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.