Which leads me to what I want to write about with the Eames films we looked at. The common thematic thread I felt within in them was a playfulness with perspective. Not so much in terms of cinematography, although that certainly happens, but on a broader scale. There's a certain visual and conceptual re-imagining of perspectives at work in Eames. Powers of Ten is a good example.
What I liked about the Eames' films, is this loose sense of magnitude that you get from them. Powers of Ten is pretty much an examination of spatial relations in one (or maybe two) camera movements. The way it's filmed is with one long continuous zoom-out, which is then reversed. That there is an odometer framing what we see is telling. By having the distance in metres either side of the image, we gain some abstract (as we don't actually count metres in our everyday experience) sense of spatial awareness.
What I also thought was interesting was the usage of the blue frame within the film, signifying a change in the factor of ten. Which I think gives the film a kind of telescopic aesthetic; you have frames within frames firstly moving away from you, then rapidly your perspectives flies through these frames and into the microscopic details of atomic and subatomic particles that make up the universe.
One of the most powerful images of Powers of Ten happens after about two minutes: the Earth taking up a dominant position at the foreground of the screen then slowly moving away until we can't see it anymore.
I think having the entire planet, there as the focal point of the screen, framed by a blue square and measurements in relation to where we began, highlights the aesthetics of perspective which are at the heart of Powers of Ten.
In complete contrast is House, which is more like a collection of photographs sliced together. Unlike the smooth movement of Toccata for Toy Trains or Powers of Ten, House seems a bit more stilted. The effect of this is to highlight more forcefully the differences in perspective, but I think, aesthetically at least, the House is perhaps less interesting than Powers of Ten or Toccata. You do have a wider variety of shot angles in House though, again, reinforcing this idea of perspective, and linking back to the doll's eye view idea. In House it's more of a flower's eye view, with slight but semi-jarring changes in pace.
Anyway, in conclusion, here is a Simpsons parody video I found.
