Week 1 Blog

The film Le Chant du Styrene, by Alain Resnais, is shot in a very interesting manner. Most of the shots are still shots where the camera does not move and the shot lingers on the frame for a few seconds. When the camera does move, it does so in a very slow panning motion. This gives the film a very documentary and objective point of view. The still shots and the slow panning that is combined with the music and the voice-over allows the spectator to view the content of the film in a very objective manner. The music and the voice-over is very dramatized and sometimes romanticized. The shots of the film are shots of simple plastic objects, yet with the dramatic music that is combined with the dramatized narrative, this brings the film into a very serious view on plastic and the creation of plastic materials. Nothing about plastic and the way in which it is made seems exciting or intense, but the sounds in relation to the shots are used to help present this social critic about our society and its dependence on machines and industrialization.

The first few shots of the film, like the plastic flowers that are growing, helps to bring in the nature vs. industrial (machine-like) view of the world in which we live in. The plastic seems to be growing and it is given a type of life as they form into different objects. This gives a sort of industrial take-over of nature and the human life. There is this huge industrial dependence that our world now focuses on and it has taken over and controlled our lives and how we live as a society. Our society is so focused and dependent on machines that we almost lose our sense of being. The film contains very little human presence. There are times where hands are presented to work the machines, but these hands do not provide any type of human nature or interaction. The hands act like machines themselves. They do the same tasks over and over and they act in a very systematic and robotic way. This helps to show how the film provides a type of social commentary about the way in which people and society have become so dependent on machines and how nature is diminishing in our human way of life.