Breaking the Waves

Breaking the Waves was an engrossing film. It had a way of making the viewer forget about its filmic material and feel genuine emotion towards the characters. I found the mis-en-scene in the film, actually, to be the most engrossing. The helicopter, the oil rig, the hospital—these locales seem like they would be difficult to obtain! There is actual work being done on the rig, and realistic-looking medical procedures in the hospital. Von Trier found such an ascetic church and solemn actors for bess's homeland. He really did create a world.

Physiologically speaking.... I cried! I found it immensely harrowing. Especially as someone who has had experience with love interrupted by long-distance circumstances. I also identify heavily with Bess. I am not a religious person, but I believe in spirits, in auras, in a collective conscious, in dimensions higher than this one and a universal law of love that creates and transmutes us.

I thought that the cinematography was great, especially long takes with flowing camera movement. When Dodo is giving a speech at the wedding and the camera moves in long pan whips between her and Bess and Jan! Also, as we discussed in class, Von Trier has a way of employing a histrionic type of editing. Shots will abruptly switch between radical changes in Bess's emotional states. Bess's glances at the camera, as we discussed in class, demonstrates a kind of awareness to and humorous acceptance of, the omnipresent surveillance of her.

Bess truly is under surveillance. As Makarushka argues, Bess is constrained by multiple institutions, the church, the family, the 'laws of marriage', the medical institution. Institutions are in a certain sense simply groupings of people. Their purpose is to aid individual's with the power of the collective. Bess's love has enormous breadth, and enjoins the church, the family, marriage because they contain, or have the capacity to contain, a wealth of love between persons. However, Bess transgresses the constraints of social constructed institutions when their parameters impede love, when it marginalizes autonomy or encourages judgement. I found Makarushka's that insight that when Bess speaks to God in church, she does so in "an empty church—a place where, owing to her gender, she is ordinarily forbidden to speak." To think of her going to church to talk to God as a transgression! In this way, as Makarushka describes, "speaking with god places Bess both inside and outside of the worshipping community." Here asserted there is a massive hypocrisy of the church. The church fails Bess in her quest to do good on Earth. To clarify, not the kind of 'good' that connotes the "culturally encoded expectations of femininity" of "submission and purity," but a desire to act on love, to honor a natural sense of compassion and mysticism. However, this pure wish is complicated by how law has been enforced institutionally. Makarushka argues that Bess's schizophrenic scenes in conversation with God illustrates her internalized sense of judgement from her environment. I believe that Bess is good, not only in how she perpetuates traditional models of goodness, but how she bravely transgresses social parameters in the name of love and her mystic intuition. These are boundaries that she not only had to break in the external world, but within herself too. Initially, the notion of infidelity as a medical panacea seems impossible to her, but she does it! And she risks excommunication from her community. In the end, I believe that Bess is willing to part from that which does not exercise love towards her. This is a good rule to live by, to use institution or tradition for their positive strengths, and to jettison the inequities, the ligature, the entrapment.

This is shorter than my usual blogging, but I'm completely enervated! Have a lovely break, David! See you in 2016.

Tarkovsky

To begin, I thought the cinematography was breath-taking. There isn't a single shot that doesn't brim with determination and careful planning. Many seem to have involved intricate premeditation, like my personal favorite Stalker's Dream shot scanning over the surface of the water in which a collage of symbolic junk and viscous oil miasma can be found. Others, such as the asbestos sea, or some of the fog shots, because of their evanescent content, imply that they must have been captured with a degree on spontaneity; but you'll never see spontaneity (pejoratively) reflected in the camerawork. There's not a single shake, not a single moment's halt in a dolly.  The film demonstrates unblemished, flawless technique, but it never boasts it. Certain directors are known for unveiling films that boast technical precision. Kubrick is an easy example—his films are technically flawless—but a kind of flawlessness that boasts—that invokes rigidity, perfectionism, OCD, an iron rule, Renaissance symbolic mastery of the world, solipsism—his films often feature tyrants as subjects whose stringency can be seen reflected in the technical perfection of the filmic composition. The confluence between auteur control and boyish solipsism has been explored more recently by Wes Anderson. Stalker, on the other hand, does not reflect this mindset through its cinematography. The question can certainly be raised—why go through the pangs of cinematographic perfection to capture a film in which a crucial theme is the value of human weakness, the inexorable flaw in human form being its most vital quality? Why not employ a handheld technique as Malick has, which registers all the minute shakes, the effervescence of the "human" cinematographer rather than the mechanical rig? To put it simply, the cinematography gives me hope, it reminds me that my spirit travels the Earth's topography, moving not by clunky footsteps but hovering in phantasmal fashion. I've frequently heard from spiritual mentors and mediums the virtue of treading lightly upon the Earth, which of course figuratively implies a lack of materiality, not to invest oneself to fully in Earthly matters (if you thrust your foot into the Earth to make it your home, declaring to walk no further, watch as it turns to quicksand and engulfs your body into a subterranean hellscape!) To love is to walk lightly. Fear, to not walk forward, will drown you and make you feel the madness of living death. Anger is to stomp, every step a pang. Guilt is to crawl, so close to the dirt as to see every insect, and you wonder how many you've annihilated by your mere travel. To walk lightly is to love, to travel in a way that can not fatigue or exhaust you, that never attempts you to stop, so light as to leave the ground un-trampled under you. It is this way that the camera travels in the film, lightly, so that not a footstep can be seen.

The following statement does not suggest that I dislike long movies, because I don't. A film is one of the most brief (comparative to novels or television series) invitations into a diegesis. So long as they are not made turgid by narrative gluttony, I enjoy films that, when executed successfully, allow the viewer a little longer in such a temporary world. With that prolepsis, I'll say that Stalker, in terms of physiological experience, was the "shortest" feeling "long" film I've seen. When I say that, I simply mean that I wasn't at all lost in a kind of torpor that one may fear to find in a 160-min feature. Seriously, I've seen 90 minute films that felt longer than Stalker. I was utterly consumed! The same can be said, (following along the typical complaints pertaining to art cinema), that Stalker is an easy "talkative" film to follow. I think that these two are common deterrents that keep many viewers (Americans?) from wishing to watch foreign (subtitled) Art Cinema. And again, it's my personal taste, but in my opinion the script for Stalker to be so thorough, unabatingly exploring the fields of Science, Literature, Art, Philosophy until these potentially esoteric or cold fields manage to form a huge ontological mammoth shape. It really did. It's difficult to describe stalker in words not only because "its visuals invoke majesty so ineffable to defy language" but additionally because it's script covers everything! After watching the film, I couldn't believe that Tarkovsky hadn't written the script (as the credits suggest.) It made much more sense to me when I learnt that Tarkovsky had for all intents and purposes written it—and on the brink of death! For scientists attempting to demonstrate that the brain is a mere vessel for the human spirit, a conductive organ such as the heart, many turn to the brimming lucidity of people on the brink of death. Even patients suffering from dementia often experience untold clarity during their last days. You can see this lucidity in the script for Stalker. Similar to the cinematography, this script doesn't carry an ounce of pretension. It does not allude to the sciences and the arts as a flaunting of cultural capital, no!—it addresses them seriously as the few artifacts at our disposal linking us to the Beyond—and such shabby bridges and bridge-makers they often are, as the film suggests! 
 
Stalker is radical–I can safely say that it is radical because it is so unlike any other work that I would describe as radical. In the Tarkovsky reading, he asserts that "the artist seeks to destroy the stability by which society lives." In almost any example, this "destruction" of stability has been literal, such as Suzuki, Cronenberg, Jodorowsky, Miike, Noe, Kubrick, Korine, Pasolini, Bunuel, so many radical directors critique society by presenting dialogues on violence, and patriarchy—but such a mass radical movement to discuss violence equates ultimately to an emulation of violence—a perpetuation and encouragement! I see so much of this violence as the director reflecting the patriarchal systems of power—"fighting"their way to fame and recognition through on-screen violence—desiring a recognition, a response, perhaps even to hurt the viewer (as the viewer's pain often generated praise of a director—how this masochism is abused!) Tarkovsky writes that art must be a service. It must be done out of sheer necessity of the artist to aid the world in some way. Just like the Stalker, who demands that no guns be brought into the zone, so does Tarkovsky prevent any aestheticized violence. Instead, there are the pangs of ere existence, or mortal questions that drive you mad! Is any more pain really necessary? The films seems selfless to me, without ego. The film has nothing to lose by you not understanding it. In fact, it presents characters that do not understand with which you can resonate. It merely provides, for those willing to hear the roar in the whisper, an invitation into series ontological contemplation. Films such as these can rescue from feeling isolated. How often does the vapid or flat nonsense of movies make me feel alien! Stalker reminds us that none of our conscious world is easy, that it is deliberately difficult and a mere sliver of a greater picture.      



I felt immediacy when viewing Stalker. Tarkovsky describes cinema as an"immediate art," requiring no symbolic explanation. Following suit, I haven't really attempted to define or describe the crux of the film. If it's okay with you, I think I'll keep the epiphanies of the film to myself for now, but, as it continues to sink in, I'll come to you to discuss it.

Sans Soleil!

Sans Soleil was exactly what I needed to watch at this point in the semester. The most engrossing topics of study in my classes recently have been The Left Bank filmmakers, especially Franju and Renais, in my French Cinema course, and the cultural devastation of nuclear warfare on the Japanese as discussed in my WWII Dialogues on Violence course. As was Hiroshima Mon Amour, Marker’s visual essay served as a crucial curricular vertex.

I found the film beautiful. Marker is a strong writer, unafraid to employ the enigmatic and express the inquisitive. His insight seems able to penetrate any cultural body, while also so phantasmal and ephemeral as to hover gently over it. While watching, it was sometimes difficult to discern if Marker’s anthropological observation guides the viewer towards an analysis of ethnic specificity or abstract universalism—not to say that these perspectives cannot coexist. Marker handles all his subject matter, I believe, with love. A love of contradiction, a love that recognizes the luminous orb in every person’s chest cavity, and knows it to be the very Earth itself.

The narration and imagery dance so harmoniously throughout the film. It was so very difficult to believe that Marker had managed to pair found letters and found footage into such an elegant symbiotic embrace—it simply had to be him. This deliberate formal method, creating for the viewer an experience of hearing a woman recall words from letters accompanied by an image, speaks strongly to the faculty of memory. The narration expands the information of the image, adding context, insight, anecdote. Likewise, the image mounts flesh onto the disembodied narration. The two are interdependent, and it is uncertain whether the image recalls the word or if the word recalls the image.

I was highly cognitively engaged throughout the film. In addition to visually following the images, I had to maintain aural focus in following the narration—often having to momentarily derail from it to explore the massive ontological spaces it produced, unsnarl its enigmatic coils—only to return to the narrative as it continued onward without resolving the quandaries posed. There is a lot to take in. What makes it even more challenging is that this visual/aural cascade flows over many, initially seemingly disparate, cultural platforms. The enterprise in Sans Soleil is to accompany a philosopher of dissociative identity as he teleports transcontinentally and intertextually—simple right?

I want to focus my attention on Marker’s portrait of Japan in the 1980s. Marker's portrait of Japan in many ways contests with the longstanding occidental derision of the nation as coated by procrustean homogenous culture—a derogatory framing of a Japan that rejects individualism and whose hubris lies in the fact that their citizens' hearts beat as one. Sans Soleil, airing almost forty years subsequent to the dropping of the bomb, illustrates a culturally inchoate Japan, whose palpitations are no longer synchronized but polyrhythmic. Wolfgang ball describes the work as Marker’s endeavor to capture the "meshing of cultural customs" in Japan, examining “which elements of Japanese culture will survive in a capitalist self-understanding and which will probably be abandoned." Indeed, Japan in Sans Soleil illustrates recognition of its diachronistic culture: samurai films, tea ceremonies, prayer, sumo wrestling, kimono dress—each, however, re-positioned within a new synchronic context. Japan’s historical chronology is difficult to view as a diachronic whole, as it contains ruptures marked by radical socio-industrial alteration. Japan was at one point an isolated, intranational feudal hermit, organized as a military-nobility caste system under a shogunate. Then, suddenly, it became internationally extroverted, and abruptly adapted itself as a modernist chameleon, championing the Early 20th Century Vogue of mass industrialism and colonial imperialism. For its Eurocentric mimesis, Japan was brutally castrated. In this way, Japan presents a rapid and condensed model of what was for other nations a glacial transition from pre-modern to modern to postmodern.  

Marker, interested in time and memory, shows an interest in understanding the current cultural state of Japan, trying to reconcile the “traditional mythic consciousness and perfection of society” as Ball describes. At times it seems critical—critical of whether the upholding of tradition is sincere or merely a pastiche that necessitates diachronic stability—critical of the future which Japan seeks, what it has built atop its bombed rubble. However, as I said before, Marker approaches his subject with love. I believe that the criticism is not positioned as occidental, haughty towards the orient, but rather, positioned with the orient and criticizing the etiology of toxic occidental ideology within Japan’s cultural and industrial structure. Ball writes, for example, that Marker examines "how Western cultural styles are being reproduced in television” in Japan - no judgement placed on the Japanese as perpetuator of Americanism, but sympathy towards Japan as victim to ongoing American imperialism. Ball describes Marker’s observation position of the “extra terrestrial” as one that “liberates [his] view for abstract concepts.” I concur that Marker, as a European in Japan, is not a superior, but does occupy a unique position to view Japan abstractly and examine how occidentalism has become increasingly manifest.    

Ball describes the television as something that “transmits and receives gazes/images” in Sans Soleil. It is in this way that Americanism is both industrial and cultural - implemented by the machine and reciprocally adopted and accepted by the population. Marker describes a kind of mis-en-abyme in which ubiquitous sentinel surveillance observes a mass populace who itself exercises panopticism over a perpetual manga panorama. The people simultaneously identify with the observer and the observed. Japan seems in many ways virtual. A great epitomization of this is the recurrent cartoon of the train which, as it approaches a break in the tracks, adapts and becomes an airborne vessel. The train, an archetypal symbol of modernity - its chugging a mechanic poetry. The viewer at the front of the train can see the tracks ahead - a linear perspective, the march towards progress, the objective certainty of the renaissance, a sense of time that advances forward through eureka and innovation. Just as modernist certainty lead to the ubermensch, The Third Reich, and the Manhattan Project, the tracks in this cartoon lead to a fatalist rupture. At this impasse, what option does the train have but to enter the virtual, the fantastical, to disavow its own death?    

In this regard, The Zone, the digitalization of images throughout the film, seems to me as a kind of necessary hyperreality. If everything has become an image, then what empowerment is granted by creating an image? Does associating the image with reality simply assimilate oneself to the ideological screen? By tampering with the image, by refusing it as a signifier of something but merely as a signifier - and, by obfuscating the original, making the resultant image a signifier of the mere signifier—the digitalization of The Zone in Sans Soleil allows the individual mastery over technology information rather than submission to it. It recognizes information as information, something that can, and is, manipulated, warped, and contorted.

I could talk about Japan all day, but I should probably wrap up this blog.

Overall, I found the film’s non-linear and transcontinental approach very interesting. Marker jumps, in a way that may seem mercurial, to various places and times without precedent. To me, this nonlinear approach is not meant to hinder our understanding, but expand it. The juxtaposed, disparate fragments allowing the viewer to construct a paradigmatic interweb between resonant syntagmatic elements. The resultant journey transcends travel itself, collapsing spatial boundaries. Any image is relatable to another, emphasizing a terrestrial and humanist unity. If one were to dissolve every shot of Sans Soleil into one, it would produce an image that approaches an integrous anthropological Earth. “Marker likes standing outside the spatial/temporal limits in order to observe the world from a different perspective,” Ball writes. Marker’s geographic range is in a certain sense limited in this film, but if he were ever given the resources to document the full anthropological gamut of Earth, he could have shown the universality, the cultural string theory, binding ever terrestrial.  

To the Wonder

I really enjoyed the editing style used in To the Wonder. It was my first Malick experience. Unlike the editing practice of Intensified Continuity emerging in cinema (Transformers, etc.) in which a short ASL drains the picture of richness, Malick's editing allows for an abundance of ideas and juxtapositions. Malick sequences shots under a narration in combination that you never thought would be syntadgmatically meaningful. Malick does not relate time in a conventional cinematic manner. I can't tell if it augments or diminishes the "standard" amount of time for a scene. For me, the film presented a plentiful variety of shots that each contained a weighty gravity of information. This, in one sense, emphasized a "nowness" like Dorsky, making it difficult to have an accumulated sense of time, since the totality of each shots is only a disparate collection of very brief moments. The syntactical negative space between these shots is unknown. However, the shots are often unconnected and from a variety of locations and time periods. The combinations of these shots form a synecdochical whole that is temporally cast. The negative space between, especially, allows for temporal fathoms, as the viewer constructs indefinitely vast narrative bridges to combine the disparate shots. Malick allows his viewers to practice their emotional intuition. He rarely provides a complete picture, often beginning a seen that seems already midway to fruition. The film has a documentary feel in this regard - the camera happening to be there to capture spontaneous events as opposed to rehearsed and premeditated scenes. Malick grants profundity to the quotidian and subtle. Anything that he shoots seems to serve as a strong symbol or important syntactical element. 

In terms of my experience watching To The Wonder, it was very painful! I suffered a great deal, it was hard to watch the characters struggle. This was especially difficult for me because I (you'd never guess) love to talk and express myself. I would be very fearful of being misrepresented in a situation. it's very challenging to watch a situation crumble due to communication issues. Just as the characters cannot find each other, we cannot find them. These films are the most brutal for me. Any violent film is escapist in the sense that I would not kill another human so to watch a murder in film is disaffecting and distancing, easy to watch. This film shows real pain, real regret. It shows situations I'm afraid of, nightmares that I've seen and fear I'll see again.

I would argue that this film reflects the essential style of Transcendental Cinema. Though not every charactr Transcends - in fact, no character ever reaches full bliss. It does, however, discuss despair, stasis, and how people respond to the conflicts of life. Ben Afleck's character (Neil) reflects the disparity of the transcendental style. Schrader describes disparity as a "growing crack in the dull surface of everyday reality." In his case, Neil's existential schism forms a gash dividing his security regarding the endurance of his new family unity. Neil exhibits the symptoms of despair as outlined by Schrader. He persistently "negate[s] his emotions", and overall an inaccessible, stolid character. Though dialogically he is all but impenetrable, his solitary behavior, especially his job , suggest deeper aspects of his character. It is a valid effort to anything done by Neil in the film to be psychologically divulgent - or, moreover, that the transcendental style allows for fluid irrationality and emotional reality. Neil's occupation as an environmental inspector, for example, situates him within literal chasms in the earth. He is knee-deep in the muck and industrial carnage of violated nature, enunciates the Schrader's second level of despair that "all is not right with the banal world." Contrasted against the mud-play scene in Normandy at the film's beginning, the scenes of Neil rummaging through ruined fracking sites evoke a deep sense of terrestrial irresponsibility, a demystification of the natural. Malick's transcendental style allows for multitudinous dimensionality of any image. Neil's occupation, for example, invokes not only a literalization of his marital discord, but speaks to a larger discourse regarding differences between the American and European imaginaries and realities. When Marina and Tatiana move to America, it is framed as more spacious, freer, fantastical. The opening American shots feature carefree dancing through field acres, Walmart: the consumer good wonder emporium, high school football. However, as time elapses, America proves to be less-wild, less-mystical, more-constraining. On this macro level of film analysis, To the Wonder is very much in-keeping with the directorial themes and motifs of Malick's earlier works as analyzed in "All Things Shining" and "Poetic Visions in America." In "Poetic Visions in America," Patterson outlines a paradox often stressed by Malick in his films of “the impossibility of fulfilling myths that assert mobility and settlement, freedom and restraint, individualism and conformity.” In "All Things Shining," Mottram describes Malick's first three films as discourses on "the violence of natural in our world and in ourselves," "the bareness of contemporary American life," and "nature and the meaning of war." It was interesting to watch this film, as it lies subsequent to these analyses yet reflects the Malick themes highlighted in his earlier work. Neil and Marina's love is a war - the exodus of Europeans to America and the mounting cultural tension between the two now - American torpor, environmental exhaustion, bloated penitentiaries, high consumerism. When Marina and Neil go to a Sonic drive-thru and he smashes his car's side mirror upon learning of her affair, it is archetypal and transhistorical in so many ways. It's composition speaks to, almost the culture of imperialism and violence in America. The drive-thru speaks to the American malaise of mass consumerism, of business conglomerates that reinforce banality, of capitalism and its unrelenting competitiveness, how it will insert neon into a desert stolen from American Indians and underpay employees to service customer cars so they don't have to even enter the restaurant. Neil is unwilling to enter the mystical realm of romantic feelings, he is lethargic. As him and Marina go to a lethargic eatery, as Neil is forced to confront a mature situation regarding infidelity, his aggression becomes volatile. He does not confront her sexual identity, the crucial issues in their relationship - at a time of conflict, his lethargy proves to be a guise to cover his aggression. This notion of violence guised by lethargy should not be extricated from the more abstract notions of a larger American banality of violence addressed in Malick's oeuvre.

In many ways, Marina presents a transcendence of despair. Though the film never really indicates what specifically Neil is avoiding, it presents plenty of stress that Marina must overcome. Marina is a single mother who must take a huge chance beginning a new life with a emotionally uncertain partner. She must travel to a new country that turns out to reflect a radical cultural alterity to everything she knew. She is torn bureaucratically from her homeland and her new home. She must suffer the strife of her daughter, as she has a hard time making friends and feels unsure of Neil as a new father figure. Yet despite all this, she dances. Marina freezes the conflicts, and, in melancholic grace, embraces the universality of nature and love , unabashedly expressing herself and remaining open to the splendors of love despite fear. She is not a giddy character by any means, but she does something which Neil doesn't: she manages to stay warm and live atop a frozen stasis, at some points ambivalent and at others independent from her surroundings. Neil, on the other hand, forces stasis within himself, and does not transcend. At the film's conclusion, Marina tells Neil that she will keep his last name. She very much indicates an ability to feel an ease with the tumult of the past - to not drop the pain, as it is her, and she can accept it and move beyond it.

Dorsky's Tenets Will Improve my Quality of Life Profoundly

Dorsky: Arbor Vitae and Triste

A music instructor from high school once told me his **secret method** to sustained concentration. He explained that, unlike body nutrition, homeostasis, or other corporeal functions that provide motivational visceral signals, the ebb and flow of our focus does not communicate with our psychic circuitry. For the average person, when their focus is "hungry," they don't know how recognize it or feed it. He recommended to us that we take time in our schedule to take time to observe the organic patterns of natural phenomena - that they revitalize our metabolic rhymes. If you watch the movement of waves, for example, you can feel your ego being pacified, but subliminally, you can feel your subconscious registering the mathematics of the wave functions. The fluttering of leave sin the breeze, while placid to our conscious senses, presents very complex and harmonious visual information. We crave this organic flux, and after viewing it, we can tell that before watching it, we were not "now" and we were not focused - trapped in some void before or after the vivacious "now." 

I remembered this advice while watching Dorsky. Arbor Vitae and Triste were so relaxing; not because the films are still, but on the contrary - every shot is effervescent and animated, never still. Each shot is rich with organic entropy. Dorsky captures phenomenology that is completely outward from his manipulative control. He photographs flora and fauna, submitting to natural chaos. The natural truly is chaotic. It presents restless movement that, although seeming initially erratic, accumulates diagrammatically to reveal the harmonious and elegant mathematical patterns of our world. Watching these films was reinvigorating. It was one of the few times that I have watched something and never had a single thought regarding how long into the film I was or how long I had been watching it. After each film ended, I felt neither that it had been a long nor little time since I had commenced watching - I had been in a perennial present. 

I love the composition of Dorsky's shots. They each have their own distinct energy points and kinetic composition. There was never a still moment in a single shot - the sway of branches, the dance of shadows, the goading of the wind, flickers of light, rippling water, the natural wobbling of suspended objects, fluid mechanics, the drifting of clouds, even the (argued as impressionist) crackle of the celluloid itself and the apparent transmutation of the image as sequential photographs succeed one after another - the ever-changing environment of Dorsky's canvas was richly stimulating for me.

Under the confluence of cosmic waves and forces, nature never halts. Whether on an atomic or galactic platform, energy never dissipates, but experiences continual fission and fusion of its conserved self. This entropy is captured so beautifully by film, for film is dynamic by its very design. Film cannot be idle; the photograph is idle - the confluence of multitudinous photographs amounting to the gestalt of moving-picture cinema. The film strip is a vital organism in that every frame of its projected image marks further elongation of its survival - a survival accommodated by its digestive system: the photographic aperture's consumption of phenomenology and representation excretion. Watching the films, I found myself in agreement with Dorsky's quote: "the more we are able to relax and accept the absolute presence of our situation and then begin to recognize its formal qualities, the greater the chance we have to transmute it." For me, these "formal qualities" are the cinematic grace of the organic, the organic grace of cinema, and the organic cinema of human sight.

I found Devotional Cinema to be very elucidating. Dorsky discussed many epistemological concerns of sight/spectatorship frequently on my mind, such as the friction between the certain internal and the uncertain external. He related some important historical marks following epistemological criticism of seeing. His argument to resolve the Medieval perspective of seeing as internal and Renaissance perspective of seeing as external is so cool! Of the two, the former seems less prevalent in our contemporary beliefs. Though perspectivism or solipsism are disconcerting - feeling as if there is no external, that our mind produces our virtual spectacle - some though should be given towards the questionable transparency of our ocular physiology as a informative medium. I personally question the simplicity of my perception. Taking into consideration the dynamic chaos of quantum matter - how the modica of large visible structures are constantly whizzing and colliding - it makes no sense for their accumulation to be so geometrically stable. How can a table be so tactile and sturdy when its molecular infrastructure is in such flux? Another example is, how can you trust that an apple is red when, in reality, the apple reflects every electromagnetic chromatic frequency other than red? In brief, I always take into account that phenomenology is entropic, dealing in irrational numbers, and that my mind must, for the sake of its calculations, round its numbers and paraphrase the fractal-like maelstrom of the external world. Dorsky's films present images that are notably perspectival in how their composition utilizes depth of field. Images often include foregrounded objects, shadows of unseen objects, diffracted light, objects seen through windows with reflected images from things n the other side of the window, static foreground with mobile background, etc. The composition speaks to the position of the seer, but also effects what is seen. The resultant epistemological sensation is that though there is a 'image' that we view while seeing, it is negotiated by an intermediary, whose impression upon the visual image is just as integral to the resultant visual as that upon which it impresses. Though there is in one sense an objective externality, its ubiquitous total is intangible. You cannot see the abstract total form of "a bed," only a view of a bed from a particular observational position. To know that a large ball is round, you must observe its contortion as you circumambulate it. To see the totality of a room is impossible, you must navigate it The refusal of ubiquity to the human subject marks the parturition of time and space - space behind required in order to allow for the subject to see the ubiquity of an external object by synecdoche of every perspectival angle, and time required in order to move from any single perspective in space to another. Dorsky's shots do not present any kind of ubiquity. Each image is crucially affected by the position from which it is seen. This stressed subjectivity, along which the constant virtual entropy of the image, truly establishes the "nowness" which Dorsky stresses. I am so very much steeped in "nowness" while watching his films. The images, so often micro-spective, give the viewer so room to imagine what lies outside the frame. With there being no sound, or narrative, the images are temporally significant. They are everything for the duration that they are. The shots leave the viewer no desire to wander temporally or spatially from the current moment. The minutiae - the often quotidian or banal subject matter in the shot, augment and fill the space. The rattling of a fork on a table is now ambassador to the whole cosmos - it is all of spacetime for its limelight moment, and its effervescent dance on crackling celluloid is just as vivacious as anything else. Since watching these films, I notice my gaze wandering to highly kinetically stimulating vistas: micro-moments. The shaking of someone's foot at the library, the blinking and nodding of someone reading, fingers tapping, the way in which the floor looks as my head sway - all these things are, in their own focused context, galactic kinetic forces in of themselves. By never being still, by always being now, by viewing every space as oceanic whose energy is always fluctuating and never dormant, I find myself always now and never dead. I think it is important that Dorsky incorporates the modern and quotidian as well as the mystical and natural. By including images of money handling and store fronts, he thereby saves them, forgives them, refuses to exclude them from the devotion of the human experience.

WHAT AN AMAZING SCREENING IT WAS ALL SO GOOD BUT SOLOMON ESPECIALLY I LOVED SOLOMON

We enjoyed a generous serving of cinematic delights on Wednesday. I was fully prepared to delve into all that I had to say about Brakhage, until I saw Solomon’s work - the first film of his especially, Psalm II: Walking Distance. I wish to devote the entire blog to discussing the reactions to Psalm II. Along the nature of these films, my writing will deal in large abstractions and attempt to tackle both the galactic and zygotic.

I thought the aesthetics of Psalms II were incredible. The composition is so eroded, oxidized - seemingly descendant from the dead aeons. The celluloid withers and warps listlessly and fluidly, like the shaping of stone over millennia. The aesthetic seems so atavistic and primordial, the movement of the films topography does not seem to illustrate the hyperkinetics of modern minutia, but the movement of natural processes - glacial. Vague outlines of human figures appear amidst the sands of time - seemingly atemporal - the human archetype who dwells in the collective unconscious.

I heard some people say that they found these films disconcerting or scary. I didn’t find them scary. I saw them as alluding to the conduction of some sort of telluric orchestra. To be afraid of the image, even if it threatens to engulf my precious flesh into the oblivion in which the 21st century is but a blip, is to be afraid of that beautiful process which absolves the human individual of any divine encumbrance and returns humankind to the reasonable hierarchical rung of the animal. To me, it felt like watching the ocean. I felt calm in a placid environment. I fell into a kind of trance, which did not offer any lucidity until the film had concluded. Physiologically, it was a meditation. I would like to share some spiritual reactions to Psalms, though they are in many ways anchored in my belief of reincarnation and personal in nature.

Solomon’s Psalm II presents the archaic putrefaction of the symbolic image. It is a cinematic ossification that strips away the comforts of typical image epidermis to expose its dinosaur bones. It invokes a way of seeing that is either long-forsworn or long-pending - exploring the spectatorial terrain lying between the postmortem and the antepartum. The Psalms were richly ontologically evocative for me. I don’t believe that Psalms II presents an omnipotent view, but a revelation of ineffable truths accessible exclusively beyond hominid flesh, but emphatically discursive on the examination of human perception. As someone who subscribes to the notion of the reincarnate cycle, I’d like to think of the gestative period as liminal or mitigative between the incorporeal ubiquity after death and the singular individuality of the begotten human. The fetal subject, I believe, undergoes a purge of transcendental sagacity - the collective intelligence of incorporeality - so that it can re-learn organic pedagogy once-more -- how else could a divine body ascend higher other than re-learning the mortal lessons in a new being? The process of transformation from an immaterial being to a begotten one is therefore an exchange of the imaginary/universal truth for the symbolic/empirical estimation. The fetal dream vision is very interesting - it is superior to the visual language of the begotten as it is not constricted by the contours of the symbolic order - yet the fetal dream vision is less omniscient than the incorporeal body’s vision as its information is processed through the human mind, which, by the very definition of its mortal design, relays an intelligent scope much narrower than the breadth of astral body understanding. For beings who have not yet died, the gestative period is the most halcyon chapter - our visual period least inculcated into the choke-hold of symbolically ordered viewing. This, I think, is the goal of Psalm II: to present imagery so archaic as to entice us towards our primordial roots, to relate obscured tapestry that requires our automatism and subliminal perception - vision not as perception of external objects, but vision as internal elucidation. You will find sparse representation in Psalm II, just the nebulous silhouette of the human form contained within the terra firma. To me the images in Psalm II, of the human embedded within earthy strata. I assert, therefore, that both the form and content of Psalm II relate to the primordial state, challenging spectatorial symbolic vision and depicting primordial imagery - inviting us to recall the glyphs painted on uterine walls - the prenatal mirror-phase during which, as we saw anything and everything, it was a reflection of our conception and ability to command mental plastic.

This practice of encouraging gestative, pre-symbolic viewing, as I see it, reflects very much so the Brakhage tenets of hypnagogic viewing as outlined in his interviews. In “Brakhage at Sixty,” he describes close-eye vision as “a field of grainy, shifting, multi-colored sands that gradually assume various shapes” - I couldn’t apply a more apt description to the symbolically desolate, psychologically-private visual landscapes of Psalm II. Many of the sentiments that I felt after viewing Psalms II resonated in Brakhage’s interviews. The deleterious influence of the symbolic order on the purity of the imaginary mind, and the ontological munificence of primordial vision, as I argued, are also argued by Brakhage. He asserts that the eyes are “tutored to death by man-made laws of perspective or compositional logic” and that he wishes to “imagine a world ‘before the beginning was the word.’” He laments our excommunication from the antepartum, the halcyon imaginary period, describing maturation in “Metaphors on Vision” as a “loss of innocence” - an innocence to which we “can never go back.” Brakhage is emphatic in his pursuit of unadulterated perception, seeking the primal. 

Thanks for exposing us to all these works, David

Two Surfaces of a Coin - Chelsea Gurlz

I saw the production technique behind Chelsea Girls, despite its withholding of varied visual information and brutal proponent of malaise, was nevertheless accomplished in execution. The sheer length of some of those takes captured on film - how many feet of film did they need, how big the mag?! I wondered if it was possible to shoot that much film in a single contained sequence of if there were hidden edits during the more frantic camera movements. In terms of performance too, acting in front of the camera for such a long period is impressive! Actors did occasionally glance at the camera - usually long, long into a take - but I actually enjoyed it, as I too had cached my stamina and saw those moments as mutual recognition of fatigue between image and viewer. Although the shots are predominantly statically positioned to the point of lethargic longevity, the cinematographic flights of fancy (zooms, focus adjustment, quick pans) created entirely fresh images with the mounted camera. They may be amateur, but they’re radical - I’ve seen uneasy shaky-cam footage, granted, but the oscillation between the stationary immobility of fixed shots and vagabond ambling of the camera movement into exotic spaces between fixed shots displays a prowess of command between exhaustion and beguilement.

With those accolades noted, I will say that I found myself mentally and physiologically - naturally - in states of ennui and torpor during scenes of the film. It wasn’t the film itself that was necessarily boring - the image, in my opinion, always garners a certain amount of aesthetic value due to the viewer’s need for value and meaning as the present image recedes into the past and a new image is demanded - but the tangential digression of my attention away from the image onto my own watching of the film. I kept thinking about how I was sitting, if my mouth was dry, if I wanted to adjust my leg positioning, when was it last I had adjusted my leg positioning, if an appropriate interval of time had elapsed that would venerate a fresh positioning in my legs to other viewers. I thought about having to use the bathroom, or needing a drink of water, or getting a drink of water and allowing it to pass through my digestion so that I could also use the bathroom. I would hope to be shown a new part of the frame. I would sometimes find myself shaken back into lucidity by the arrival of a toilet or a new piece of furniture that hadn’t previously appear in the shot. After such lengthy exposures of a certain frame of any of the hotel rooms, you have thoroughly noted every detail and require something - anything - fresh, especially when there was no/garbage sound.   

I found the Gretchen Berg’s interview with Warhol, Nothing to Lose, helpful in my reading of the film. Warhol described his methods as brushing “over the surface of things.” He seems to demonstrate a feeling of futility in gleaning deeper understanding of things beyond the surface, or at least a uslessness or borishness in doing so. This depthlessness finds kinship in the surface-based nature of mass consumer culture - items whose substantive dearth is compensated by multiplicity in purchase - an exoskeletal coruscation guise over a vacuous social interior. Warhol says that when objects are “just objects,” he “hate[s]” them,  “so when I paint I just make more and more of these objects, without any feeling for them”- for which his style is famed in his Monroe, Elvis, and Campbell’s works.  I agree our fascination in fashion and decor is both a material drapery over the human body and environment and, culturally, a high-stimulus overlay masking problematic hegemony. Chelsea Girls presents a surface. It presents actors, or at least subjects. It displays human representation on screen. This is, in quintessence, all the audience demands of the screen: a subject onto which we can psychically project our Imaginary self, and for them to construct plastic realms into which we can delve. In Warhol’s case, however, the plasticity is not a covert sorcery, but painfully overt. Warhol gives the viewer no variety, no information, no plot, no characters, no depth or dimension beyond the flat screen, at exhaustive durations, until the cinematic apparatus is no longer opaque and impeccable but transparent and worthy of critique. In some ways, a Warhol film is healthier than a film with subliminal propaganda or toxic embedded ideology. Films that seek to enforce dominant ideology often prioritize normalcy and tradition over engage in discourse - a reliance on depthlessness. Warhol says that American films “really don’t have much to say” but that their “surfaces are really great.” I would say that Chelsea Girls also displays this.

However, I do think that the film contains substance and discourse. The scene in which Hannah Hoi conducts a fascist and solipsistic radio interview offered a frightening angle on the questionable democracy of media. The argument between a woman and man in the first diptych offered many examples of dissonance in the female-male relational dynamic.  

Asparagus - Exposing How Society's Piss Smells Terrible!

Asparagus blew my mind! I know that these aren't supposed to operate as movie-review blogs, but I just want to begin by praising this film as one of the most aesthetically spirited as socially provocative films I've ever seen!

A theme that I find fascinating, even in the first two minutes of the film, is the conflation of the fantastical with the domestic banal - of boundless generation with constrictive frames. For example, an opening circular frame gives way to unhindered flora and majesty, which pans to a quotidian set of lamps, books, mirrors - and another frame, into which we dive. Another scene shows the female protagonist stood before a moving picture pan across the window - a show of unbridled and tremendous oneiric foliage, but again, limited by the frame of the window. Another example is the matryoshka lemniscate of doll houses within doll houses. This imagery provoked a sense of claustrophobic infinitum, which for me, is a true and heartfelt discourse of the tragedy of subjugation upon the human spirit.

I found the imagery in this film beautiful. It was an absolute delight. I was especially fond of the surrealistic wildlife, which Judith Mayne, in Women in the Avant Garde, described as a feature of the 'primitive' female narrator. I took the term primitive as a positive connotation - images free from meaning, unencumbered by significance - flight from the oft phallocentric Symbolic order into the Imaginary. Physically and emotionally, the fantasy spectacle felt liberating, freeing, giving hope to the plenitude of automatism. The satire of the public sphere too, laden with fucktoys and guns, made me happy. Though satire often evokes negative, even hyperbolic and sardonic imagery, which is unpalatable to some, it makes me happy - I see the absurdity of gender-relational irresponsibility everywhere in daily life and films - the culmination of even a single day's observation constitutes, in essence, an absurd and bleak landscape as is expressed by Pitt.

The Mayne reading helped me unpack the paradox, or at least multiplicity, of the film. Those might not be the correct terms. Mayne describes it as a "refusal of divisions." The fellatio conclusion of the film, for example, could be read as a passive act of service or an active sexual statement (I would decode it as the latter). The opening defecation scene was strikingly strange to me - is it a disregard for the phallus - is it the production of 'phallic' power? The lines between activity and passivity are blurred - it speaks to our failure as a society to have codes granting females sexual agency! Under phallocentrism, the 'receiving' of the active penis is a passive act - where can women find sexual assertion under amid our sexual lexicon?

I agree with Mayne that over the course of Asparagus, the female protagonist finds active agency. The theatre scene, in which she unleashes the frenzy of her Pandora's box into the theatre, bridges the divide between the audience and the screen. This is essential, in relation to apparatus theory - cinematic hegemony has positioned the audience to identify with active masculine imagery and view femininity with voyeurism. Masculinity has depth, Renaissance perspective (as is shown through the Anemic Cinema-style whirling circles on screen before the character opens her box. Similarly, after actively engaging the theatre audience, the character actively addresses the phallus. I love this eding scene! The phallus is garnered so much influence and power in our society, the most magnanimous phallus! - but the phallus desires! - it stands tall because it is still at a distance from completion, orgasm, pleasure - and that is the ultimate agency of the character's mouth: she loads the gun, she completes the phallus, alchemizes it into golden magic, gives it meaning and purpose.

Also, the claymation in the theatre scene is incredible! A hundred different antsy patrons  fidgeting endlessly! I can't even image planning the separate human movements for each character, frame by frame!

I read online that Asparagus was shown in tandem with Eraserhead for two years on a midnight circuit - what a trip that would have been!

The point is, the film is loaded with gender-dynamic discourse, it's masterfully crafted,  we need stronger female occupation in cinema (duh) but moreover we need more overt and confrontational feminist works such as these. This blog did not neatly distinguish between my reaction to the film's content, my emotional reactions, and my thoughts in relation to the readings - my reaction was, simply, strong and complex. All I can ever ask for is a film about which I could write endlessly and never fully surmise my experience watching and digesting. Thanks for sharing this gem.

Home Movies, the American Dream

My favorite film shown in this week's screening was The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra! I was greatly impressed with the sophisticated design of 9413 on such a low budget - its mere $97 purse boasted in the title sequences, framing the film to audiences as an anti-industrial, independent triumph of low-budget avant-garde cinema. From the beginning, it was kept in mind that 9413 was, for all intents and purposes, a home movie. (I read ([on Wikipedia] that it was actually all shot in an apartment that they had painted black and used a single light bulb to illuminate the set). The miniature cityscapes shot in double-vision superimposition, the strobe lighting, the expressionist tendrils and backgrounds - minimal, but well-crafted, spectacular weight and visual appeal never out of mind. I especially loved the finale: the elysian ascent of 9413, on an angelic track, passing by increasingly abstract backgrounds. The acting too was comical and scathing - the gibberish talking of the Star Actor, the wagging finger of The Hollywood Hand, the recurrent stair clime to **Dreams** - even now, almost 100 years later, I found the reductio ad absurdum telling of Hollywood industrial practices - the de-individualization of the Hollywood-hopeful, the empty promise of Hollywood dreams, the authoritarian Hollywood industrial command, the flatness behind the cult of the movie star - still relevant and an accurate portrayal often lemented regarding the Hollywood industry.

I laughed a lot during 9413. I felt sorry for the young aspiring actor being repetitively trodden-upon by the system. I also mourned the loss of the actor as he was lost behind masked guises, and his rise to stardom demise of his individuality. But it was funny, especially his vapid mask. It's so funny.  






In relation to the Horak essay, I think that 9413 embodies the amateur do-it-yourself spirit of the American Avant-Garde. With the advent of cheaper film and cameras that allowed for handheld and on-location shooting, such as the 16mm Cine-Kodak, aspiring artists were able to make moving pictures themselves without having to rely on larger production bodies. 9413 reflects this production mode two-fold through its famously thin budget and its overt criticism of capitalist industrial film practices. Horak points to Dr. Caligari as an often-cited inspirational catalyst for American Avant-Garde. This can be seen plainly in 9413's allusion to expressionist mise en scène. What I couldn't discern during screening was whether this style was a continuance of the expressionist style, (9413 airing only 9 years after Caligari), or a form of appropriation or co-option.  I found Horak helpful in answering this question, as he describes an almost postmodern air about the American Avant-Garde movement - a somewhat cannibalistic response to the various artistic movement in Europe. 9413 appropriates the expressionist vibes of Caligari, I'll argue, in order to posit an argument relating to the delusion of the Hollywood/American dream. As we have discussed earlier, the demented mise en scène of Caligari was to relate subjectivity, the world as perceived by a madman. Hollywood, too, is viewed mystically, feverishly, optimistically, incorrectly. Thus, 9413 is an intertextual satire combining homage to European stylistic modes to criticize an American industrial mode, positing it's own production mode, the amateur force of the American Avant-Garde, as autonomously promising. 

When reading Rees, I found a certain parallelism between 9413 and the futurist movement. Rees credits the Futurists as the first cohort to seek to make films independently themselves, which is later scene in American AG production ideology. Rees also describes the Futurists' desire to culminate the arts under cinema. 9413 indeed combines miniature sculpture, absurd performance, cultural criticism, formal film technique, found footage - to do what no other artistic medium can.