Essay On Sharrett's Exploration Of Modernity

After learning to drive recently, a noticeable feature of the act of driving is the way one observes their surroundings, the skills in manoeuvring the vehicle, remembering the rules of the road, and other aspects I have taken for granted as public transportation and my parents were those who had driven for me. Much like a passenger, cinema takes the audience to places through the use of the camera where they are presented with a specific and intentional perspective which creates a new reality for the audience. This deconstruction, in the exploration of modernity and the emphasis on mobility, reveals underlying ideologies, discovering previously unknown possibilities of existence and how they can be taken for granted. When one is accustomed
to a perceived reality, it is often difficult to reject such a truth as it has been fabricated to the point where it can be overwhelmingly difficult to resist. In Foster’s deconstruction of maternal melodrama films, she finds that blank characters in “their incomplete personalities are like modernist paintings of light and shadow, dapping of color that barely connect as fully human beings especially when contrasted with the more richly characterized mother figures” (106). In my viewing of the film Cloverfield (2008), the camera is shaking with much volatility and quickly shutters with flashes of darkness and light with facial expressions of worry, crowds panicking, and mimics the act of drowning. Due to the selective information given and the camera’s volatile mobility my reality became that I was in danger, overwhelmed by waves of people only able to catch glimpses of the occurrence. For me, the absence of anything made me want information such as the panicking people and so this is how the audience can be deceived into believing a certain reality – having been accustomed to it and only appreciating it once it is absent. In contrast to my viewing of the second film, both films had crowds, where the first is looking for the danger and the second is running away from the perceived danger.
In Sharrett’s deconstruction of the bourgeois life in films suggest “as the most extraordinary art form of modernity, the cinema can claim its greatest accomplishments the subversive critique of various received truths, from conventional notions of sexuality to the operations of time and space, and the undermining of the very concept of being in the age of relativity” (130) indicating to me how modernity allows us to question old conventions. In a similar viewing of The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947), the camera pans upward to reveal a crowd running away but instead of following the panic, the camera pans to the right to reveal the danger, who is the domesticated Jackie the Lion also trying to run away interpreting to me both parties becoming shocked. The camera acts as a communication medium between the viewer and the actual recorded reality where effects, movements and other layers of noise can influence the messages between the parties. Therefore, despite specific truths given to us, the audience can create their own truths given their individual thought despite whatever intentional deception a film
presents.