Photographing Mating Butterflies

No Flash Photography Please

In the Tent of a Thousand Butterflies…

Visitor: Butterflies eat fruit?

Custodian: These ones do.

Visitor: It’s a big butterfly.

Custodian: Actually it’s two. They’re mating.

Visitor: Oh. Would it be an invasion of their privacy if I took a photo?

Custodian: It’d be polite to ask their permission.

____________

Voice-over

Notable for its informative content, this conversation is typical of a visitor/custodian exchange.

It also highlights an interesting moral distinction between photographing animals and photographing humans in private contexts.

…

The Crane Returns a Kindness (鶴の恩返し)

He peeped!

A one-minute story…

A man pulls an arrow out of an injured crane’s wing.

A woman appears at his house and begins living with him.

They are poor, the woman asks the man to make a loom.

She closes the door, saying, “Don’t look while I am working.”

She produces cloth, the man sells it, they become wealthy.

One day the man peeps in the room.

He sees a crane making cloth with feathers.

She sees him looking, and says, “You have seen my true form, I cannot stay here,” and flies away.

__________

Voice-over

Sometimes, there isn’t time to tell a story slowly. Fidgeting starts. Give yourself one minute and deliver in the present tense. Jump cuts. No transitions. No diversions. Pure plot.

Old stories were often used for instructing.

They were a vehicle for a precept: a rule, command, order.

Or, more subtly, a moral: a message, meaning, point.

Interpretations for The Crane may vary:

Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth?

In a modern context, Respect privacy?

“Privacy and security are those things you give up when you show the world what makes you extraordinary.” Margaret Cho. 

Or as Marshall McLuhan viewed it: “Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.”

...

He'd kill us if he got the chance

He'd kill us if he got the chance.

Take 3 …

Ann: This film we’re in, it’s a metaphor. Those six microphones they’re pointing at us.

Mark: Yeah. Metaphors for guns.

Ann: They’re having a hard job recording us.

Mark: Don’t be too sure. It’s hi-tech gear. Shotgun mikes, super-super cardioid.

Ann: Shotguns? See, I told you. He’d kill us if he got the chance.

Mark: You’re obsessing about him killing us. We’re just actors.

CUT!

________

Voice-over

Harry Caul is a surveillance expert, who contracts to record people’s conversations. He’s good at his job; he takes the craft of deciphering incomprehensible speech to the level of art.

Significantly, The Conversation, (1974), a Francis Ford Coppola film, owes much of its acclaim to the editing of Walter Murch, the sound designer. Harry collects sounds, filters out the distractions, and constructs his eavesdroppings. A sound editor like Walter Murch works like this too. Harry, in the way he works, is a metaphor for a sound editor.

But Harry’s job takes him into other people’s private spaces. Then Harry becomes obsessed that his own privacy has been compromised, in his apartment.

And so it has. Just as ours is by the internet, by Google, by FaceBook. We are never alone now.