Week 7

Upon construction of the Spiral Jetty I noticed a prevalent aspect of the film editing that remained consistent throughout its erection.  There was a noticeable juxtaposition of sound in between edits during the construction which involved cutting between shots of the calm and steady sound of rippling water and atrociously loud shots of the construction vehicles moving the earth.  I took this pattern to evoke some kind of gap between the quiet past and the loud future.  It is the scene in the dinosaur exhibit that persuades me to form this connection to past and present.  The framing of the equipment also seemed to make a comparison between the extinct dinosaurs of the past and the equally large machines of the present, perhaps a modern day version of a dinosaur.  There was a particular shot of the front-end-loader in which only the shovel was seen loading a dump truck from afar as if it was a dinosaurs head surveying the land. For a reason I am not sure of the shot of the dump truck unloading the massive boulders into position was always played at slow motion (appeared to be about 36 frames per second).  This was also a consistent aspect of the sequence but void of any significance to my knowledge. However, it is clear to me the comparison of old and new between the dinosaurs, extinct yet still existing in their mummified state, and the machines of today which never were alive but perhaps are considered to be more so than the dinosaurs.  The Spiral Jetty is itself a physical representation of a large whirlpool which threatened the passage of a schooner in 1870.