Questions 02/03

The film Allegreto by Fischinger is completely different from Cormans House of Usher. Not only is Fischingers film animated but it is also in color and deals solely in the beauty of the image and it's connection to the sound. Cormans film shows the growing need to tell a story that comes into Hollywood. Some aspects of expressionism do come out in House of Usher , specifically with the large german-expressionist sets and the canted angles.


Sitney on Brakhage

1. When it comes to film and vision, Brakhage demands that the filmmaker show what he sees rather then what he/she has been taught to see or thinks they should see. He also believes that have been taught to be unconscious of what we really see. He believes that vision includes eye movements and changes in focus of what the mind sees as well as shapes formed when ones eyes are closed and what one sees during dreams or "brain movies." This coincides with Wallace Stevens who states that reality is the product of our imagination as it shapes the world and that the eye is just a thing, a "vulgate of experience." Both he and Brakhage are trying to capture moments specifically in time in the exact way each of them perceived them. To Brakhage it's by turning the camera into a third eye with all of the movements and randomization of a real eye while Stevens uses words to achieve the impossibility of direct knowledge of reality.

2. Going back to page 168 in Lyrical film, Sitney also argues that because of Brakhages ideas of vision and their application to his films he stumbled upon a representation of space that corresponds to that of Abstract Expressionism that did not occur to him. My example for Sitneys arguement is action painting (sometimes used as a synonym for Abstract Expressionism). In action painting the artist drips, slings, or throws paint into a canvas depending on their movement or action. Basically the painting would come out as a record physical expression of the artist. Brakhage does the same thing when he paints/ scratches on film; granted on a much smaller canvas. This even shows in the editing of Window Water Baby Moving as it shows is excited and disoriented state during such an event.

Sitney "Apocolypses and Picaresques"

3. Sitney says the use of Synecdoche, meaning "simultaneous understanding," plays a major role in MacLaine's films. Specifically in the section in The End where Charles is running from the police and then "with his last dime he removed himself from the red tape..." we are shown a turnstile and then the golden gate bridge. Even though it isn't state outright, through the sound and the image it is understood he jumped from the bridge. To quote Sitney "the combination of picture and sound at the conclusion of the next episode exemplifies the latter." This happens again in the next section with the suicide of John being compared to the dancers legs and sleeping bum. After seeing the The End Brakhage also tried to go beyond the trance film as MacLaine did by making a three part film with a unifying theme Reflections on Black. He also used the ideas of direct and indirect address in Blue Roses and helped MacLaine distribute his films.

4. MacLaines view on doom seems to be more of a serious outlook. Each apocalypse (for each character) is presented in a somber fashion with deep narration. Conner on the other hand seems to have a more comical, matter-of-fact outlook. The scene in which the guy meets the girl, they ride the horse, and then are blown up by the atomic bomb could be seen as funny, I don't think that was it's original intention. MacLaine seems to be aware of death and the apocolypse and wishes there was something to do about it while Conner seems to just point it out and accept it; "engendering the viewer into a state of ambivalence."

5. Both The Flower Thief and The Great Blondino are expressions of Beat sensibility because they go against mainstream culture and give critical representations of it. Both films are picaresque examples because each involves a "roguish main character who lives by their wits in a corrupt society."

Bruce Jenkins "Fluxfilms in Three False Starts" (this article was hard to read)

7. What jenkins means by the democratization of production is that he created a way for anyone to make films that are so-called "art." Since fluxfilms are there solely to refute the highly established, highly creativity based films that were at the time considered art they needed a way to produce films in an easy way. Thus making fluxfilms available by the yard and going against all the time and effort taken by Brakhage and his peers.

8. Na June Paiks Zen for Film fixed material and aesthetic terms for production by taking it all the way down to just film. This way the film is in its more pure form and the viewer is left to cultivate an experience out of it. Since the film would become more and more worn out as it played over and over, the film would look different each time one would see it. It breaks down the film into what it actually is, just a strip of something running through a machine.