Reading Response 3

Post your response to Brakhage's Prelude: Dog Star Man.

I was first introduced to Brakhage in FST 200 with his film "Mothlight," along with a very brief synopsis of his work. In my opinion, Mothlight is a poor example to start young impressionable students unfamiliar with the avantgarde on Brakhage. Brakhage's style and philosophical motivations were not explained to us in that class, so inevitably I and some of my classmates formed negative impressions on Brakhage. Thankfully I have since come to know Brakhage better and have immense respect for him. Dogstar's prelude, like most of his other work, is starkly beautiful, strangely curious, and immediately weird, and undeniably creepy. His obsession with vision comes through in all his work. I don't quite make all the connections Brakhage and his critics make between his work and its mythical inspirations, but I can definitely take the work as it is and enjoy it.

Sitney, “Apocalypses and Picaresques”

2. 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?

Synechdoche, which means when a part stands for a whole or a whole stands for a part, plays a major role in the film in that the destruction of each character in the beginning of the film resembles the destruction of humankind and the world. The pessimism of this film and its foretelling of the destruction of mankind in mythopoeic fashion arguably influenced Brakhage's Dog Star Man and other works.

3. What are some similarities and differences between the apocalyptic visions of Christopher Maclaine and Bruce Conner?

Maclaine's film is made of both found footage and original material whereas Conner's film is purely collage. Conner's film is slightly comical, with the frame containing his name prolonging its duration onscreen in the beginning of the fim to relating the imagery of military guns to human sexuality.

4. 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?

These films involve a misfit protagonist dwelling about in a strange environment. Comparisons betwen these films and The Cage run amuck even though Rice and Nelson were most likely unaware of the parallels. Beat sensibility and picaresque form go hand in hand since both reject mainstream values and vie to explore alternative modes of lifestyle and expression.

Bruce Jenkins, “Fluxfilms in Three False Starts.”

5. How and why were the “anti-art” Fluxfilms reactions against the avant-garde films of Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger. [Hint: Think about Fluxus in relation to earlier anti-art such as Dada, and Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain."]

One such example of anti-art as opposed to Brakhage is Dick Higgins' "Invocations of Canyons and Boulders for Stan Brakhage," which parodies Brakhage's obsession with the sense of vision by showing a man chew on something from various angles and played at a loop for hours on end. This film postulates "the act of chewing with one's own mouth." (as opposed to "the act of seeing with one's own eyes). The presumed slight against Kenneth Anger is the play on words in the title of the film, with it beginning with the word invocaton.

6. What does Jenkins mean by the democratization of production in the Fluxfilms?

In the beginning film was heralded solely by those who sought to create from it personal and poetic high art, and was made by trained technicians. By Maciunas' time, filmmaking was more affordable and accessible. By filming a stationary tree with a nonmoving camera for hours, Maciunas dumbed down the medium in an attempt to parody the preseumptuous works of such self-important filmmakers of his time and perhaps tell his viewers what the avantgard filmmakers really were making according to him - meaningless shots of random everyday objects and elevating it to art-status.

7. Why does Jenkins argue that Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film “fixed the material and aesthetic terms for the production of subsequent Fluxfilms”? How does it use the materials of the cinema? What kind of aesthetic experience does it offer?

Zen for Film consisted of thirty minutes of clear leader, adopting a very "zen" approach in which the film literally consisted of blank nothingness. This film fixed the material and aesthetic terms for the production of subsequent Fluxfilms because it embodied the ideological goal of the fluxfilmmakers: it is still technically a film even though it involves none of traditional filmmaking procedures, is very cheap, and is tremendously meaningful in its stance as an alternative to alternative and commercial filmmaking. By its very nature, the film could "invite intense scrutiny and elicit absolute boredom." Despite what it is (and what it isn't), the film embodies the ideals of the fluxfilm as being the ultimate lynchpin for the anti-art of the 50s and 60s.