500 Days of Summer/ Photography

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsD0NpFSADM

There are numerous reasons to love 500 Days of Summer but I particularly enjoy the color palette and selective visual shots and how they interact with the music. Also, the opening is just super exciting with the usage of old film. I feel like old film automatically puts a romanticized spin on things.

I was obsessing over this movie at the end of last fall semester when I was thinking in terms of memory rather than time. I was also focusing a lot more on the nature of photographs in connection with my work. "Long ago it must be, I have a photograph. Preserve your memories, they're all thats left you" is a direct quote from one of the songs in the movie. More PROOF that photographs and memory have a clear and strong connection. "A moment, a love, a dream, a laugh " from another song just creates a nice visual.

The thing about photographs is that they edit information. They are documentation of reality that has occurred but it is selective truth. The viewer can only know what actually happened unless they were there. Since they alter fact isn't creating artwork from photographs taking that fact to yet another level of illusion? It allows for even more situations to be set up. Isn't that what humans often do in their heads? Set up possible instances that could have happened or that they hope to happen? I feel like this all dances around words such as fantasy, illusion, and romanticism. Taboo cliches in reality. It took me a while to admit that a lot of my work deals with romanticism (not as in romantic love) but more in terms of an idealized view of life. That's what old photographs do. As much as I would like to imagine people in the 1940s walking around in a sepia tone mist, actuality is that it wasn't anything different from the world we experience today.

Also, I adore Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.