In class Tuesday, we watched the film Primer. After leaving class, I felt confused and frustrated. The physics wasn't simplified and for a majority of the time, I didn't understand what was going on. The nesting doll was used to forshadow the time machine. I think having multiple doubles is addressing humanity and multi-dimensional aspect of identities. Throughout the time travel it seems as if the two are loosing parts of themselves and accumulating other parts that were there to begin with in the beginning.  The video game limbo was frustrating as well and slightly disturbing. However, with the lights and the character and I was able to identify with the character in the game and go through a trial and error process.

Primer

I didn't like this movie because it was confusing and really hard to follow. I don't understand what's the point of adding all the technical terms of the time machine since most of the viewers probably don't understand it. The movie should have at least ellaborated on what stuff meant if they were going to use such complicated terms. Also, the blond guy constantly had his mouth open with a blank expression on his face that was very annoying.

Limbo

While playing Limbo, it did present dreamlike qualities. It felt surreal, I guess, because of how blurred it was. Maybe it was because everything was a silhouette. The game doesn’t have any dialogue but it seems that the world is one that accepts the supernatural as reality. To get past the spider thing, the character had to harm it and with no expression showing on the character, I feel that I should assume that it was just how to deal with it, like it was no big deal. The puzzles that needed to be solved, while strange to the player outside, seemed necessary and normal to the character. For me, I think it’s saying something about dreams and how often people accept the irregularities in the dreams as normal.

Primer

Primer was a confusing movie, how there was no lead in to the plot, it was like we started in the middle of it. the characters were overlapping each other's conversations and there was a lot of suspense, because a lot times we were waiting for something bad to happen with the machine, like a malfunction while it was running or some sort. the problem, however, arose within the characters, the way they thought they could control time and the manner in which events occurs to their liking. the first supernatural event that impressed me was when the blond one was in the storage room, walked to one end of the machine and found nothing there, and then a minute later the second guy was in the same spot, and thats when it clicked for me that the movie was about time travel, which would explain the clock thing earlier in the movie. it was very supernatural towards the end when there was more than one of the characters at once, their present and future selves in the same scene. it was hard to know which one was which, because they were the exact same person but also not the exact same person, because one was technically older. this business with time travel, an attempt to deviate from reality has its consequences, like there will always be one person who abuses that power. as with the stories we have read earlier in the course, trying to associate one's self into a selfish matter of some supernatural superiority proves to be consequential to their being. in hill house, eleanor becomes too attached to playing a role in the house that her life ends when her interaction with the house ends. in the rats in the walls, delapore becomes so immersed into unearthing the buried secrets of his family history that it consumes him. in the yellow wallpaper, the woman becomes attached to what she thinks she sees in the patterns of the wallpaper that her sanity is degraded the more she tries to sympathize with it.

War of the Worlds

I found the abrupt shifts from reports to soothing classical music disconcerting. It reminds me of the abrupt shifts from the cabin to the control center in the Cabin in the Woods. As a member of the audience, tension lies in my inability to understand how I should be feeling. A commentator, Carl Phillips, visits a farm in New Jersey where a meteorite was believed to have crash landed. He describes a massive pit, and an object inside the pit that looks more like a yellowish-white cylinder than a meteorite. Phillips brings our attention to a strange humming sound that seems to be coming from the cylinder to which the professor replies that it must be the sounds of the meteorite cooling off, but admits that he no longer believes it to be a meteorite. Bystanders begin to shout when a creature Phillips describes as having tentacles begins to crawl out of the pit. He is interrupted before he is able to complete his report. The New York studio comes on air stating that there is trouble with field transmissions and fades into a piano interlude. While I appreciate the commentator's attempt at calming the audience through soothing music, its more unsettling than if he were to admit that the events taking place at Grover's Mill are a cause for concern.

Foreshadowing and temporal disruptions through filmic techniques in Primer

      In the movie Primer, director Shaun Carrath discusses the implications of time travel and temporal disruption, as well as human actions and morality when confronted with a power over others.  In the narrative of the film, competing inventors Abe and Arron both use the time machine to their own ends to accomplish different goals.  Abe uses a fail-safe time machine that he built in secret to try to prevent Arron from messing with time, while Arron discovers the Fail-safe machine and uses it to bring a portable time-machine back before Abe arrives, and uses it to ensure that their past selves will finish the invention.  This is all foreshadowed throughout the film through the use of quick, disjointed cuts, frame skipping and rewinding, and displaced narrative and video.  The first time that this happens is on the day that Abe first uses the time machine and subsequently tells Arron about it, and foreshadows Abe's attempt in the same timeline to stop Arron from learning of the time machine..  From the moment that he wakes up, the process of him waking up and going from the floor where he is sleeping to out the door is full of disjointed cuts and skipped frames, with Abe jumping forward and backward in frame, and repeated delayed audio along with audio that is ahead of the video or source.  Each of these jumps and discontinuities acts as a kind of oscillation between the two timelines, with the disjointed cuts and audio showing the slight disparities between the timelines, and jumping between the original and changed timeline.  This kind of foreshadowing is also evident when Arron gets an ear-bleed after the first trip in the machine.  During this scene as well, the cuts jump constantly with frames missing in-between, only to go back to those frames later, creating jerky, disjointed movements.  Again, this is foreshadowing the fact that there is an alternate timeline of this scene, where Abe gets an ear-bleed instead of Arron, and the jerky jump-cut nature of the scene serves to metaphorically show the disparities of the two timelines.

Primer

The screening of Primer in class was very confusing. I didn’t know what to think of the characters and the story overall. We first are introduced to the main characters at the very beginning of the story, but their motives and plan are never clearly stated. The experiment they worked on in the garage is very strange as well in the sense that we have no background knowledge of the machine or the experiment itself. As the story continue I found myself lost with what the characters were trying to accomplish and finally a double popped into the story unexpectedly. At this point of the movie I was more confused on how the machine worked in order to create a double or in order to time travel in general. At the very end of the movie I didn’t understand why one of the characters wanted to run away and make big money someplace else and I also didn’t understand why the two main characters were no longer friends. The ending was very confusing for me and to top that off I didn’t understand why the characters are losing their hand writing skills. This movie as a whole left me with more questions at the end than it did in the beginning and as a person who watched this for the first time I do not understand the meaning behind the movie.