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.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Reading Response 2
Hans Richter, “A History of the Avant-garde”
1. What conditions in Europe made the avant-garde film movement possible after World War I?
- Political, social, cultural, and economic unrest (desire of new ideas)
- The Opposition against conventional film routine (commercial aesthetic lacking the technical ability of the medium)
- The Artistic climate of Europe (the rise of Cubism, Expressionism, Dadaism and Abstract art)
- The influence of new technique and new art on the public (new generations finding beauty in new capabilities)
2. If the goal of Impressionist art is “Nature Interpreted by Temperament,” what are the goals of abstract art?
- The elimination of the uncontrolled, creation of norms, discipline and control of the whole. Or I would say, to rearrange the impressionist conception; temperament interpreted by creation with nature.
Oskar Fischinger, “My Statements Are in My Work”
3. On what grounds does Fischinger argue that “there is nothing of an absolute artistic creative sense” in conventional cinematography? (At least two important reasons.)
- Oskar argues that these films lack an absolute artistic creativeness because the films are created as “photographed surface realism” therefore it “copies only nature with realistic conceptions, destroying the deep and absolute creative force.” By using reality as its basic model for creation it limits the artistic freedom of the medium. Also, he argues that the conventional cinema “is a mass product of factory proportions” which limits the effectiveness of the artist because of the influence of the many contributors in the process of creating those films. “They change the ideas, kill the ideas, before they are born, prevent the ideas from being born, and substitute for the absolute creative motives only the cheap ideas to fit the lowest among them.” Also he thinks that the artist should not be concerned with whether his art is understood or misunderstood, but only with his “Creative Spirit” and “highest ideals… and that art museums create greater interest in this direction”.
Sitney, “The Lyrical Film”
4. While Brakhage’s Reflections on Black is a trance film, why does Sitney argue that it anticipates the lyrical film?
- It anticipates the lyrical film because it Brakhage begins to explore “the perimeters of imagination”. In the blind man’s “visions” “fantasy and sight mingle together”. “Later, more emphatically, the film-maker scratched with a sharp instrument on the film stock itself, so that a set of brilliant white stars shimmers over the blind man’s eyes, changing slightly from frame to frame. By attacking the surface of the film and by using materials which reflect back on the condition of film-making, Brakhage begins to formulate an equation between the process of making film and the search for consciousness…” The final episode is introduced by scratches of stars bursting on black leader, as if we too were seeing through the blind man’s eyes.” This, to Sitney, seems to signify Brakhage’s attempts to create subjective vision from pure imagination.
5. What are the key characteristics of the lyrical film (the first example of which was Anticipation of the Night)?
-According to Sitney, “The lyrical film postulates the film-maker behind the camera as the first-person protagonist of the film. The images of the film are what he sees, filmed in such a way that we never forget his presence and we know how he is reacting to his vision. In the lyrical film there is no longer a hero; instead the screen is filled with movement, and that movement, both of the camera and the editing, reverberates with the idea of a person looking.” Space is typically flattened as if in an Abstract Expressionist painting. “Through superimposition, several perspectives can occupy that space at one time.”
6. Which filmmaker was highly influential on Brakhage’s move to lyrical film in terms of film style, and why?
- Marie Menken was highly influential to Brakhage’s move to lyrical film in terms of film style mostly because of her first film: Visual Variations on Noguchi. In it she subtly created the impression of an implied mediator and “demonstrated a rhythmic inventiveness previously unmatched in cinema.” She did this “with a freely swinging camera, (shooting) rhythmic movements around the smooth, curved forms.” Of Noguchi’s sculptures, creating a style very similar to what would become Brakhage’s lyrical film.
9. How are Bruce Baillie’s lyrical films and filmmaking practices similar to and different from Brakhage’s?
- In his lyrical films, Baillie turns from the uneasy inwardness of Brakhage’s work to a problematic study of the heroic. Similarly to Brakhage Baillie attempts to create a cinematic haiku and the argument between consciousness and nature is as crucial to Baillie’s cinema as it is to Brakhage’s. Both Baillie and Brakhage push in their later lyrical films toward cinematic vision of impersonal or unqualified consciousness.
Sitney, “Major Mythopoeia”
10. 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.”
-Brakhage’s very tight artistic relationship with his film’s aesthetic, Brakhage created expressions in his films 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…”
1. What conditions in Europe made the avant-garde film movement possible after World War I?
- Political, social, cultural, and economic unrest (desire of new ideas)
- The Opposition against conventional film routine (commercial aesthetic lacking the technical ability of the medium)
- The Artistic climate of Europe (the rise of Cubism, Expressionism, Dadaism and Abstract art)
- The influence of new technique and new art on the public (new generations finding beauty in new capabilities)
2. If the goal of Impressionist art is “Nature Interpreted by Temperament,” what are the goals of abstract art?
- The elimination of the uncontrolled, creation of norms, discipline and control of the whole. Or I would say, to rearrange the impressionist conception; temperament interpreted by creation with nature.
Oskar Fischinger, “My Statements Are in My Work”
3. On what grounds does Fischinger argue that “there is nothing of an absolute artistic creative sense” in conventional cinematography? (At least two important reasons.)
- Oskar argues that these films lack an absolute artistic creativeness because the films are created as “photographed surface realism” therefore it “copies only nature with realistic conceptions, destroying the deep and absolute creative force.” By using reality as its basic model for creation it limits the artistic freedom of the medium. Also, he argues that the conventional cinema “is a mass product of factory proportions” which limits the effectiveness of the artist because of the influence of the many contributors in the process of creating those films. “They change the ideas, kill the ideas, before they are born, prevent the ideas from being born, and substitute for the absolute creative motives only the cheap ideas to fit the lowest among them.” Also he thinks that the artist should not be concerned with whether his art is understood or misunderstood, but only with his “Creative Spirit” and “highest ideals… and that art museums create greater interest in this direction”.
Sitney, “The Lyrical Film”
4. While Brakhage’s Reflections on Black is a trance film, why does Sitney argue that it anticipates the lyrical film?
- It anticipates the lyrical film because it Brakhage begins to explore “the perimeters of imagination”. In the blind man’s “visions” “fantasy and sight mingle together”. “Later, more emphatically, the film-maker scratched with a sharp instrument on the film stock itself, so that a set of brilliant white stars shimmers over the blind man’s eyes, changing slightly from frame to frame. By attacking the surface of the film and by using materials which reflect back on the condition of film-making, Brakhage begins to formulate an equation between the process of making film and the search for consciousness…” The final episode is introduced by scratches of stars bursting on black leader, as if we too were seeing through the blind man’s eyes.” This, to Sitney, seems to signify Brakhage’s attempts to create subjective vision from pure imagination.
5. What are the key characteristics of the lyrical film (the first example of which was Anticipation of the Night)?
-According to Sitney, “The lyrical film postulates the film-maker behind the camera as the first-person protagonist of the film. The images of the film are what he sees, filmed in such a way that we never forget his presence and we know how he is reacting to his vision. In the lyrical film there is no longer a hero; instead the screen is filled with movement, and that movement, both of the camera and the editing, reverberates with the idea of a person looking.” Space is typically flattened as if in an Abstract Expressionist painting. “Through superimposition, several perspectives can occupy that space at one time.”
6. Which filmmaker was highly influential on Brakhage’s move to lyrical film in terms of film style, and why?
- Marie Menken was highly influential to Brakhage’s move to lyrical film in terms of film style mostly because of her first film: Visual Variations on Noguchi. In it she subtly created the impression of an implied mediator and “demonstrated a rhythmic inventiveness previously unmatched in cinema.” She did this “with a freely swinging camera, (shooting) rhythmic movements around the smooth, curved forms.” Of Noguchi’s sculptures, creating a style very similar to what would become Brakhage’s lyrical film.
9. How are Bruce Baillie’s lyrical films and filmmaking practices similar to and different from Brakhage’s?
- In his lyrical films, Baillie turns from the uneasy inwardness of Brakhage’s work to a problematic study of the heroic. Similarly to Brakhage Baillie attempts to create a cinematic haiku and the argument between consciousness and nature is as crucial to Baillie’s cinema as it is to Brakhage’s. Both Baillie and Brakhage push in their later lyrical films toward cinematic vision of impersonal or unqualified consciousness.
Sitney, “Major Mythopoeia”
10. 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.”
-Brakhage’s very tight artistic relationship with his film’s aesthetic, Brakhage created expressions in his films 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…”
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
The Cage Response
The Cage by Sidney Peterson was a very fun veiwing. The effects created were impressive for the time period that the film was created. In my opinion it was a play on perspective. The "Cage" is a metaphor for the solitary perception(the common concious) that most people use to see the world. The film contrasts the main characters of the film (who are exploring their subconcious) and the common people on the streets (who only see concious reality) by picturing the main characters running "forward" while all of the common people are moving backwards. The Cage begins with an artist who seems to not know what he wants to create. There is a POV shot where he seems to see himself leaning against a pile of random objects slouched and exhausted. Then we see the artists hand empty of the brush he previously held. Suddenly a peice of bread appears there in his hand and he decides to paint on the bread and eat it (we see him eat the only art that he has created). The artist then seeks to explore outside of physical reality. The more we see the ECU of the blinking eye the more distorted the images become. The shots become progressively stranger, uncommon, and distorted as we see the artist rolling his eye around. The artist attempts to paint a line (seemingly inspired by the subconcious explorations thus far) but regrettably puts his brush down. The next shots are of him finally pulling the eye completely out. With the eye completely out he begins to morph into a completely different person (im not sure what effect was used to do this, it seems like a mirror trick, but it was very nice) showing how his perspective has completely changed. After the eye falls out of the artist's hand and begins rolling on the floor the funnest part of the film begins; the chase for the eye. The apartment collapsing around him was like the moment of terror that someone might feel right before they completely let go of reality. The woman is cares for the artist and calls for the doctor who's treatment for the artist's detachment from reality is to destroy the eye. There is alot to interpret in this peice, but I really wanted to enjoy the film and tried not overanalyze it from a certain point on.
Week One Response
Sitney, “Meshes of the Afternoon”According to Sitney, what are some of the important differences between Meshes of the Afternoon and Un Chien Andalou?
-The main difference between the films is that Meshes of the Afternoon deliberately tries to create a dreamlike environment, while Un Chien Andalou only attempts to create absurdity which in turn simulates the dream. There are metaphors in the latter but no symbolism while symbolism is a huge part of Meshes.
Sitney, “Ritual and Nature”What are some characteristics of the American psychodrama in the 1940s?
-It deals with a visionary experience, the characters movements are very stylized, an isolated protagonist wanders through a potent environment toward a climax of self-realization. Progress is marked by what the protagonist sees along his journey, and landscapes are often chosen to marka specific line of symbolism.
What does Sitney mean by an “imagist” structure replacing narrative structure in Choreography for the Camera?
-Sitney interprets imagist structure as an isolated movement or gestrure constituting the entire filmic form in Coreography for the Camera as opposed to a theme or storyline.
According to Sitney, Ritual in Transfigured Time represents a transition between the psychodrama and what kind of film?
-Sitney describes Ritual in Transfigured Time as a transition between the Trance(psychodrama) and the architectonic film. But he also describes it as a Dance film, almost expressionist, and mythopoeic.
Respond briefly to Sitney’s reading of Ritual in Transfigured Time (27-28); Is his interpretation compatible with your experience of the film?
-In my first veiwing of the film I did not see the Invoker and the Guide as he describes them but it makes alot of sense after the reading. I did notice the role of the widow and the change in rythm that came from the transition into dance. I feel like Sitney's interpretation is very similar to my experience of the film.
Sitney, “The Magus”Paraphrase the paragraph on p. 90 that begins “The filmic dream constituted…” in your own words.
-Anger interpreted the Dream on film in very similar terms as did the other American Avant-Gardists of the 1940's. The relation of the camera to its subjects relays the objects importance in the subject's perception. The film-maker is apparent on screen and behind the camera.Posted by bluesmobile440JKR at 8:13 AM 1 comments
-The main difference between the films is that Meshes of the Afternoon deliberately tries to create a dreamlike environment, while Un Chien Andalou only attempts to create absurdity which in turn simulates the dream. There are metaphors in the latter but no symbolism while symbolism is a huge part of Meshes.
Sitney, “Ritual and Nature”What are some characteristics of the American psychodrama in the 1940s?
-It deals with a visionary experience, the characters movements are very stylized, an isolated protagonist wanders through a potent environment toward a climax of self-realization. Progress is marked by what the protagonist sees along his journey, and landscapes are often chosen to marka specific line of symbolism.
What does Sitney mean by an “imagist” structure replacing narrative structure in Choreography for the Camera?
-Sitney interprets imagist structure as an isolated movement or gestrure constituting the entire filmic form in Coreography for the Camera as opposed to a theme or storyline.
According to Sitney, Ritual in Transfigured Time represents a transition between the psychodrama and what kind of film?
-Sitney describes Ritual in Transfigured Time as a transition between the Trance(psychodrama) and the architectonic film. But he also describes it as a Dance film, almost expressionist, and mythopoeic.
Respond briefly to Sitney’s reading of Ritual in Transfigured Time (27-28); Is his interpretation compatible with your experience of the film?
-In my first veiwing of the film I did not see the Invoker and the Guide as he describes them but it makes alot of sense after the reading. I did notice the role of the widow and the change in rythm that came from the transition into dance. I feel like Sitney's interpretation is very similar to my experience of the film.
Sitney, “The Magus”Paraphrase the paragraph on p. 90 that begins “The filmic dream constituted…” in your own words.
-Anger interpreted the Dream on film in very similar terms as did the other American Avant-Gardists of the 1940's. The relation of the camera to its subjects relays the objects importance in the subject's perception. The film-maker is apparent on screen and behind the camera.Posted by bluesmobile440JKR at 8:13 AM 1 comments
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
