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Current Projects: |
Revolutionary Crowds
The film, "Revolutionary Crowds," visualizes the emergent phenomena that arise from the interactions between a very large number of individuals. The transition from a group of people to a crowd in action with a well- defined collective goal has been likened to a phase transition between states of matter - from gas to liquid. Different threads of the film juxtapose black and white material that is older and mostly European (including some Soviet), with a variety of more modern images of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Tiananmen Incident, Khomenni's death, and the violent dispersion of a student anti-war rally at UCLA in 1969. The majority of archival footage in this films is very emotional; for instance, disturbing images of students being arrested or beaten up by the police are contrasted with the colorful, more intimate crowds, full of joy, at the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the film, the expression of the crowd as a like minded entity is contrasted with images of individuals, e.g. the expressive faces of orators and leaders and victims. The film is an experiment dealing with the relative importance of subsets of visual information in the perception of crowds. It encapsulates six political revolutions in five and a half minutes. |
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