Reading Response

1. Some characteristics of the American Psychodrama of the 1940's are dream, ritual, dance, and sexual as described by Sitney.

2. When Sitney means when he say's an "imagist" structure replaces a narrative structure in Choreography for the Camera there is no said "narrative" to the film but instead "images" are used to tell the story and in the instance it is the dancers body and movement that conveys motion, feelings, etc. through his language of dance which is a series of images.

3. Sitney's description or response to the film Ritual in Transfigured Time helped make more sense of the film. Now I understand more of the symbolism of the widow and the guide while mentioning the scarf. These things I did not pick up on but it is clearer now. This does not mean I enjoyed the film any more because I did not but it does help me to understand it more.

4. Paraphrasing Sitney's paragraph that begins "The filmic dream constituted" would mean to me....that what we as an audience sees on screen is nothing more than what the director feels. It is an emotional visualization coupled with how the director thinks about a subject.

5. According to Sitney, the film Dome, at the end is not an apocalypse of liberated gods or demons nor is it a perversion of the myth of Pentheus and Dionysus What divinity the thers maintain comes from the Magus. This was definitely not what I got from the film as I stated in class. I got bored quickly and could only take so much repetition. If I had to choose some story in the mess of the Dome I would think it had to do with cults.

6. The key characteristics of the lyrical film are that there is no longer a hero and the protagonist is behind the camera the screen is filled with movement both in editing and the camera.

7. I believe that Sitney means "hard" montage is quicker more random paced montage while a "soft" montage is slower with a less frantic, easier to follow narrative. He sites examples in the opening collision of night and day shots.

8. The characteristics of vision according to Brakhage were the fact that he has his own vision. All filmmakers will have a different vision of the same thing THe camera will be able to photograph what "it" sees but not necessarily what the filmmaker sees.

9. Sitney argues that about Brakhage because he was the first to embrace the formal directives and verbal aesthetics of abstract expressionism and because of his flying camera and fast cutting also his work with films only using what he did to the surface of the celluloid; scratching, painting, toning, etc.

10. The significant archetypes in Dog Star Man are Innocence, Experience, Ulro, and Eden. Some writers that are associated with these four types of existence are : It was the romanticism movement which was associated with writers such as : Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, and Crane to name a few.