In her hometown of White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, school for African-Americans normally stopped at the eighth grade for those who could afford to attend. She was fascinated with numbers and became a high school freshman by age 10. Johnson's impressive intellect was evident from the time she was a child. NASA Katherine Johnson Documentaryĭid Katherine's father really move the family 120 miles each school year so that she and her siblings could continue their education? For her accomplishments, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom on November 24, 2015. She calculated trajectories for Alan Shepard's groundbreaking 1961 spaceflight (America's first human in space), she verified the calculations for John Glenn's first American orbit of Earth, she computed the trajectory of Apollo 11's flight to the moon, and she worked on the plan that saved Apollo 13's crew and brought them safely back to Earth. His hidden gold is that miraculous alchemical element in Jedi blood.Over the course of her three decades at NASA, Katherine Johnson's biography includes an impressive list of accomplishments. His goal was a similar marriage of the visual (space) with story (Joseph Campbell inspired myth). So that is the real template Lucas took in conceiving his project. Obligatory Star Wars comment: I am sure Lucas' film school professors would have explained the relationship of story and visual challenge this way. He now has more natural horizontals in his greytone/greystone arrangements so has to create more artificial verticals. He still does diagonals, but fewer, less steep and with less static import. And he reinvented his strategy of panning of motion: compare a running sequence here to the famous woodcutter's running in the beginning of 'Rashomon.' Look at how he panned the General's attack on horseback. Here, he was able to relax the axis so that the layers did not have be so much on top of one another. His approach to framing had always been layered, usually three layers of activity in fore, middle and background. Kurosawa did not respond to the wide format like his American peers who preferred awesome panoramas. Kurosawa has wrestled this new eye and mastered it. But this second time, we are at peace, the frame is serene. Kurosawa not so.) At the end of the story, the peasant-actors are on a grand stair that mirrors a similar stair we saw earlier which was the scene of a huge conflict (in turn mirroring the battle on Eisenstein's Odessa steps in 'Potemkin'). Mifune would end up wealthy and celebrated in Japan. Mifune would eventually run away from Kurosawa's - probably much needed - overbearing command. (Mifune's pride and Kurosawa's control were much like that shown here between Mifune's samurai and the peasants. The gold in the film is hidden in similar harvesting of nature by the eye. The gold in the story is hidden in sticks. The story is told from their perspective. (Notice the symbols he uses for these three klans.) The two hapless peasants represent to the story what actors represent to the 'real' enterprise of film-making: relatively ignorant, gold-chasers, likely to turn on each other, and liable to go where they are not supposed to. The 'middle' territory is under attack, and our characters must leave their fortress and go all the way from left to right to survive. So we have a story about three territories and a journey that spans them all. As with all his scripts, the story reflects his own challenges. He was master - indeed largely the creator - of a visual grammar and the rules had changed. One really needs to study his framing in the old format to understand how significant this challenge was. The new territories are on the left and right, which in the original cinerama were actually two additional cameras. It is a matter of there being three territories where there was formally one. All his life until here, that frame was the same, but all of a sudden it changed. Kurosawa is first a visual storyteller who scripts in pictures, each one dramatically framed. This time around, his concern is the new aspect ratio of 'cinemascope' copied and renamed by Toho. Any Kurosawa film is worth watching, but the focus of interest shifts from project to project.
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