Week Four.

1. What films did Jonas Mekas associate with “Baudelairean Cinema,” and why did he call it that? [Yes, I’m implicitly asking you to look up Baudelaire.]
Baudelaire: Charles Baudelaire, who is known for literary and artistic decadence.
Mekas associated The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man, The Flaming Creatures, Little Stabs at Happiness and Blonde Cobra with Baudelairean cinema. He called it this because it contained poetry both beautiful and terrible and was unsuerpassable in perversity, richness, beauty, sadness and tragedy.

2. How did Jonas Mekas’s views on experimental cinema change between 1955 and 1961?
He became more accepting of the films as time moved towards the 60s and he began to see them as forerunners for independent cinema.

3. How did Mekas’s interest in performance and improvisation shape his views of the New American Cinema in the 1960s.
He was less interested in realistic world views than in a substitution on spontaneous performance. He considered improv the essence of thought, emotion and movment.

4. Even though Jack Smith did not use found footage in Flaming Creatures, what are some similarities between Flaming Creatures and Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart?
They both deal with the tranformation and "liberation" of Hollywood stereotypes in a pseudo-Arabian world. Neither had a plot, only structured scenes.

5. What are some of the visual influences on Flaming Creatures, and according to Sitney how are the scenes organized?
Visual influences: Maria Mantez and von Sternberg.
Organization: Scenes are blended with deliberately obscured boundaries determined not by plot or narrative but by rhythm and dramatic effect.

Leftovers, Part One.

10. 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.”
Brakhage used fast cutting and scratching/painting on the film to push the image into the space of Abstract Expressionism, which no other American filmmaker was doing yet.

11. What archetypes are significant motifs in Dog Star Man, and which writers are associated with these four states of existence?
The writer most associated with this is Blake, and the four states are innocence, experience, ulro (hell) and eden (heaven).

12. What are some similarities and differences between Dog Star Man and the Songs?
Differences: different film format/stock (16mm vs 8mm). all fades/superimpositions on Songs had to be done in camera. 30 Songs vs 5 DSM sections.
Similarities: deal with similar themes. all sections are in some way connected. lots of superimposition.

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.]
Alright, I'm not too sure on this one, but I think he means hard montage to be when the images juxtaposed are very different, such as in the opening with the montage of day and night, and soft montage is when the images are more similar and lead in to each other through pattern or color.

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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