1. Post a brief response to one of the following Brakhage films: The Wold Shadow, Window Water Baby Moving, Dog Star Man Part 2, Dog Star Man Part 3.

I think Window Water Baby Moving was a fascinating movie as far as analyzing its impact on the viewer. In the beginning moments of the film, it felt like the most natural extension of Imagist Poetry I had seen so far in the class. It took a single moment, a pregnant woman laying in the bathtub with her husband near her, and seemed to evoke an amazing depth of intimacy in that small space of time. The way the editing went from the stomach (the womb), to the water, to the glances shared between the man and the woman felt like a meditation on the existence of love and the hope intrinsic in new life. As the film went on, though, it seemed to make a pointed collision between those intimate moments and the unabashedly graphic scenes of actual childbirth, almost forcibly making the audience accept that this too must be beautiful because each moment is necessarily linked to the other. It was difficult to watch, I think mostly because as a cultural thing we shy away from the reality of these situations (see: animated storks carrying babies to doorsteps). In any case, it felt like Brakhage was straining to depict childbirth as a whole truth, and I find it hard to believe that he wouldn't think of the graphic moments, the blood and viscera, as something deserving of awe as well.

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? (Implicit in this question: what is synechdoche? It is a figure of speech, but what kind?)

According to Dictionary.com synechdoche means: a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part"

In this particular sense, Sitney seems to be referring to how a part of the film (ie brief images) tend to clarify the greater whole of what the filmmaker is trying to say in a given moment. For instance, the images of a turnstile and of a bridge symbolize and clarify the suicide of one of Maclaine's characters. Not only that, but Sitney suggest that how one section ends seems to have an encompassing connection to the whole of the following section in his film. As far as how the film anticipates Brakhage and the mythopoeic form, Maclaine is already beyond the characteristic traits of the trance film at this point. His characters kill, they play, they engage with activity in the film, so the characters are already in a position of action where they can better evoke mythic connections. But more importantly, there is an underlying theme of the destruction of man that seems to be particularly linked to the ambitions of the mythopoeic form, because Maclaine's apocalyptic vision seems to carry some weight of myth itself. The vision is not one of stark realism, but an absurd fable wrought with the anxiety of times, a feeling of pessimism that is alienating and universal all at once.

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

Sitney talks about the intentional provocation of ambivalence in Bruce Conner's vision by alternating between gestures of attraction and repulsion. For instance, A Movie contrasts the humor of the periscope spying on Marilyn Monroe to the violence associated with the Atomic Bomb. By Sitney's account of The End, it seems that Maclaine similarly uses extreme juxtapositions to accentuate a tonal mood, for instance a dying man's legs compared to a dancer's legs. However, with Maclaine I'm not certain that ambivalence is the desired effect (the book doesn't state one way or the other). It seems to me that the specific gesture in question would call an associative link between the joy of life and the despair of life, where Conner's link between the images seems more disconnected and extreme. In other ways their visions are similar obviously because they share "an apocalyptic despair", a pessimism inherent with the times. However, while Conner's work is imbued with irony, Maclaine's work suggests a genuine hope that is only snuffed out by an Atomic bomb at the film's finale.

Bruce Jenkins, “Fluxfilms in Three False Starts.”

4. 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."]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3671180/Duchamps-Fountain-The-practical-joke-that-launched-an-artistic-revolution.html

Jenkins states that the flux film reaction against avant-garde films had to do with the "deadly serious" attitude of the Avant-Garde filmmakers. Because of this self-imposed severity, those of the fluxfilm movement chose to target them, through mockingly replicating their films while dispensing of their formal trademarks (complex editing schemes or personal content inherent in poetic films) or "less formal but more parodic" attempts like Dick Higgins' Invocation of Canyons and Boulders for Stan Brakhage which showed a close up of the filmmaker chewing in a continuous loop. These films, from the viewpoint of the filmmakers, flew in the face of the conventional thought that art must be bereft of silliness and ran amok with childish glee.

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

He talks about a direct challenge to the idea of the authorship of a film through the practice of recreation, thereby allowing access to a true filmmaking collective in the process of production. The example he gives is of several different filmmakers filming the same tree, thereby decentralizing the film, denying the voice of any one true artist, allowing the medium to "dematerialize...in order to bridge the gap between art and life".

6. Critic Jonas Mekas divided avant-garde filmmaking into the "slow" and the "quick"; which filmmakers were associated with "slow" and which filmmakers were associated with "quick"? Which Fluxus films were "slow" and "quick" (name one of each)?

Slow Filmmakers:

Andy Warhol (long takes), Nam June Paik, George Brecht, Yoko Ono, Peter Moore

Slow Flux Film:

Zen for Film by Nam June Paik

Fast Filmmakers

Stan Brakhage (kinetic, highly edited), George Maciunas, Wolf Vostell, Eric Anderson, Paul Sharits

Fast Flux Film:

Sun in Your Head

7. How is the Fluxus approach to the cinema different from both Godard and Brakhage?

Jenkins writes that Godard and Brakhage both "spearheaded new cinemas". With Godard it was a shift of the narrative film to something that was a little more experimental but still largely accessible to those already indoctrinated with mainstream cinema. With Brakhage, Jenkins writes that he directed cinema inward to humanity's intimate experiences now seen through a new aesthetic of filmmaking ("the camera I/eye"). However, according to Jenkins both new cinemas bear some weight of the past, where Fluxfilms are an attempt at retaining the joyful conception of film, to unburden themselves of the memory of filmmakers before them and to abandon either homage or pointed avoidance of past conventions.

8. 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? A version of the film (and other Fluxfilms) is available here:

http://www.ubu.com/film/fluxfilm.html

It fixed the material and aesthetic terms by being "inexpensively produced by circumventing the standard technologies of production...and post production". In other words, the filmmaker cleverly used a role of leader as the film itself, allowing the scratches that would eventually accumulate on it become a continual part of its evolution as a film. It's aesthetic experience is, in Jenkins' words, "imageless and anti-illusionist". It denies the process of making film, and any artifice that might develop through that process. In so many words, it provides the viewer with an absolutely pure experience that is constantly changing and adapting, living and breathing, sustaining a simple elegance.

For those looking for more information about Fluxus, here is an interesting podcast called "The Sounds of Fluxus" by the Poetry Foundation:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/audio/agat_may2010.mp3