Angriest Rice Cooker Director’s Cut 20–On Directing Film
That image in the last panel is the almost unedited version of the piece of art I distorted to make the Angriest Rice Cooker image.
I’ve never really studied film extensively, but as part of a project on literary criticism I read a few books on it. The idea referenced in this comic is a pretty common one in what I’ve read of film studies, but the main place I got it was the works of early Russian film genius Sergei Eisenstein. He wasn’t the first to have this idea, but he was one of the first to put it into glorious practice. Battleship Potemkin uses this idea of montage to great effect. The book I read by him is The Film Sense, a very articulate and accessable read. He saw film as an American medium, and wrote in very clear English to speak to an American audience. He also discusses “montage” as a relationship between visual elements and musical score–something he pioneered in Alexander Nevsky working along side soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev. There’s plenty bad you can say about the Soviet art system–but they did a pretty good job of matching up geniuses. Of course, then they turned around, made a deal with the Germans, and suppressed Nevsky for a while until the whole Nazi thing blew up in their faces. I made another comic about that.
The title of this comic comes from the David Mamet book of the same name. I read that in high school before discovering that other people had said basically the same thing like fifty years before. Still a good read though. Also, those interested in making comics really ought to check out all this stuff–this particular theory of film is extremely applicable to comics.
Below the cut is both the comic, as always, and a poster for Alexander Nevsky because it’s super awesome.
Save on del.icio.us
Save on Stumbleupon
June 15th, 2007 at 12:58 am
You know, I’m really enjoying these.
June 15th, 2007 at 9:28 am
I’m glad! Me too. You could probably make an argument that it would be less work to just make new comics. I’m not sure if that’s true, but either way I’m not sure that I’d rather be making comics than doing this.