This blog prompt is a hard one for me, I want to somehow tie it into this post so I can make my thoughts cohesive, but I have a feeling it isn't going to work, so I apologize for how scatterbrained this post might sound.
In Tuesday's class, Dr. Zwicker mentioned the idea of the "flaneur", and how Baudelaire's idea of the flaneur ties into how we see the city. This statement got me thinking about Baudelaire's ideas of capturing modernity. He believed that the only way to properly represent modernity through painting was to walk through the city and record it the way everyone else sees it from day to day, without thinking about how the image in the artist's mind would translate onto the canvas. I have always thought this was an accurate way to represent the city, and whenever I see an Impressionist piece that is painted from the flaneur perspective I think it is the most accurate display of that city at that time.
When Trevor Anderson came into our class I realized that this is what he did in his film, "The High Level Bridge", which is a very honest interpretation of the bridge from a person who knows it as part of his everyday journey. He explained to us that pieces were filmed "walking home from the bar" and during other everyday movements through the city. It isn't a piece about something "modern" but it exists in modern life. Now obviously this is not a painting, but maybe it is a modern way of recording part of the city in an accurate and true manner. Maybe 100 years from now people will see this film and feel like they can see the past from a ordinary person's perspective.
Maybe I'm totally crazy but I see a similarity between Anderson's documentary and this flaneur painting by Toulouse-Lautrec from the 19th century.
You're not crazy, I see what you're getting at. Not just with Anderson's documentary, either; you could probably look at half of youtube using Baudelaire's ideas of modernity (I know very little about this, so I could be way off-base.) When you think about it, future historians are going to have an extremely easy time of piecing together our time period/everyday life, because we have a tendency to leave records of everything.
ReplyDeleteI too agree that you're not crazy :)
ReplyDeleteI found it very interesting how you related the two mediums of art onto one cohesive theme. I think that pretty much is an application of what we've been discussing in class in terms of looking at how we move in the city.
We all travel throughout the city in our own way and as Sam said above, we do have a tendency to leave records of everything. It's definitely interesting to see how similar two documentations of movement may be, despite them being recorded at different times, in different places, be different people, and in different ways.