Week 3

1. I wasn't there for the screening but I do think I read about it last week and I watched a bootleg version on the internet. While I found it boring I found myself seeing different things in the images. For example I know it was a mouth but just staring at it I saw a face in the mount I know that might be hard to understand but that is what I saw just staring at the picture trying to make it more entertaining for myself.

A. I feel that this guy thought film should be simple and basic. This is what Disaperaing Music face was. I mean it was just a stationary camera and an extreme close up of a face. I know most artist were more into making a film about their emotions or expressing something about their personal life. But his film is saying that if you get a camera you can make a film.

B. I think art as on object is referring to paintings or sculptures or even statues. But Art as a performance is anything that isn't stationary. So a film or a dance could be art as performance. While both can be entertaining I think Art as performance is what I would chose over art as object.

2. I don't think Fluxus is in there because it doesn't register with Sitney's argument. He was saying that avant garde was more of a personal, thoughtful film. Where Fluxus was kind of fun and "hey anyone can do this". I think Sitney left them out because it would not help his argument.

3. Jack found a gorgeous Puertorican man and gave him the name Mario Montez. He was a transvestite. But Jack loved him so much because Mario had a presence so Jack gave him the name Maria and when he was Maria it was Jack's creation. Maria was an actress who Jack adored and he would cry during her films. She was the glamor girl of Universal during the technicolor days, when she acted she was not messing around she was sincere about her performance. He might also have loved her so much because she was a Dominican woman who came to American by herself and was able to become an actor. Sort of like the way Jack came to New York trying to be a filmmaker after a rough or unhappy childhood. The people being interview explain that Maria brought the film world to life, that she made the fantasy real, she breathed life into the movie and made you feel it.

I think her movies are pretty cool. I am all for the classics but I am surprised that I have never heard of her. I think that her movies would be entertaining to me. I think she would be a person or actress who I would have liked as well if I was born in a different decade. I couldn't tell which film was Cobra Woman, but I think it was the first clip and she just looks like this beautiful woman, a secretive person who is hiding something and I'm dying to find out.

4. There was a lot of restrictions in the 1950's that broke free during the 60's that made helped to reinvent art. It was a "spiritual awakening". There was a small community and everyone knew everyone and they were all artists. They seemed like the should go together, or to be grouped together. They were trying to achieve the movie glam look, but with such low budgets and limitations it gave their films a different kind of look. Jack and others would go to department store dumpsters and find all the materials they needed to create their films. Whatever they threw away was exactly what they needed for their movie.

5. Zorn's argument is that the real film is the filming of the film. He says that there should have been an audience there watching him film his movie. Jack was true to himself his films were suppose to be extremely close to his own vision, fantasy and view of the world. Jack was a myth while Warhol was known. A lot of important ideas from Warhol came from Jack they had an understand they were friends. Jack believed that Warhol was copying him. Other more mainstream artists including Felelinni would take elements of Jacks films and put it into their own. John Waters says that people began making films like Jack later, but they were doing it and it was becoming more popular.

6. I think he was trying to say that the commercial movie industry was trying to take elements of his personal films and make it mainstream, and he resisted this very much. He did not want his type of film to be commercial film he wanted to keep doing it the way he wanted. They talk about in the film how he set up his apartment like one of his films. Perhaps this was one way of coping with not being able to make the films he wanted without it being eventually tainted with the commercial cinema.