Reading Response 2

1. My chosen response is to the move Window Water Baby Moving. This was actually the second time I saw the film and I had a much different experience this time around. When I initially saw the film it was my first introduction to Avant-Garde cinema and I was not so much shocked as I was just taken back. This time viewing the film I had a different experience. I did not look away as many men would, instead I saw it for what it was and enjoyed the experience. I would say I enjoyed it because it made me reflect on the fact that this is where every living being on this earth has started in some way. It was beautiful in that way. It also made me think about how I would be there when(if) I have kids, taking part in the miracle of childbirth. It was a interesting and better experience the second time around.

2. Sitney argues that synecdoche plays a major role in The End. Synecdoche means that asically part or parts of something is used to refer to the whole. Or as Sitney puts it, "The combination of picture and sound at the conclusion of the next episode exemplifies the latter." He cites the example in the film, because we see Charles passing through a turnstile and the camera then shows the Golden Gate bridge we learn he entered the Golden Gate park and jumped the bridge through and inference of two shots "indirect in themselves".

Also the film anticipates later achievements by Brakhage and the mythopoeic form because Brakhage was influenced after watching The End and integrated the techniques that make The End great- combination of black-and-white and color, the dialectic of doom, and the proleptic use of metaphor- Brakhages uses them in a more achieved and integrated way in Dog Star Man.

3. Some similarities and differences between the apocalyptic visions of Bruce Conner and Christopher MacLaine are, according to Sitney" unlike MacLaine, Conner is not naive in his vision of doom. Nor are the intellectual rhythms of A Movie, which move between the terrible and the ridiculous, part of a general interior drift, like the desperate but gradual postulation of hope befor the finish of THe End; Conner deliberately and carefully orchestrated the twists and changes of pace within his film."

4. The fluxfilms were reactions against avant-garde films because they did not take themselves too seriously. THey were not made by filmmakers but more by writers, poets, musicians, graphic designers, painters.

5. The democratiziation of production in the fluxfilms represented a transgression of the highly individualistic, personal, and hand-crafted style of then-current avant-garde practice. FLuxus art could literally be produced by the yard.

6. An example of a "slow" fluxfilm is Zen For Film by Nam June Paik. An example of a "quick" fluxfilm is Wolf Vostell's Sun in Your Head.

7. The fluxus approach to cinema is different than the Godard or Brakhage approach because it instills a performative aspect into the screening context and in the process liberating the viewer from the manipulations of both the commercial and the alternative cinema.

8. Jenkins arguse that Paik "fixed the material and aesthetic termsfor the production of subsequent fluxfilms" because it was "quickly and inexpensively produced y circumventing the standard technologies of the production and post production".

It uses the materials of the cinema by just showing about 1000 feet of clear film. In doing so it would accumulate dust and scratches so every time it was shown it would be different even though it was the same. It could invite intese scrutiny while at the same time elicit absolute boredom.