Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Reading Response #4

Fluxfilm viewing response:

George Maciuna's 10 Feet was a playful exercise, showing the viewer exactly how quickly ten feet of film passes through the projector at a normal frame rate. The blackness is only interrupted by the flashing white numbers denoting the length that has been shown.
Yoko Ono's One is a beautiful film. The high-speed camera captures every flicker of motion and amplifies it, slowing the act of striking a match down to take up several seconds, letting the viewer absorb every detail of her hand, the dancing flame, and the chiaroscuro of the shadows around it.
Paul Sharits's Wrist Trick is completely different; I had no idea what I was looking at most of the time, as the negative images flashed in split-seconds across the screen, creating an illusion of movement. I know there were hands, and a banana-shaped thing. The energy of it was exhilarating.

1. What films did Jonas Mekas associate with “Baudelairean Cinema,” and why did he call it that? [Yes, I’m implicitly asking you to look up Baudelaire.]

I've read Baudelaire, so I didn't need to look him up! Baudelaire was associated with the so-called Decandence movement in French literature during the mid-19th century, a reaction against the Romanticism of the past and a forerunner to Modernism. I've read a lot of writers from that period [Huysmans, Rimbaud, de Nerval, etc.] and from what I've read, "Decadence" refers to the championing of the artificial, including outrageous content [rape, murder, sex are all fair game.] Getting back to the question at hand, Jonas Mekas's term "Baudelairean Cinema" refers then to the "beautiful and terrible," to quote Mekas, showing something horrid through the lens of its decaying beauty. Mekas named Flaming Creatures, Blond Cobra, Little Stabs at Happiness, and The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man as Baudelairean.

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

Mekas lambasted the early American avant-garde films of the 40s-50s as degenerative and pretentious, saying in his magazine Film Culture that such artists as Brakhage and Deren were pushing for new techniques, not deeper meaning or new themes in their work. When John Cassavetes' Shadows was released, he began to come around to the American avant-garde, awarding it and Pull My Daisy. Mekas was greatly influenced by the Nouvelle Vague movement in France in the late 50s-early 60s; their spirit and innovation made him re-evaluate his earlier condemnation of American avant-garde film, since without it, this new cinema may not have come to fruition.

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

Mekas was always interested in acting, as he was a member of a theatre in Lithuania before he moved to the US, studying the Stanislavsky method. He believed not so much in acting a role, as performance--when the actor merges with his role, and the difference between the two becomes unclear. He was especially impressed by improvisational films, such as Shadows and Pull My Daisy, which have a loose script.

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

Warhol's early films were silent, minimalist works with a usually static camera. These include Sleep, Eat, Blowjob, and his masterpiece of his long minimalist films, Empire.

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

Screen Tests were shot over an extensive period, of basically every person who visited the Factory during that time. They were each three-minutes long, and the person was told to be very still, making these films little portraits. These Screen Tests also helped to segue into Warhol's next era of filmmaking, that of serials.

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?

Warhol's first sound films include Harlot, Poor Little Rich Girl and Vinyl. These sound films are characterised by a loose narrative, lack of editing, and creating a film as a full experience. Warhol refused to cut mistakes from the finished films, leaving in out-of-focus shots, and making sure the actors did not know their lines. Whatever the camera captured was the film.

1 comment:

  1. Very good.

    You're my "go-to" student for literary references.

    ReplyDelete