Exercise 3

When viewing the reference screening in Exercise 3, I was immediately drawn to Peter Mack's work. You can tell right off the bat that he puts a lot of time and effort into the videos. Not only that, but creativity in the art as well as choice of music. 

The first film I watched was "Sitting Waiting". In the beginning, I was at peace with the image being shown. The sound was just wind, and a person sitting on a chair, but then the audio was split up. It's like having keyframes all next to each other, then taking out every other one, but with sound. The colors got more violent when the sound changed, and I felt a very unsettling feeling, then the colors began to slowly fade back. I found that with "Blue Velvet" the same thought process was there. You start off in the film very at peace, the music fades into very unsettling, then back to peaceful. But here's the cool part, the peace is different at the end then at the beginning. When you start watching, you are unaware of what's to come, and that kind of peace is called "positive peace". Then you start to see that this imaginary world isn't as perfect as it's portrayed on the outside. In this film, the "inside" is the grass. It seems as though something is lurking, and then it becomes almost disturbing in a sense. It cuts abruptly into positive music and a smiling woman on a billboard, odd right? This is where the "negative peace" sets in. It's more clearly defined as the "absence of violence or fear of violence". After we see what is really going on in this town, we aren't in that same positive peace as in the start. I find it incredible how well he can toy with someone's emotions with his film. People have told me that certain art pieces make you cry or intensely happy, but I've never felt that until now, in his work.