Reading Response #3

Compare/contrast one European film & one American film:

Man Ray's L'Etoile de Mer may be my favourite avant-garde film I've ever seen. The use of Surrealist poetry to construct the film's imagery gives it an ephemeral air, emphasized through the use of distorted lenses in certain shots, obscuring the characters as they interact in altogether odd ways. The absurdity of the film is strung together by very striking, at times sheerly beautiful shots [when the woman steps onto the open book, for instance.] Qu'elle est belle! On the other hand, Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart stands as a kind of cultural oddity, a man's personal obsession with an obscure star. I've been a big fan of found film/collage film for a few years now, and how Cornell isolated beautiful moments in an otherwise unremarkable film/performance shows how a filmmaker can manipulate so-called film reality with ease. The personality of Rose/her character is revealed in Cornell's film and his use of silent-speed, unlike how clouded and unknown the characters in L'Etoile de Mer are. I also loved the monkey, like any normal person would.

1. What are the characteristics of vision according to Brakhage's revival of the Romantic dialectics of sight and imagination?

Brakhage upholds sight as a full-blown experience, denouncing what we are taught to see and relying on true vision, what we actually see, both with our eyes open as well as closed (what he calls "brain movies" and the play of colour over one's closed eyelids), memories of sights seen, and dream-sight. Stripping vision of its analytical aspects, Brakhage wishes to express how a child sees before it is taught the world of traditional perspectives and sight acting solely as information.

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."

Brakhage rejected the conventional mode of filmmaking (even within avant-garde filmmaking at the time) by his use of painting/scratching directly on the film, intentionally flattening the space, utilising freewheeling camera movements to elude to the emotions of the filmmaker, and generally evading the traditional storytelling mode of film in exchange for an emotional/visceral personal experience crafted by the filmmaker. This is closely tied to the Abstract Expressionist painters, and how let paintings come alive through the movements of their brush-wielding hand. In particular, Brakhage's hand-painting over film is abstract and as full of energy and emotion as the Abstract Expressionist painters, as they tried to evoke the emotion of an action/memory/etc itself, as opposed to representing it through recognizable paint forms on the canvas.

3. Why does Sitney argue that synecdoche plays a major role in Christopher Maclaine's The End, and how does the film anticipate later achievements by Brakhage and the mythopoeic form?

In Maclaine's film, synecdoche is used to allude to actions which are never shown, taking a partial piece to represent the entirety of something. This is used to grim effect by showing the young man Charles in combination with shots of the Golden Gate Bridge; through our knowledge of his past acts, we infer that he has committed suicide. Maclaine's film, according to Sitney was so ambitious in its scope of what it tried to do in prior to the proper birth of the mythopoeic form, that it may have influenced Brakhage, who saw it before he moved from trance films to his mythopoeic films.

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

Maclaine's vision of the apocalypse in The End is characterised by its contradictory tentative glimpses of hope and its quite pessimistic conclusion, creating a mostly straight-forward, and as Sitney puts it, naive take on his apocalypse. Conner, on the other hand, plays with the audience, creating humour through juxtaposition and pacing, such as the famous periscope/nude false eyeline match. Conner exerts complete control over his film, establishing his unique blend of irony, beauty and destruction.

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?

Using absurd, outlandish, anarchistic imagery, these films depict young, naive heroes galavanting about their insane/inane world; these films are indicative of the subculture that produced them in San Francisco at the time.

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]

Fluxfilms were a direct call to arms against the too-serious, poetic/personal avant-garde films of Brakhage and Anger. Fluxfilms championed the film form as ideal for collective production through its inherently mechanical aspects, in opposition to the single-creator filmmakers like Brakhage. Some films were made in obvious parody of Brakhage and his cohorts' personal/autobiographical poetic mode, such as Invocation of Canyons and Boulders for Stan Brakhage. In the various Fluxfilms, parodic/ironic baring of the film medium was utilized to combat the poetic avant-garde mode. Fluxfilms can be seen as a successor to Dada as anti-art backlash against the pretentiousness of high art/film at the time.

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

In Fluxfilms, most were produced by a team of artists (many of which were not filmmakers, but often composers or writers) as opposed to the single visionary artist dichotomy of figures such as Brakhage. Personal/individual films were not the point of Fluxus; instead, they strived to mock this mode, and create films which played with the film medium itself, as well as duration and audience expectations.

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?

Paik's film does not use regular film stock, but instead only clear 16mm leader, projected unaltered as a "film". This act makes one question what constitutes a "film", and how it can be produced by anyone, since a camera was not used in any way. As the film accumulated dust and scratches, the film changed over time and screenings.