First Week

1. I'm not sure if this is right but it has elements of a dream, ritual, dancing, and sex. The chapter before Ritual and Nature explains Maya Derren's Meshes of the Afternoon as a psycho-drama saying the central theme of it is a quest for sexual identity. Going back to chapter two, Sitney explains that these are trance films. So I guess I am wondering if trance films are the same thing as psycho-dramas because Sitney goes on to explain trance film deals with visionary experience. The protagonist are usually priest, initiates of rituals and possessed. He goes on to say the camera movements are stylized with slow and fast motions.

2. I think he is trying to say that these films no longer have a narrative structure and if you look for a story in the film you will not find it. He is trying to say that one single gesture or idea can be the main source of an entire film. He explains that images make up the film and brings up Le Ballet Mecanique, in which different objects move around to look like a dance from what I remember. There is no story in that film it is just a dance using objects and I think Sitney is trying to convey that a single movement or gesture can create a film. I have no clue if that is what you are looking for.

3. With Ritual in Transfigured Time I thought that Maya Derren was the same person as the widow. But the Widow had come back to visit her past. So I thought Maya Derren's character was the same as the Widow who had been killed or died and she was coming back to retrace her steps which led to her death. My hypothesis continued as she went into the ballroom because no one was paying her any attention so she could be a ghost. Then the one man notices her so i figured he must be the one who killed her or led to her demise. Then we got to the garden scene and I was totally confused. I know we are suppose to watch the films in a vertical way but it is hard for me and that is something I will have to work on during the semester. So my reading of the film was totally different than that of Sitney. His description of the film makes more sense than mine but he is a avant garde scholar and I am just a student.

4. The filmic dream is a sensory experience where the subject of the film is represent through his or her own mind or dream. The film shows or tries to establish what is going on inside of the subjects mind. The camera is just there to record the elaboration of the dream. It also asks the viewers to interact and try and figure out what is going on inside the mind of the subject. I have no clue if that is right or even close.

5. Sitney has a better handle on Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome than I do. He explains that all of these people are represent or becoming different gods or goddesses in a cult. I thought that they were a cult and that the drug made them all feel like they were in hell. Sitney says " It is not an apocalypse of liberated gods or chaotic demons, nor is it a perversion of the myth of Pentheus and Dionysus, in which the god is devoured" So I guess I interpreted the film a whole lot different than Sitney did. But his reasons make more sense than mine. I would like to go back and watch it again to see if I can get a better grasp of the film.

6. The Lyrical film is when the main character of the film is behind the camera. There is not protagonist for the viewer to see, we are seeing the film through the camera eyes which are also the protagonist eyes. So whatever the protagonist sees or does is what the audience sees.

7. I think that he means a soft montage shows us what is going to happen. He describes showing the audience trees with color, but by the end of the film the trees have lost their leaves and are dying. So the hard montage would be the tree dying. I don't know if that is right but thats what I got out of it. It doesn't seem like montage is the right word to use for it though.

8. Brakhage believed that we all see things as they happen but we remember them according to how we feel about them. He goes on to explain that the camera is also a sort of eye but it does not have a mind to change the perception of the image we have seen. So instead of using our mind to alter an image we have seen he uses editing, or aesthetic techniques to alter the way we see things. I hope thats sort of right.

9. I think Sitney says this because Brakhage was the first person to take the 35mm film or whatever film he had and physically create art on it, either by scratching directly on the film or doing some other type of abuse to the film. It is also a new type of film where there aren't really characters but instead just abstract images.

10. I don't know if any of this is right but here we go. The four motifs are the birth of consciousness, the cycle of the seasons, man's struggle with nature, and sexual balance. I can't figure out which artist go with which motif but the artist involved are from the European Romanticism of Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Pound, Stevens, Crane, Williams, and Sukofsky.