Response 6

Robert Whitman, Prune Flat

1. How does this work relate to our discussion of intermedia and expanded cinema in the 1960s?

Prune Flat is a great example of intermedia and expanded cinema because of the high focus of filmmaking as an installation and performance. The show moves from purely filmic to purely theatrical; With the use of actors who come on stage and meld with the projection and become distinctly separated from it at the end.

2. Describe a passage from Prune Flat in very concrete terms, and explain how film and performance are combined to create different images and/or illusions.

J. Hoberman, Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Underground

3. How does Edie Sedgewick end up "stealing" the scene in Vinyl?

She wasn't intended to be in the film but Warhol threw her in at the last minute to balance out the composition. Apparently she had a very dynamic, spaced-out presence and the camera really picked up on her eyes. The film became a star vehicle for her even though she never really had a part and was thrown into the picture during the filming.

4. In what ways did the underground film begin to "crossover" into the mainstream in 1965-1966?

My Hustler became Andy Warhol's first popular as opposed to critical success. Lots of people new to the underground came to see My Hustler. The Theater of the ridiculous opened up with a group organized by Tavel and directed by John Vaccaro to extended the concepts of underground film into the realm of theatrical performance. Expanded cinema and multi-media shows became important vehicle for the underground. They were quite aggressive in their sensory bombardment which made them perfect for the indulgence of psychedelic drugs acid, LSD, mushrooms, all very popular at the time. Warhol did the E.P.I with the Velvet Underground probably the hardest assault on the senses there had been in the form. Next was Chelsea Girls which was likely propelled by the drug culture that had recently become more and more followers of the underground scene.

5. How was John Getz an important figure in the crossover of the underground?

Mike Getz was the first distributor to actually circuit underground films in packages for weekend midnight showings. He is most responsible for introducing underground movies to the American heartland. At Getz' cinema 12 in its height of 1969 films were being distributed to 22 different cities. Getz provided a framework for the midnight movie explosion of the 70's.

Chelsea Girls Response

Well, aside from this being a kind of movie that i don't typically attend or intend on attending. Simply because i have been raised on a narrative format my entire life. I found the film stunning and interesting even though at some times it was very awkward and I felt like I shouldn't be watching something so close yet so abstract from my own reality. In the first double set of multi-projected films there was a man (presumably on drugs) in a confession with the camera about what he could sense, and what he presumed people could sense of him. His words were poetic although close to absurdity and nonsense. In the reel played directly left of this one there was the reel of him in a social situation, exactly like he is speaking of. They are a in a movie theatre: a show of self-reflexivity that makes you think that any one of the people watching this movie could be in this film. But the light changes, if not the movement of the camera, distances the viewer from the intense actuality of the subjects in the image. The next two simulataneous projections almost plays opposites with the one before it visually, because the predominance of light and frame changes were coming from the left. But the right screen pops up first and the sound is obviously coming from its reel so "the pope" became the dominant figure of my attention. I would like to know what he shot up because I don't want it ever: it abviousley sent him over the edge. Crack kills, and I think thats all I have to say about that. Yes, it shocked me when he hit her but I've seen it before and visa-versa and she could hit just as hard as he did. So that wasn't as bad as just the situation going on... and on... and on... which made it so real. Nearly half of the reel was spent watching him in the dark screaming about this woman that offended him. That whole time I was wishing he would just get over it and stop trying to remain this disgusting character that he was possibly creating simply for the film. It was cool that the girl in the other projection seemed so linked to "the pope". she cried just after he hit up and after the girl gave her "confession" to "the pope" I noticed she had these pattens through the light that looked like the light shining through designs on a confession window.

Response 5

Reading (and Documentary) Response Five

Mary Jordan, Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
1. Chapter 4: What are some of the reasons suggested for Smith’s obsession with Maria Montez? What are some of your responses to the clips from the Montez films (especially Cobra Woman)?

"Every Saturday he would go to the movies" and supposedly that is when he fell in love with Maria Montez. Agosto Machado says it is a rapture of remembrance of his childhood that made Maria an obsession. Nick Zedd believes it is an inside joke for gay people. Another says that Maria was the apotheosis of the drag queen likely because of her glamorous decor and the fact that she draws so much attention. Well the Maria Montez films seemed corny at best, very similar to whatever I would imagine Rose Hobart was like in film. She does have a look that is particularly beautiful and the film settings are as exotic as I imagined them, but her acting lacked any particular beauty on screen aside from its relevance to the period. But I can understand how such a huge star could become an object of obsession or desire to a child, because to him it was the loss of her idolization in the mainstream that made here something that he must hold on too.

2. Chapter 5: What were some attributes of the New York art community in the 1960s, and what was the relationship between the economics of the time and the materials that Smith incorporated in to his work and films? [How could Smith survive and make art if he was so poor in the city so big they named it twice?]

During the 50's when Jack grew up there was alot of conformity in America and a repression of blatant eroticism. Then in the 60's there was breaking point where all of this dissolved and dissipated into free expression. Artist were open and free to work on any project they wanted to with anyone they wanted to. Also, it was easy for artists to find space to do projects and rent was cheap, often around 30 dollars per month for spacious apartments. The New York art community was very unified at the time Jack Smith's filmmaking. His attempts to create Hollywood effects on a low budget actually assisted in the establishment of a new realm of counterculture. Many of the eclectic materials smith used for his films could be found in the dumpsters outside of the many department stores in NY. Part of what Smith's films unique was the fact that he displayed the things that Hollywood used alot of money to cover up. Using whatever was available Smith could make the films he wanted.

3. Chapter 6: What problems emerged after the obscenity charges against Flaming Creatures in the relationship between Jack Smith and Jonas Mekas? What metaphor emerged from the conflict between Smith and Mekas?

Well, according to Smith, Mekas began travelling with the film defying the police making the film into something that Jack Smith did not want it to be (basically a symbol for the underground struggle against censorship and Mekas). Mekas was making more wealth and fame from Smith's film than Smith did. Smith deeply resented Mekas for taking his film "with the position of defending it and yet essentially kicking it to death." Smith began calling Mekas names and Lobster was one of them. Lobsterism became a symbol for the exploitation, capitalism, being a scavenger, or taking everything for yourself. The lobster symbol apparently pops up alot in Smith's works.

4. Chapter 7: What is John Zorn’s argument about Normal Love? How does his argument relate to some of the changes in the New York art world in the 1960s that we discussed in class? What are some arguments made about the influence of Jack Smith on other filmmakers (besides Warhol)?


John Zorn says that the real show was the filming itself not the film. It ties in most with the idea of artmaking as an activity. John waters and Federico Fellini we influenced by Flaming Creatures and Jack Smith.

5. Chapter 8: What are some arguments made about the relationship between Jack Smith’s artistic practice and Andy Warhol’s artistic practice?

Basically I think the argument of the chapter is that Warhol basically copied Jack Smith and made multitudes of money making films the same way Jack was, only warhol Public Relations Warhol made the practic commercialized. Andy Warhol's Factory was supposedly based on Jack Smith's film settings. Warhol took many of Smith's actors and furthered their progression of underground superstars into the pop scene. Jack and Andy clashed whenever they worked together because Jack wanted complete control.

6. Chapter 9 and 10: In what ways did Jack Smith become “uncommercial film personified”? What is meant by the slogan, “no more masterpieces” and how did Smith resist commodification (or the production of art products)?

Jack found the aspect of commercial film as destroying the artists intentions. So Jacks concept became that his personal works of art would become his alone and that since it was never finished only he could exhibit the films doing everything needed to make the films a viable showing. He found a way to keep and share art with people without it becoming a sort of product available for ownership even to himself. The slogan "no more masterpieces" is meant to explain the concept of a work of art that is not a product at all or maybe it is the final decree against concept of high art. Smith never finished Normal Love so there would never be a finished product.

Daniel Belasco, "The Vanished Prodigy"
7. Name at least three important friends/relationships Barbara Rubin had in the world of art and music in the early 1960s.

Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, Allen Ginsberg and The Velvet Underground.

8. Briefly describe Rubin's production and exhibition practices for Christmas on Earth. Why does Belasco argue that Christmas on Earth cannot be reproduced electronically or in other forms?

Rubin would show the two reels of Christmas on Earth superimposed in unequal sizes and colorized randomly by the projectionist while the audience listens randomly whatever is on a Rock Radio station. Belasco argues that Christmas on Earth cannot be reproduced electronically or in other forms because it was the originality of each screening that became a part of the work. You could record a live screening of the film but even that wouldn't do justice to the films impact in true exhibition.

Toby Mussman’s review of The Chelsea Girls
9. How does Mussman compare and contrast Warhol’s work in The Chelsea Girls with the work of the following directors?
Luis Bunuel

Alfred Hitchcock

Jean-Luc Godard

Response 4

I found Wrist Trick very interesting in the way that it combines separate short rapid shots of hands and a banana, progressively more peeled, to create the effect of the hands peeling the banana. You can tell that the banana and the hands are not in the same shot but it looks like superimposition, which after multiple pauses I realized it wasn't. What a Trick! It also creates a flicker effect with the varying positive and negative images which assists in the effect by dissorienting the viewer and forcing them to make connections between the shots. I was likewise tricked by Disappearing Music for Face which plainly presents in ECU a gaped tooth smile which loses its expression very, very, very slowly. I stopped paying attention to the mouth thinking that it was not presenting any particularly interesting aspect to the film. I began focusing on the glare coming off of the subject's face seeing that the light changes slightly with each frame, convinced that it was the minimalist theme of the film. Then I realized that the mouth was no longer smiling and I had to go back to review what I had missed. The change was so subtle and that I missed it even while I was staring at the film. It was like a long shot where you might not notice two characters interacting, but more intentional. The fact that the change of face is so important yet so easily impercievable is what stood out the most to me in this short film.

1. What films did Jonas Mekas associate with “Baudelairean Cinema,” and why did he call it that?
Jonas Mekas associates Ron Rice's The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man, Jack Smith's The Flaming Creatures, Ken Jacobs' Little Stabs at Happiness, and Bob Fleischners's Blonde Cobra with Baudelairean Cinema Blond Cobra being its "masterpiece". Mekas calls upon the great writers of decadence, Buadalaire, Marquis de Sade, and Rimbaud, to typify his association of these films as a bridge between Romanticism and Modernism; calling upon both the radiant and the sordid to create a yin-yang effect on screen (which is particularly interesting in black and white, where black most often seems to take over). Mekas says that Blonde Cobra is "one of the greatest works of personal cinema" but he also thinks authorship is ridiculous. I guess it is hard to not consider authorship when your associating great poetry with great films. " 'Life Swarms with innocent monsters.' Charles Baudelaire" is a double quote that is from Blonde Cobra. This film was blatantly asking for someone to make this association.

2. How did Jonas Mekas’s views on experimental cinema change between 1955 and 1961?

Mekas was always a Romanticist and did not recognize and romantic ability in the avant-garde until the early sixties and the mythopoeic films. In 1955 Jonas Mekas believed that American filmmakers were a "degenerative" force on the medium and should focus less on the technique of the medium and more on the thematic elements of human nature. With the tremendous influence of the nouvelle vague and indigenous realism "he gradually began to see more in the films he had previously rejected." In 1960 he even called for a foundation of a "cooperative distribution center" for the avant-garde, and in 1961 he gave Brakhage the "fourth Independent Film Award for The Dead and Prelude: Dog Star Man". Soon he after became a huge distributor and supporter of American independent avant-garde films.

3. How did Mekas’s interest in performance and improvisation shape his views of the New American Cinema in the 1960s?

Mekas had set his roots in the study of Stanislavsky. Therefore he saw the actors imagination as a connection to reality and thus creating realistic imaginary circumstances. The Stanislavsky method is precisely the method to achieve the "breakdown of the difference between performer and role"; because it is intended to make the character and the performer indistinct from each other in performance. To me it seems that Mekas must have believed in improvisation as the key for the performer to obtain the truth of the character, because he must react naturally as he is encountered with new ideas, circumstances, and other stimuli. And thus Mekas was supportive of the films that used such spontaneous improvisation.

4. Even though Jack Smith did not use found footage in Flaming Creatures, what are some similarities between Flaming Creatures and Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart?

Flaming Creatures ironically recreates, "liberates", and transforms Hollywood stereotypes of the "pseudo-Arabian world of Maria Montez films." It completely dicards the narrative conventions so highly prized in the typical Hollywood film thereby releasing it's purist, autonomous attributes as does Rose Hobart.

5. What are some of the visual influences on Flaming Creatures, and according to Sitney how are the scenes organized?

Flaming Creatures was influenced by the visual truth and the exotic locations of the Maria Montez films, Smith believeing that the truth of an actor is revealed through its being unconvincing in its depiction of a character. In his perspective upon textures, light and shadow, and, it hermaphroditic eroticism in Flaming Creatures Jack Smith was influenced by the films of von Sternberg.

Callie Angell, “Andy Warhol, Filmmaker”

6. How does Angell characterize the first major period of Warhol’s film making career? What are some of the films from this period?

Angell characterizes Warhol's first major period in filmmaking as minimalist. This period includes Sleep, Kiss, Haircut, Blow Job, Eat, Empire and Henry Geldzahier.

7. What role did the Screen Tests play in the routines at the Factory and in Warhol’s filmmaking?

The Factory became basically a studion for Screen Tests, and Screen Tests became a sort of visual guest book for the Factory. With the period's extreme intertest in Warhol's artistic practices, Screen Tests recorded portraits of "artists, film-makers, writers and critics, gallery owners,actors, dancers, socialites, pop music stars, poets, and, of course, Factory regulars and Superstars." the Screen Tests were an important aspect of Warhol's portrait concept and the expansion of his film practice into a continuous, cumulative mode of serial production. Warhol also used the reels select stars for his films and recycled them into some of his other films.

8. How does Angell characterize the first period of sound films in Warhol’s filmmaking career. What are some of the films from this period?

Well, Andy began exploring scripted action which he often introduced "destabalizing element". These films were one reel continuous 33 minute shot that treated the film as a performance space where the final result was the fully finished product. Vinyl was one of these films.

Response Three

Seeing R1 in the theatre was probably the coolest thing ever. The Panorama effect of the three simultaneous projections was the most distinctive thing about this film and the orginal percussion accompaniment that synched up with the movements on the screen stood out very well. I could not get the full effect of those aspects on the television. Early Abstractions 1-3 similarly uses music to accompany abstracted geometric forms moving in the screen. Early Abstractions uses songs from the The Beatles, which was cool because I love The Beatles, but if it synches with the images it only seems to do so by happenstance. The images in Early Abstractions seem more like something from a lyrical film with its direct manipulation of the film stock and the rawness of the geometric figures. R1 does not just use geometric figures, it has a shots of fire, water, an explosion and a turning globed interspearsed on the center screen. For the most part though R1 is made up of circles and bars working together on their seperate screens to create a complex, veiwing experience. It reminded me of one of my favorite veiwing experiences; once I was lucky enough to see Prince Achmed at a film festival on a huge screen with a live orchestral accompaniement. The sound of the percussion and the rythm of the editing I think brought me back to that. Anyways, as much as these two films are similar they are even more different from each other and I think that makes them both great in their own right.

Sitney on Brakhage [leftover from last week]1. What are the characteristics of vision according to Brakhage’s revival of the Romantic dialectics of sight and imagination? [I’m not asking here about film style, I’m asking about Brakhage’s views about vision.]

“Brakhage’s sense of vision presumes that we have been taught to be unconscious of most of what we see.” Most people perceive as vision only what the open eye sees projected on the retina. For Brakhage, “seeing includes what the open eyes view, including the essential movements and dilations involved in that primary mode of seeing, as well as the shifts of focus. What the mind’s eye sees in visual memory and in dreams (he calls them “brain moves”), and the perceptual play of shapes and colors on the closed eyelid and occasionally on the eye surface (“closed-eye vision”). The imagination, as he seems to define it, includes the simultaneous function of all these modes.”

2. Why does Sitney argue, “It was Brakhage, of all the major American avant-garde filmmakers, who first embraced the formal directives and verbal aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism.”

-It is because of Brakhage’s very tight artistic relationship with his film’s aesthetic, which causes Sitney to believe Brakhage first created expressions through his medium equal to the painterly abstract expressionist form. “With his flying camera and fast cutting, and by covering the surface of the celluloid with paint scratches, Brakhage drove the cinematic image into the space of Abstract Expressionism and relegated the conventional depth of function to a function of artistic will…”

Sitney, “Apocalypses and Picaresques”
3. Why does Sitney argue that synechdoche plays a major role in Christopher Maclaine’s The End, and how does the film anticipate later achievements by Brakhage and the mythopoeic form?

-I don’t really understand what Sitney’s saying about synechdoche in The End. The End tries to break the convictions of the trance film and greatly influenced Brakhage's attempts in the same way in Reflections on Black, also the "formal acheivevements (of the film), the combination of color and black-and-white, the proleptic use of metaphor, the dialectic of doom and redemption" anticipates the mythopoeic form and is fully "achieved in Brakhage's Dog Star Man."

4. What are some similarities and differences between the apocalyptic visions of Christopher Maclaine and Bruce Conner?

"Unlike MacLaine, Conner is not naive in his vision of doom." The images move from comical to horrific to to graceful and back again. Which seems to make Conner's apocalyptic vision less direct and foreboding. He likewise uses the mushroom cloud as a way of terrorizing the audience but as Sitney says "The shock slowly wears off with the recognition of the visual grace of the mushroom cloud." Conner plays with the idea of apocalypse making it ironic instead of simply a frightining.

5. Why are the films of Ron Rice (The Flower Thief) and Robert Nelson (The Great Blondino) examples of Beat sensibility and what Sitney calls the picaresque form?

-Both films are centered on San Francisco, the epicenter of Beat sensibility, and display a rejection of the mainstream American values typified by the beatniks. Both use Poetry as a major theme. Drugs come up in the crude poetry of The Flower Thief. “Christ on opium, marijuana used in the past…Peruvian civilizations based on cocaine, America on coca-cola.” The rhythm of The Great Blondino is rooted in a poetic tradition. In picaresque tradition the films satirically detail the adventures of a roguish protagonist in an unpredictable environment.

Bruce Jenkins, “Fluxfilms in Three False Starts.”

6. How and why were the “anti-art” Fluxfilms reactions against the avant-garde films of Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger. [Hint: Think about Fluxus in relation to earlier anti-art such as Dada, and Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain.")

- "The anti-art-films strategies employed by the films were multiple: they ranged from jettisoning the personal or contemporary content of the poetic films to dispensing with significant aspects of their formal innovations, particularly the complex editing schemes and aggressive cinematography that marked the most personal in this most impersonal of media." Fluxfilms countered the personal film with institution and functional film form.

7. What does Jenkins mean by the democratization of production in the Fluxfilms?

-Jenkins describes it as "a transgression of the highly individualistic, personal, and handcrafted "style" of the then current avant-garde practice." By making the avant-garde movement accessible to more than just the dominant artists of the time to make their versions of the art-film the film-maker could utilize the "industrial, impersonal facticity of the age of reproduction. Fluxus art could be produced by the yard." If anything could be considered art, then any person could easily make an art-film.

8. Why does Jenkins argue that Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film “fixed the material and aesthetic terms for the production of subsequent Fluxfilms”? How does it use the materials of the cinema? What kind of aesthetic experience does it offer?

-Jenkins argues that Zen for Film creates a model for the following of Fluxfilms by making an artisitic statement comparable to Duchamp quickley and inexpensively. Without the use of the complex technologies of the medium (camera, lights, editing, opticals, or sound), Naim June Paik created Zen for Film essentially circumventing the tedious and expensive work in film-making that characterized other films of the time. By making a film from simple 16mm clear leader Naim June Paik created a "highly presentational, imageless, and anti-illusionist work" Which offered the experience of observing "the generally unseen- that is, repressed- physical support of cinema" making the materials of the medium the star of the show.