Week Three.

*I apologize, I don't have all the questions done. I think I caught the plague this weekend, I'm going to try to make it to class but I don't know if I will. I will answer the rest of these questions as well as the ones I skipped from last week later this week.*

3. Why does Sitney argue that synechdoche plays a major role in Christopher Maclaine’s The End, and how does the film anticipate later achievements by Brakhage and the mythopoeic form?
Synecdoche: n. A figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole (as hand for sailor), the whole for a part (as the law for police officer), the specific for the general (as cutthroat for assassin), the general for the specific (as thief for pickpocket), or the material for the thing made from it (as steel for sword).
Synecdoche plays a role in The End because Maclaine uses episodes of different lives to give new meaning of the whole.
This influences and anticipates Brakhage and mythopoeic films by combining multiple episodes with a unifying theme, the combination of colour and black-and-white footage and the use of direct address and indirect narration.

4. What are some similarities and differences between the apocalyptic visions of Christopher Maclaine and Bruce Conner?
Conner's vision is less naive. Maclaine has a feeling of desperation but gradual postulation of hope while Conner uses deliberate and carefully organized twists to create his vision. Conner engenders in the viewer a state of extreme ambivalence.

5. Why are the films of Ron Rice (The Flower Thief) and Robert Nelson (The Great Blondino) examples of Beat sensibility and what Sitney calls the picaresque form?
Ron Rice's The Flower Thief is an example of Beat sensibility because it portrays the absurd, anarchistic, often infantile adventures of an innocent hero. Robert Nelson's The Great Blondino shows Beat sensibility through an alienated and naive protagonist who is fleeing to escape a detective from "the committee".
Picaresque = a simplification and elongation of Maclaine's form.

–adjective

1.

pertaining to, characteristic of, or characterized by a form of prose fiction, originally developed in Spain, in which the adventures of an engagingly roguish hero are described in a series of usually humorous or satiric episodes that often depict, in realistic detail, the everyday life of the common people: picaresque novel; picaresque hero.

2.	of, pertaining to, or resembling rogues.

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