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less charming and more strange than your average blog
January 15, 2004
Deepest boob
We watched some more avant garde films in class today, including Stan Brakhage's Mothlight (1961) and Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). They were both pretty preposterous. I also saw Dziga Vertov's Man with the Movie Camera (1929), which I fell in love with for reasons that are still unclear to me considering my hostility toward the whole surrealist philosophy of filmmaking. So maybe I don't hate it so much after all.
The guy who made Mothlight was ideologically opposed to the whole idea of narrative cinema, and the way people assumed that the image captured by a camera (still or motion picture) was the objective reality, because he didn't believe that that's how people's eyes actually saw the world. Or if they did, that they were just conditioned to, and that disgusted him. Anyway, this led to him going into the woods and collecting a bunch of dead moths, pasting them onto some film stock, and THAT'S THE MOVIE, FOLKS. It was the stupidest thing I've ever seen. Saying that makes me sound like the dense one, but IT WAS DEAD MOTHS. And it didn't even look like dead moths, which might have looked semi-interesting, it looked like static. When it was over, I was like, I'll never have that five minutes of my life back again. That's five minutes I could have spent watching the "Milkshake" video and throwing up in my mouth.
When I told David about Brakhage's assertion that the image a camera makes is not the way human eyes see the world, and the concept behind Mothlight, he said, "What the hell does he see?"
In some ways, the problems I had last quarter are carrying over into this one: I'm afraid that I'm not "deep" enough for this department. I see films like Mothlight, and I get nothing out of it. It's not just that I think this film and others are stupid -- it's that nothing comes to mind after seeing them. No thoughts either way. It's the same even when I love the films they show us. I read dozens of pages of film theory every night, and it's like reading another language. The interpretations all seems so far-fetched to me. Even when I do get it, fine, but my brain is empty afterwards. I try to write my response paper and I have nothing to say. My mind is blank. What did I think of what I read? Nothing, really. I feel stupid.
Meshes of the Afternoon was much better, but still silly because it's EXACTLY LIKE MY MOVIE. The same thing happened with Man with the Movie Camera: there were shots and edits in both of those films that were nearly identical to ones we made for Guns of Religion. There are overarching themes of avant garde filmmaking (fixation on the human eye, for example) that we put in our film without even knowing about them. (There's even something near-Nun-Clownage in Meshes of the Afternoon) We set out to make a big fucking caricature of the genre, and it turns out that we fit in perfectly. Our film is funny, but no funnier than actual avant garde films. Guns of Religion got a freakin' 4.0. WE'RE ACCIDENTAL GENIUSES. I'm officially speechless.
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The guy who made Mothlight was ideologically opposed to the whole idea of narrative cinema, and the way people assumed that the image captured by a camera (still or motion picture) was the objective reality, because he didn't believe that that's how people's eyes actually saw the world. Or if they did, that they were just conditioned to, and that disgusted him. Anyway, this led to him going into the woods and collecting a bunch of dead moths, pasting them onto some film stock, and THAT'S THE MOVIE, FOLKS. It was the stupidest thing I've ever seen. Saying that makes me sound like the dense one, but IT WAS DEAD MOTHS. And it didn't even look like dead moths, which might have looked semi-interesting, it looked like static. When it was over, I was like, I'll never have that five minutes of my life back again. That's five minutes I could have spent watching the "Milkshake" video and throwing up in my mouth.
When I told David about Brakhage's assertion that the image a camera makes is not the way human eyes see the world, and the concept behind Mothlight, he said, "What the hell does he see?"
In some ways, the problems I had last quarter are carrying over into this one: I'm afraid that I'm not "deep" enough for this department. I see films like Mothlight, and I get nothing out of it. It's not just that I think this film and others are stupid -- it's that nothing comes to mind after seeing them. No thoughts either way. It's the same even when I love the films they show us. I read dozens of pages of film theory every night, and it's like reading another language. The interpretations all seems so far-fetched to me. Even when I do get it, fine, but my brain is empty afterwards. I try to write my response paper and I have nothing to say. My mind is blank. What did I think of what I read? Nothing, really. I feel stupid.
Meshes of the Afternoon was much better, but still silly because it's EXACTLY LIKE MY MOVIE. The same thing happened with Man with the Movie Camera: there were shots and edits in both of those films that were nearly identical to ones we made for Guns of Religion. There are overarching themes of avant garde filmmaking (fixation on the human eye, for example) that we put in our film without even knowing about them. (There's even something near-Nun-Clownage in Meshes of the Afternoon) We set out to make a big fucking caricature of the genre, and it turns out that we fit in perfectly. Our film is funny, but no funnier than actual avant garde films. Guns of Religion got a freakin' 4.0. WE'RE ACCIDENTAL GENIUSES. I'm officially speechless.
