If you haven't already, write a brief response to either Fireworks or Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome on your blog. Then respond to the following questions.
Sitney, “Ritual and Nature”
1. What are some characteristics of the American psychodrama in the 1940s?
Some characteristics of the American Psychodrama in the 1940's are dreams, dance, ritual and sex. The images on screen alongside the sound(s)(if there is any) makes you feel as if you are in a trance or dreamlike state.This is why they are called "trance" films, and they are more about the visual experience rather than the narrative. Another characteristic is the use super-impositions and slow and fast motions through camera movements . Sitney says'"Trance films tend to resist specific interpretation." The protagansist (many times the filmmaker) is a passive one who deals with internal struggles.This was seen in the Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and Meshes of the Afternoon.
2. What does Sitney mean by an “imagist” structure replacing narrative structure in Choreography for the Camera?
Sitney says, " Maya Deren introduced the possiblity of isolating a single gesture as a complete film form." This is called "imagist" structure, these films can be as simple as a man banging his fist on a glass tabletop as seen in the film by Boultenhouse.
3. Respond briefly to Sitney’s reading of Ritual in Transfigured Time (27-28); Is his interpretation compatible with your experience of the film?
I feel like our experiences with Ritual in Transfigured Time were pretty similar but I feel like he got much more out of it than I did. I had a hard time deriving meaning from the film, although I feel like the repitition of images , the slow motion and freeze frames really gave me a sense of time being slowed down and exaggerated.
Sitney, “The Magus”
4. Paraphrase the paragraph on p. 90 that begins “The filmic dream constituted…” in your own words.
I think it is saying, Deren and Anger want to be one with the camera. because the camera that is the receptive mind that interacts with our minds.Sitney says, that the main object or subject is shown on screen then the other objects that pertain to it appear as well. Making the viewer place the two together.
5. According to Sitney, what is the ultimate result at the end of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome? How does his reading of the film compare / contrast with your own experience of the film?
The ultimate result at the end of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome according to Sitney ,is that Magus becomes a redeemed man. Which I really didn't get, I felt like there was something shady going on with Magus at the beginning but then I kind of lost touch of any meaning to the story towards the middle through to the end. The repetition, all of the characters and colors made it hard for me to find any resolution in the film, but were beautiful and entrancing none the less.
Sitney, “The Lyrical Film”
6. What are the key characteristics of the lyrical film (the first example of which was Anticipation of the Night).
Sitney says,"There is no longer a hero in lyrical film" and "the lyrical film postulates the film-maker behind the camera as the first- person protagonist."Lots of color and movement.
7. What does Sitney mean by "hard" and "soft" montage? What examples of each does he give from Anticipation of the Night? [Tricky question; read the entire passage very carefully.]
Sitney brings up the fact that Brakhage accurately chooses the verb "to become". He speaks of the opening collsion of day and night shots, and how major scenes blend into one another in rhetoric of becoming. I had a hard time fully grasping this one.
8. What are the characteristics of vision according to Brakhage’s revival of the Romantic dialectics of sight and imagination? [I’m not asking here about film style, I’m asking about Brakhage’s views about vision.]
Sitney says,"His sense of vision presumes that we have been taught to be unconscious of most of what we see. For him seeing includes what the open eyes view, including essential movements and dilation's involved in that primary mode of seeing, as well as the shifts of focus, what the minds eye sees in visual memory and in dreams( he calls them "brain movies"), and the perpetual play of shapes and colors on the closed eyelid and occasionally the eye surface("closed-eye vision"). The imagination includes the simultaneous functioning of all of these modes."
Sitney, “Major Mythopoeia”
9. Why does Sitney argue, “It was Brakhage, of all the major American avant-garde filmmakers, who first embraced the formal directives and verbal aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism.”
Because, Sitney argues,"With his flying camera and fast cutting, and by covering the surface of celluloid with paint and scratches, Brakhage drove the cinematic image into the space of Abstract Expressionism and relegated the conventional depth of focus to a function of the artistic will, as if to say "the deep axis will appear only when I find it necessary."
10. What archetypes are significant motifs in Dog Star Man, and which writers in what movement are associated with these four states of existence?
1)Innocence:Babies
2)Experience:growing up/sexual frustrations
3)Damned:Domination of Nature
4) Liberated:Eden
Writers like Witman, Blake, and Pound all linked with the Romanticism Movement are associated with these four states of existance. Sitney writes, "Brakhage like Blake, describes the sources of renewal as an innocence of the senses and erotic union..."
1. Fireworks is the clearer example of the trance film. Sitney will put Pleasure Dome in the Mythopoeic category. But OK.
ReplyDelete2. Be sure that you understand your examples--have you seen the Boultenhouse film?
4. and 7. We'll tackle these in class.
8. Right quote, but put it in your own words so that I know you understand the idea.
9. Implicit here is: What is Abstract Expressionism?
Good...we'll tackle many of these in class.