reading response, week of april 7.

my bad on posting this to the main page, i cant figure out how to delete it now...


**the last two will be added later..**

1. What has changed in the gallery art world that allows Barney to describe his work as “sculpture”? In other words, how has the definition of sculpture changed since the 1960s, and why?
Since the 1960s, sculpture has become a much broader term. Rather than simply an object made of clay or plaster ect, sculpture now defined many facets of art, such as media based art and architecture. Sculpture has given birth to performance art, which has destabilized the sculpture as an object. This is also a claim that his films rest in high art (gallery art/sculptures) rather than low art (blockbuster film).

2. Tricky but important question: Why was minimalist sculpture seen as a reaction against the “modernist hymns to the purity and specificity of aesthetic experience.” Hint: Do not confuse this with our discussion of structural / minimal film as modernist; they are essentially saying that minimalist sculpture is post-modernist.
Minimalist sculpture was seen as a reaction against the "modernist hymns.." because it brought the viewer back into importance in the artistic process. The viewer was forced to discover the meaning of the piece for themselves, which means that for every person it was unique.

3. Describe the role of the body in the works of Vito Acconci and Chris Burden.
Acconci used his body to create art. He hid his body from view while he masturbated, and the sounds he made were considered his art. Burden used his body to create a performance, but in a completely different way - he was a precursor to JackAss, in which he did stupid things to hurt (or potentially hurt) himself in order to create entertainment.

4. What do the authors mean when they say that Cremaster’s “genealogy in endurance works has a dual articulation”? What are the two influences?
The two influences are Burden or Abramovic, who used endurance as a physically grueling issue for themselves; and Warhol or Girono, who used endurance as a means or testing and exhausting the audience.

5. In the opinion of the authors, what are the key differences between performance art of the1960s/1970s and Barney’s Cremaster cycle?
Performance art of the 60s/70s set up a tension between the event happening and the changes it goes through as time passes, forcing the audience to think about the body, its actions and reactions. In contrast, Barney uses spectacular stunts and actions so that performance is no longer simply about the body and its reactions but about the body and what it is capable of.

1. What are the so-called two worlds of film art that Walley intends to describe in this article? What is the basic difference between the two?
The two film worlds are Avant Garde or experimental film and film words made for gallery exhibition, or Artists' film/Projected Image Art. The difference is that avant garde filmmakers are making films deliberately and exclusively, while gallery exhibition films are being made in accompaniment to other art forms, and the artists typically don't even consider themselves filmmakers.

week Five, i think?

Marc Masters, "The Offenders: No Wave Cinema"
1) Name at least three similarities between the punk music scene and the punk/no-wave filmmaking scene, in terms of technology, style and community.
They had all been hanging out in the same "punk" community, going to shows and hanging out together; within the punk community they had their own tight knit group of filmmakers, all of whom worked on each others films and helped out with anything and everything. Coming from the same community, they had much the same style - a devil may care attitude and an attempt to make films the opposite of the standard (Jonas Mekases) of the day. They made melodramatic and visceral films.
In terms of technology, just as many guitarists had never previously picked up a guitar, so many filmmakers had never picked up a camera.

2) In what ways was punk/no-wave filmmaking a reaction to the avant garde film institutionalization of the 1970s?
They brought a raw energy from rock n roll; they were taught by the institionalization-alists, but they reacted to that by making films that were outside of the art scene as people knew it, they made spectacles and encouraged audience response.

3) Which filmmakers are cited as influences on Amos Poe, Eric Mitchell, and Vivienne Dick (to the point that they "re-worked" earlier films)?
The Nouvelle Vague filmmakers, such as Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut and Eric Rohmer. They also remade several Warhol films.

4) What were the exhibition venues for punk/no-wave films such as those by Beth B and Scott B, and how did the venues affect film content and style?
CBGBs and Max's Kansas City, both punk-rock venues, screened their works between bands. This gave them a goal to connect with an audience outside the art world. New Cinema also exclusively screened no wave films for awhile, but bowed out while they were at the height of their popularity.


Michael Zryd, "Found Footage Film as Discursive Metahistory: Craig Baldwin's Tribulation 99"
5) What does Zryd mean by "double voicing" and what does Baldwin mean by "Fake right, go left"?
"Fake right, go left" is Baldwin's rhetorical move of contrasting the "said" with the "unsaid" meaning to create a critical meaning - in his case, rather than criticizing foreign policy, the films uses US patriot to embody the racist, right wing, Christian fundamentalist values that Baldwin sees as the base of US foreign policy.
"Double voicing" is another means to create this ironic intention - placing foreign policy explanation in voice-overs over seemingly unrelated, American economic images.

6) Explain Paul Arthur's distinction between the "realist" use of found footage and the "figurative" use of found footage. Which becomes important in Tribulation 99 and why?
Realist found footage is found in mainstream documentary, where the image and the sound track match up to support a central argument.
Figurative found footage is seen more in experimental films, and the image functions separately from the soundtrack to create a new meaning.

7) Explain what Baldwin means by "media jujitsu".
Media Jujitsu is a strategy for using found footage to appropriate American culture's iconography and thus criticize the culture.

8)What does Zryd argue is the relationship between the use of clips from films such as Chariots of the Gods and Baldwin's critique of American foreign policy?
Zryd argues that this relationship springs from the pseudo-documentary genre and creates a critique on US's presumption of cultural superiority.

Catching Up.

Sitney, “Structural Film”

1. How is structural film different from the tradition of Deren/Brakhage/Anger, and what are its four typical characteristics?
Tradition: movement toward increased cinematic complexity.
Structural: opposite direction of the formal effort - the shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified, and it is that shape that become the primary impression of the film. It is dependent on shape - content is minimal and subsidiary to the outline.
4 Characteristics: fixed camera position (fixed frame from viewers perspective), flicker effect, loop printing and rephotography off screen. All four are seldom in the same film, some films modify these.

2. If Brakhage’s cinema emphasized metaphors of perception, vision, and body movement, what is the central metaphor of structural film? Hint: It fits into Sitney’s central argument about the American avant-garde that we have discussed previously in class.
Cinema of the mind (rather than the eye).


3. Why does Sitney argue that Andy Warhol is the major precursor to the structural film?
The roots of fixed frame, loop printing and rephotography can be found in Warhol's early works.

4. The trickiest part of Sitney’s chapter is to understand the similarities and differences between Warhol and the structural filmmakers. He argues that Warhol in a sense is anti-Romantic and stands in opposition to the visionary tradition represented by psychodrama/mythopoeic/lyrical films. But for Sitney’s central argument to make sense, he needs to place structural film within the tradition of psychodrama/mythopoeic/lyrical films. Trace the steps in this argument by following the following questions:

a. Why does Sitney call Warhol anti-Romantic?
Because he turns the camera on and walks away, completely ignoring the "Romantic heritage" of Avant Garde.

b. Why does Sitney argue that spiritually the distance between Warhol and structural filmmakers such as Michael Snow or Ernie Gehr cannot be reconciled?
They are on opposite poles - Warhol's camera is fixed as a statement against the norm, while structural filmmakers used it to contemplate that place in space.

c. What is meant by the phrase “conscious ontology of the viewing experience”? How does this relate to Warhol’s films? How does this relate to structural films?
Ontology -

–noun

1.	the branch of metaphysics that studies the nature of existence or being as such.

2.	(loosely) metaphysics.

So the conscious ontology of the viewing experience is the conscious study of being through the viewing experience. This relates to Warhol as he films life before his lens, his films are a study of being. This relates to structural films as they contemplate existence through the film.

d. Why does Sitney argue that structural film is related to the psychodrama/mythopoeic/lyrical tradition, and in fact responds to Warhol’s attack on that tradition by using Warhol’s own tactics?
Structural film takes the triggering of ontological awareness (as seen in the psychodrama/ect tradition) to the next level, as Warhol forces ou to see things in a new light thanks to the length of his films.

5. What metaphor is crucial to Sitney’s and Annette Michelson’s interpretation of Michael Snow’s Wavelength?
Metaphor is consciousness.

6. What role does the materials of film play in the work of Michael Snow and Paul Sharits?
Different film stocks and focal points create a change in mental and physical state (consciousness) from those of human actions.

7. Summarize in your own words Sitney’s description of the structure and process of Hollis Framption’s Zorns Lemma
Zorns Lemma is a three part film. Its first two parts especially are deeply involved with letters - the first part is a reading from a primer book, the second is a repetition of the alphabet through letters on signs, which are gradually replaced by symbols. In the third part, a couple walks in the snow.

J. Hoberman, Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Underground

3. How does Edie Sedgewick end up "stealing" the scene in Vinyl?
Edie steals the scene with her beauty and her constand actions. Just her presence was enough to take the focus off the boys.

4. In what ways did the underground film begin to "crossover" into the mainstream in 1965-1966?
Magazines all across the country were running articles on them, the Museum of Modern Art ran a special on them and two major theatres were regularly screening underground films.

5. How was John Getz an important figure in the crossover of the underground?
He developed Underground Cinema 12, a series of midnight showings that played in 22 cities.

Daniel Belasco, "The Vanished Prodigy"

7. Name at least three important friends/relationships Barbara Rubin had in the world of art and music in the early 1960s.
Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol.

8. Briefly describe Rubin's production and exhibiton practices for Christmas on Earth. Why does Belasco argue that Christmas on Earth cannot be reproduced electronically or in other forms?
The film was produced by locking her friends into an apartment for 24 hours and letting them have fun. She edited it with no purposeful connections. It is shown in superimposed projection of unequal sizes, accompanied by whatever happened to be on the radio. Therefore each showing is unique and cannot be reproduced.


Toby Mussman’s review of The Chelsea Girls

9. How does Mussman compare and contrast Warhol’s work in The Chelsea Girls with the work of the following directors?

Luis Bunuel - similar to his explosive, monumental L'age d'or.

Alfred Hitchcock - Warhol doesn't manipulate the audience towards a planned ending, he has an open ended resonse.

Jean-Luc Godard - similarity: role playing, "Cinema to Sieze Life". difference: metaphorical cinema (JLG) vs close to life, cinema as reproduction of life (W)

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.

---

Week Two.

1. What conditions in Europe made the avant-garde film movement possible after World War I?
Political and economic unrest, opposition of conventional film, an artistic climate and the influence of new technique and new art made avant garde possible after World War I.

2. If the goal of Impressionist art is “Nature Interpreted by Temperament,” what are the goals of abstract art?
Abstract art's goal is to overcome pure individualistic emotional expression and find instead an expression of universal feeling.

3. On what grounds does Fischinger argue that “there is nothing of an absolute artistic creative sense” in conventional cinematography? (At least two important reasons.)
Fischinger argues this on the grounds that it is simply surface realism, and is not artistic - it copies rather than creating. He feels there is too much input (from the director, cinematographer, operator, lighting designer, actor and anyone else who happens to be close by) and the result must cater to the masses, the lowest common denominator, rather than the artistic/creative vision of the individual filmmaker.

4. While Brakhage’s Reflections on Black is a trance film, why does Sitney argue that it anticipates the lyrical film?
Alright, first for this one a disclaimer...I think I'm completely off on this answer, but:
He argues that Brakhage begins to transcend the line between fantasy and actuality, moving towards triumphant imagination.

5. What are the key characteristics of the lyrical film (the first example of which was Anticipation of the Night).
Key characteristics are: flatness of frame, multiple perspectives occupying a single space through superimposition, and the lack of a single hero - instead there is an experience of seeing.

6. Which filmmaker was highly influential on Brakhage’s move to lyrical film in terms of film style, and why?
Joseph Cornell was very influential because he hired him on projects with no storyline or hero, which forced him to shoot differently and develop the lyrical mode of simply seeing. Marie Menken's films, especially Visual Variations on Noguchi which showed rhythmical movement around statues, visually influenced his style.

7. Alright, for some reason I wrote down a different question than what I just saw on the blog when I went back to copy and paste the questions in to here..so I'm going to go ahead and answer what I wrote, and I'll get back to the real 7 later..(I have absolutely no idea where the question I answered came from...I think I must be going crazy)
7a. Paraphrase the paragraph beginning with "Brakhage takes up the opening of Meshes of the Afternoon and elaborates it in terms of a Petersonian consciousness..." in your own words.
In the opening of Meshes we don't actually see the main character's face, only her body parts as they enter her own POV. Similarly, Brakhage shoots with only the body parts the subject would see of himself visible in the frame.

8. What are the characteristics of vision according to Brakhage’s revival of the Romantic dialectics of sight and imagination?
The characteristics of vision are lens distortion, obliterated perspective, discaring the tripod, changing camera speeds and changing film stocks; he thinks these should be used to enable you to show what you actually see rather than what you have been taught to see.

9. How are Bruce Baillie’s lyrical films and filmmaking practices similar to and different from Brakhage’s?
Bruce Baillie, according to Sitney, has the most distinctive voice of his own seperate from Brakhage. Brakhage's films show uneasy inwardness, Baillie's show a problematic study of the heroic. They both portray an argument between consiousness and nature; an impersonal or unqualified consciousness.