Reading Response

Reading Response 6: Due February 17 (Wednesday)



Response to Fuses
1. I enjoyed Fuses. It creates a representation of the inner experience of intercourse and the ecstasy of it. The intercutting of floral patterns, windows, a beach, film scratching, and a couple doing it, create the feeling of what it is like to be shall we say "naturally high." I totally saw and believed it. Too bad the link to the interview didn't work, I would liked to have read it.


Sitney, “Structural Film”

2. How is structural film different from the tradition of Deren/Brakhage/Anger, and what are its four typical characteristics?

It aimed to be a cinema of the mind rather than the eye, so immediately the structural films throws out any techniques used to represent the perception of the eye. The films favor the structural shape of the films, using techniques like the fixed frame, film looping, rephotography off screen, and the flicker effect, to create its experience entirely inside in the mind of the viewer who thinks about the logic of the images he is seeing.

3. 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.

The structural films emphasized metaphors of logic, recognition of shape, and general thinking about the film, all phenomenons which occur in the mind of the viewer. The structural film is an evolutionary synthesis of European graphic cinema, lyrical romanticism, and Andy Warhol (see: pg 349)

4. Why does Sitney argue that Andy Warhol is the major precursor to the structural film?

Warhol's art "exploded" the myths of temporal compression and the filmmaker himself. His methods ignored craftmanship in photography, direction, and saturation of meaning within the frame. He stepped outside the trance film's concern with dreams with the film "Sleep" where the camera films a man sleeping for 6 1/2 hours. Warhol did not actually expose 6 1/2 hours of film, he instead every 2 1/2 minutes of the film is repeated on a film loop, and the very last frame of the film holds for an extended duration of time. Thus the structural filmmakers used the structural techniques of Warhol to an entirely different effect.

Sitney says: "To the film-makers who first encountered these films in the mid-60s, these latent mechanisms must have suggested other conscious and deliberte extensions" that is, Warhol must have inspired, by opening up, and leaving unclaimed so much ontological territory, a cinema actively engaged in generating metaphors for the viewing or rather the perceiving, experience."

Warhol reversed the experience of the trance film by externalizing the state of dreaming with "Sleeping." The structural filmmakers parry and repost Warhol's attack on the conventions of the American Avant-Garde up to that point in history by using his newly developed techniques to advance the cinema of the psychodrama/mythopoeic/lyrical back in the arch of their evolutionary progression.

Sitney says it perfectly: "The great challenge, then, of the structural film became how to orchestrate duration; how to permit the wandering attention that triggered ontological awareness while watching Warhol films and at the same time guide that awareness to a goal."

5. 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?

Sitney calls Warhol anti-Romantic because he disregards the notion of the artistic vision and the highly technical and conceptual techniques the romantic artist would employ. In a fashion similar to his career in painting, Warhol aimed to create sameness and quantity. His films add a temporal quality to his notions of pop art and thus challenges the viewer's patience to endure the longetivity of his works.

b. Why does Sitney argue that spiritually the distance between Warhol and structural filmmakers such as Michael Snow or Ernie Gehr cannot be reconciled?

The spiritual distance between the works of Snow + Gehr and Warhol cannot be reconciled because the structuralist filmmakers are basically a thesis/antithesis/synthesis amalgamation of the psychodrama, mythopoeic, and lyrical films (thesis), Warhol (antithesis), which leads to the synthesis of the structural film (to say the least about its romantic and graphic influences). The conceptual nature of Warhol's films are on the opposite end of the conceptual spectrum of the aims of the structural filmmakers. Their only commonality are the structural techniques pioneered by Warhol and reinvented through the structuralist.

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? pg351

I think the phrase means the viewer has to be aware of the technical and conceptual design of the film, and the hierarchal relationship they have with each other to define the film's perceptual impact on the viewer.

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 films explore the human mind, as does the psychodrama/mythopoeic/lyrical traditions, but does so in a way which uses Warhol's technical methods, which when used by himself were intended as oppositionary to his predecessors.


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

They believe that the film is a metaphor for consciousness, in the arch from uncertainty to certainty; cognition to revelation. Every preceeding frame corresponds to a moment of memory and recollection on a journey where we can project where we are going but are uncertain of what it will look like.