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.

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.

Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

Thought I would write a quick gut response to the film we recently watched , Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. Can't really say that I enjoyed the film too much. I can watch films that have nothing but images and music with no story line but focuses more on expressing emotion or feeling through images; I can also watch films with a story line. This film was a hybrid of both and I did not enjoy it. It seemed to have enough things happening that it could keep you engaged trying to figure what was going on but was devoid of any real sense of story. I want to either be fully engaged or not at all. This, to me, was a bad mix of both. The colors were gorgeous but I did not enjoy the forty minutes of it.