired. 

I think it is a really good choice of film to end the class on. It focuses on all aspects of image-making as a general medium. It makes the viewer more aware of what that what they are watching is am mere series of images on a screen, by way of images on a screen. This is something that this class over this month has done a great deal in teaching me. In my first intro post, I think it was pretty evident that I understood meta-cinema in a very causal and simply way. At the beginning of the class, all I had to reference was the typical "breaking of the fourth wall", or as I called it, "The Deadpool Style". It was the most obvious direction that meta-cinema can take. Now, and I hope that you and others would agree as evidenced in my more recent writings, I believe that I have a deeper understanding of the ways that reflexivity can be used in a way that delves deep into the culture behind it, and the human weltanschauung (finally got to use that word!) . 

This is Paul Christian...SIGNING OFF!