Sitney, “Ritual and Nature”
1. What are some characteristics of the American psychodrama in the 1940s?
Dream, ritual, dance, and sexual metaphors. Dream films were also called trance films, with the action being the dream and the actor as a somnambulist (sleepwalker). We have seen some of this already in Meshes of the Afternoon. Sitney describes a classic trance film: the protagonist who passes invisibly among people; the dramatic landscapes; the climactic confrontation with one’s self and one’s past. Around this time period, unless you had a private membership, movies with sex in them could not be shown in a public theater. Sex was alluded to for instance, At Land, the mustached man in bed, and the caressing of the girl’s hair by the beach. Maya Deren realized that space and time is a creative function that had to be made and was not a universal given.
2. What does Sitney mean by an “imagist” structure replacing narrative structure in Choreography for the Camera? For reference, you can see the film here:
http://www.ubu.com/film/deren_study-in-choreography.html
As we spoke of in class, two cinematic forms to compare are the Horizontal Privileges special and temporal continuity narrative form.
Vertical privileges graphic or symbolic principles; poetry.
Imagism, concentrates on a single gestures as a complete form film. Choreography for the camera was an effort to isolate and celebrate the principle of the power of movement. Choreography uses the dancing (leaping) from one environment to the next as the main focus, (vertical cinema). The dance movement provides and continuity through a space that is severely telescoped and a time that elongated. This is a shift from the narrative form of that has a thematic composition. The Imagist film represents a progressive state of inflation, whereby lateral or foreign material is introduced. In Choreography the forest and the room are introduced by the main focus is on the dancer, his foot (as he moves from the forest to an inside room) and his leaping.
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 agree with Sitney’s description of Ritual in Transfigured Time. He examines the synthesis of the somnambulist to the repetitive cyclic movement when the crowd was dancing. We also discussed in class the suppressed feeling of being in the crowd, but I enjoyed the mastery Deren displayed as a director in collaborating the dance and accomplishing her intentions. As in Meshes, Ritual also used slow motion to achieve the trance film. I could connect with what I felt Deren was trying to say in Ritual, or at least what I thought she was saying. Especially, in regards to our class discussion of Ritual being about the dance of courtship.
Sitney, “The Magus”
4. Paraphrase the paragraph on p. 90 that begins “The filmic dream constituted…” in your own words.
My understanding is: I would film an environment or subjects based on my feelings toward them or what I think these would mean to others. Organized consciousness enmeshed in some variant of Nostalgia. For ex. If I filmed a teddy bear bc I thought it metaphorically represented my childhood.
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?
There was an ultimate showdown in the end of Pleasure Dome. Sitney explains the essential tension of the film rests on the resolution of the Magus’ several aspects into a unified, redeemed man, or man made god. All the actors of the films are subsumed in his power and glory. The divinity of the others comes through the Magus.
Sitney’s explanation is a possible belief for me. All the characters were having a grand time in their costumes and drinking. The more they drank, the more Shiva’s eyes became excited, his head rocking forward with the notion of “YES!” Shots of Shiva’s glee were repeated numerous times juxtaposed with reuniting of the all the characters in Shiva’s circle, to convey the transformation and assuming the personae of gods.
Sitney, “The Lyrical Film”
6. What are the key characteristics of the lyrical film (the first example of which was Anticipation of the Night).
The lyrical film:
Film-maker behind the camera as the first-person protagonist of the film. The images of the film are what he sees. There is no longer a hero; instead the screen is filled with movement, both the camera and movement reverberates with the idea of a person looking.
The viewers see the mediator’s intense experience of seeing. Through Anticipation of the Night, superimposition was explored; several perspectives can occupy that space at one time. The film-maker working in the lyrical mode affirms the actual flatness and whiteness of the screen. After reading this information, I reflected back on question #4, which made me think of the film-maker as being the camera.
Night writing and Moon Play. P. 161.
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.]
Hard and soft Montage for me meant possibly the type of montage. Harder montage maybe a quicker, less narrative. Softer montage might be slower montage, more narrative like. Sitney indicates the opening collision of night and day shots, as counterpoint of hard and soft montage. The significant transitions of large areas of film, unlike the counterpoint, are forecast in advance by a pattern of camera movement, a drift of colors, or the “soft” preview of a forthcoming image.
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.]
Brakhage got rid of drama as prime source of inspiration. He became more personal and egocentric. First his sense of the center radiating out, then he became more concerned with the rays, the very real action of moving out. Brakhage claims to see through his eyes, with his eyes, and even the electrical patterns on the surface of his eyes. So he threw away his glasses. The imagination includes the simultaneous functioning of: seeing what the open eyes view, including he essential movements and dilations involved in that primary mode of seeing, as well as the shifts of focus, “brain movies” and the perpetual play of shapes and colors on the closed eyelid and occasionally on the eye surface (“closed-eye vision”). Brakhage’s works attempts to refine the visionary tradition by correcting its errors. Ex. In Thigh Line Lyre Triangular, The anamorphic shots of Jane in labor, as viewers watch the birth through the eyes of the artist.
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.”
Sitney uses the examination of Dog Star Man, in describing the rhetoric of Romanticism, the birth of consciousness, the cycle of the seasons, man’s struggle with nature, and sexual balance in the visual evocation of a fallen titan.
10. What archetypes are significant motifs in Dog Star Man, and which writers in what movement are associated with these four states of existence?
The first, Beulah, or Innocence, encompasses the vision of the child
Generation or experience defines the adult world of titanic sexual frustration and circumscribed erotic fulfillment.
The third and fourth states are respectively the damned and liberated alternatives to the two-fold opposition of innocence and experience.
Ulro, the hell of rationalism, self-absorption, and the domination of nature
Eden, the redeemed unity realm of “The Real Man, the Imagination”
Stephane Mallarme, Un Coup de Des 1897, Surrealism, French Poetry
William Blake 1757-1827, English Poet, painter and printmaker, mostly recognized for the Romantic Age.
Romanticism originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe.
A revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment.
Science vs. nature.
Wallace Stevens “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” 1879-1955, American Modernist Poet, most of his work famous work was created in his 50’s.
“Reality is an activity, not a static object”
No comments:
Post a Comment