372 "Meshes" Part One

1. According to Sitney, what are some of the important differences between Meshes of the Afternoon and Un Chien Andalou?
Some important differences between Meshes of the Afternoon and Un Chien Andalou are: the early American avant-garde “trance film” and surrealistic cinema; Un Chien Andalou “attempts to provide us with a broken, violent, spatially and temporally unstable world, without final reference to a more conventional actuality, Meshes of the Afternoon, offers an extended view of in which there is a terrible ambivalence between stable actuality and subconscious violence”; instructive-Un Chien Andalou has many metaphors, and Meshes has no metaphors; the space in both films are different, Un Chien Andalou has deep space where Meshes has a rounded space.
2. What are some characteristics of the American psychodrama in the 1940s?
Psychodramas have central themes, the quest for sexual identity; protagonist who passes invisibly among the people; dramatic landscapes; climactic confrontation with one’s self and one’s past; the camera is generally static; and the principle of editing.
3. What does Sitney mean by an “imagist” structure replacing narrative structure in Choreography for the Camera?
Choreography for the Camera moves from the most common narrative to the imagist structure, by isolating a single gesture as a complete film form. The term Imagist comes from the poetry Imagism, and Sidney coined this word, focusing on “pure examples, describing the inevitable inflation of the simple gesture to contain more and more aesthetic matter.”
4. According to Sitney, Ritual in Transfigured Time represents a transition between the psychodrama and what kind of film?
“Ritual in Transfigured Time is a radical extension of the trance film in the direction of a more complex form, architectonic film.”
5. Respond briefly to Sitney’s reading of Ritual in Transfigured Time, is his interpretation compatible with your experience of the film?
His interpretation is compatible with my experience of the film, except where he states, “It is this middle passage that makes one think that Maya Deren was openly trying to deal with the problem of the prestylization of dance in film, although she never acknowledged the problem as such in her writings.” I would think if she had a problem with this aspect of her film, which would be interesting since dance was incorporated even with elements outside the dance, she would have mentioned it in her writings. I haven’t read many of her writings; I am going off of Sitney’s knowledge of Maya Deren writings.
6. According to Sitney, what is the ultimate result at the end of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome?
The ultimate result at the end of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome is “what divinity the others obtain comes through the Magus.”