Blog #2

I have watched a documentary film, “Food, Inc.”, for this assignment. This film examines large-scale agricultural food production in the United States, concluding that the meat and vegetables produced by this type of economic enterprise leads to inexpensive but unhealthy and environmentally harmful food. The most harmful scene was that one showing how the food industry produce inexpensive chickens. They design chickens to grow twice as big than regular chickens and let the chickens have bigger breasts, so that they can produce more white meat since people like to eat that. However, some of the chickens die during the growing process since their organs cannot keep up with the heaviness. There is a scene of a chicken dying in the chicken house. The chicken overturns and is hardly breathing: its heaviness is choking the chicken. This is a very harmful and difficult scene to view for me. To show this pain of the chicken, a shallow depth of focus is used to emphasize this dying chicken. This is a close-up shot of the chicken dying on the center foreground and it is on focus. The other alive chickens are moving around on the background and on off-focus. Lighting contrasts the alive and dying chickens: this dying chicken is on the shade and it emphasize the end of this chicken's life, however the alive chickens are in sunshine and looks fine. The chickens house is very dusty, dirty place and it makes us even scared if we think that chickens we eat in our everyday life is growing there. Therefore, this nasty chicken house is suitable for mise-en-scene to show the chicken suffering from the death. This scene make us doubt that what the industry is doing for producing inexpensive food is right by showing how they treat chickens, such as showing the nasty chicken house where they grow or showing the dying chicken. The lighting, mise-en-scene, focusing helps create this harmful, painful scene to achieve the producer's objective, which is showing the reality of the food industry.

Blog Assignment #1

I saw a lot of interesting things at the museum, such as the history of moving images, the process of film devices, and so on. The most interesting thing that I saw is televisions from 1950’s. They were almost 60 years old, so therefore they were huge and looked like a box as well as the other old TVs. However, the biggest difference between the 1950’s TVs and the other old TVs were their design and decoration, and I loved it. According to the lady who was working in the museum, in 1950’s women were always staying at home and doing house works. They did not work outside of a house at all; therefore, these married women were the people who mostly watched TVs often. Regarding to it, the decorations on the 1950’s TVs were very feminine: surface of the TVs were pink or gold. Not only the color, but also the shapes of these 1950’s TVs were also feminine. The 50’s TVs were shaped into electrical machines which women often use for house working, such as a washing machine or stoves. The 1950's TVs reflected characteristics of the year, and it was very interesting to me. Another interesting thing I saw at the museum was the pictures of the historical movie stars. All of the pictures were on the wall so that I could see the differences among the movie stars. For example, there were two famous actresses' picture next to each other and the two actresses were very contrasting: one of them was a sexy woman who looked like she was on one of the Film Noir movies. The other actress looked very innocent and pure. The movie stars' pictures were on the same wall, therefore I could see the differences among them and it was very interesting.

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