Reading Response 3: Due February 8 @ Noon

1. Post your response to Brakhage's Prelude: Dog Star Man.
I really, almost violently, disliked Prelude: Dog Star Man. Perhaps its because I reject Brakhages mission to find the "untrained eye". I like the supposed "story" of the film, but while seeing the film I couldn't connect any of the dots. I liked the intro with the black screen, then it gradually becomes red reproducing the sunlight shining through your eyelids. In theory I am a big fan of the soft editing too. Which you would think would make the film easier to watch. I just thought it was too long, and way to fast. To keep my head from exploding I had to shut my mind out, and let the visuals work on me. I think its easy to see that Brakhage worked really hard to achieve the look he was going for in this film, but I just do not like 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? He uses metaphor throughout the film. The images have a direct and indirect relationship to the narrative, similar the film scratching of the blind mans eyes in Brakhages Reflections of the Black.

3. What are some similarities and differences between the apocalyptic visions of Christopher Maclaine and Bruce Conner? Both Maclaine and Conner use metaphor to create distance from the material, as well as a doom and gloom mood. Howerver, Conner relies on humor, eroticism, and violence to do this.

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? It portrays the absurd, anarchistic, often infantile adventures of an innocent hero.


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."] "Anti-Art" Fluxfilms relied on humor to attack the hierchies of cinema.

6. What does Jenkins mean by the democratization of production in the Fluxfilms? That the medium itself was easy and appropriate to replicate, and should be cheap to get copies of the art.

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?
It shows a black leader, a clear leader, sound and silence, to offer a zen like meditation on film form.