Self Through Art, Ethan's Introduction

    My name is Ethan Swanson (He/Him) and I'm a second year Film Studies and Art History double major. I work primarily in experimental film but I'm currently writing a screenplay because I want to make some narrative short films. Eventually, I'd like to be a director and make feature length movies.

Summer Evening, Edward Hopper, 1947

    I tend to like art that is on the darker side of things, so lately I've been really interested in Edward Hopper. There is something melancholic/pessimistic about his version of Americana that I really like. This particular painting really effects me because the people in it seem to be trapped in a conversation even though the background is so open and undefined. I also think about this piece a lot because I envy how well he uses light here (there's not a great image of this painting online so I'd recommend looking at a print, the colors are a little off here), and I hope to be able to have lighting that good in my films someday. 

Riding With Death, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1988

    I love this Basquiat painting because of the tension that there seems to be between figurative and abstraction. 

Dead Man, Directed by Jim Jarmusch, 1995 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAZPdmo7LVA 

    Dead Man is one of my favorite films because both its plot and score achieve a certain removal from reality and abstraction that I love. I love art that you can't figure out and is ultimately unknowable. I don't think film does this as much as other mediums, so Dead Man is very special. 

Boogie Nights, Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku633lZIkZc

    I also consider myself a very emotional person who feels things strongly. And I think Boogie Nights is incredible in the way that it portrays family (found family in this case) and how messed up but loving it can be. And as much as I love other art, nothing gets to me quite as much as an incredibly emotional film. I also look back at this film a lot when I'm thinking about how to set up scenes and what can be done with a camera, it has so many different ideas going on at once that its a great well to draw from. 

"Any Understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments."

    This quote is very interesting to me because it shows how completely modern media shapes our environments. In order to understand any culture, you must understand its media, and what influences that has on their people. His use of the word 'environment' is also really interesting, he is implying that media has some sort of physical presence in the world. That it is so pervasive that we live in it, not with it. This quote rings true because my life has definitely been shaped significantly by what I have watched and read, my outlook on the world would be completely different without it.