Reading Response Two

1. The conditions in Europe that made the avant-garde film movement possible after WWI was: It was a period of readjustment to the new sets of standards, which came as a consequence of the war. People were looking for new ideas, so the new ideas of the avant-garde were easily accepted.
2. The goals of abstract art include creating its own plastic expression, abstract art sought out for its “plastic value” for the very elements responsible for its creation.
3. The grounds that Fischinger argue that “there is nothing of an absolute artistic creative sense” in conventional cinematography are: copies only nature with realistic conceptions, destroying the deep and abstract creative force with substitutes, and surface realisms; mass product of factory proportions-cut down the creative purity of work; creative artist can’t have their final say with so many co-workers, who will change and kill their ideas, prevent ideas from being born, and substitute absolute creative motives for cheap ones; lastly creative artist works at their best alone, so the artist Creative Spirit is not unobstructed.
4. Brakhage’s Reflection on Black is a trance film Sitney argues that it anticipates the lyrical film, “Reflections on Black is a trance film striving for a new form that has not yet been born.” Sitney also states, Brakhage began to transcend the distinction between fantasy and actuality moving into the cinema of triumphant imagination. It also anticipates the lyrical film by the identity of erotic and aesthetic quests, the physicality of the film material within the context of the blind man’s “vision”; metaphors of vision; scratched film stock itself; Brakhage begins to formulate an equation between the process of making film and the search for consciousness; a clear line was drawn between hallucination and actuality; he used plastic cutting with collision montage; the repetition of shots; slow panning camera movement; rippling distortions from an imperfect window in the car; continual flow of movements. Brakhage’s Reflection on Black postulates the filmmaker behind the camera as the first person protagonist of the film, just like a lyrical film would.
5. The key characteristics of the lyrical film are: the film-maker behind the camera as the first-person protagonist of the film; there is no hero; the screen is filled with movement which of the camera and the editing, reverberates with the idea of a person looking; flattened space; superimposition, several perspectives can occupy space at the same time; lastly, the film-maker affirms the actual flatness and whiteness of the screen, rejecting for the most part its traditional use as a window illusion.
6. The filmmaker that was highly influential on Brakhage’s move to lyrical film in terms of style was Marie Menken. Brakhage enjoyed the delicate mesh of observation and imposition that appears in almost all of Marie’s films, Brakhage radicalized it and systemically explored its potential for the invention of new forms.
7. Sitney meant Brakhage achieved a dialectical fusion of the image represented on the screen and the filmmaker/subject’s reaction to it.
8. The characteristics of vision according to Brakhage’s revival of the Romantic dialectics of sight and imagination are: seeing includes what the open eyes view, including the essential movements and dilations involved in that primary mode of seeing, shifts in focus, what the mind’s eye sees in visual memory and in dreams; play of shapes and colors on the closed eyelid, and occasionally on the eye surface; Brakhage feels that the imagination includes the simultaneous functioning of all these modes.