Marc Masters & Michael Zryd Blog

Marc Masters
1. Three similarities between the punk music scene and the punk/no-wave filmmaking scene, in terms of technology, style, and community are: both made their own posters, and played wherever they could, filmmakers screened their films at rock clubs, often between bands; style the musicians were the ones in the films they all like the same kind of music, both wanted to connect with audiences outside the art world; style also “run and gun” it was raw and aggressive as no wave music was; in the community the filmmakers were in was the same community the punk music scene was in; both technology depended on methods that were fast and cheap, the filmmakers of no-wave used super 8 film they could record sound and picture at the same time, so all the filmmaker had to do was “point a camera and push a button.”
2. Punk/no-wave filmmaking was a reaction to the avant-garde film institutionalization of the 1970’s the use of cheap and fast technology, and the community of people who saw and were interested in the films.
3. Filmmakers that influenced Amos Poe, Mitchel and Dick were John Ford and Nicholas Ray; on film they applied their auteur approach to existential plots of Ford and Ray and improvised dialogue.
4. Scott and Beth B took a weekly cable TV program, All Colors News, scenes of “Max Karl” inviting sexual abuse are intercut with news footage, this grew into a short video this venue affected the film’s content and style because some of the footage is shot directly off a TV screen. A rock club setting, The Offenders focused on crime and violence. It was shown in weekly installments at Max’s, by doing weekly installments they made each week a cliff hanger so the audience would want to come back for the next week to see what happens.

Michael Zryd
5. Baldwin means by “Fake right, go left” as a Rhetorical move, rather than using a sincere voice for the voice over, when the film criticizes the U.S. foreign policy, “the film adapts the ironic voice of rabid U.S. patriot, embodying the racist, right-wing, Christian fundamentalist values that for, Baldwin, buttress U.S. foreign policy.” Zryd means by “double voicing” the voice over narration in Tribulation 99’s which clearly marks the ironic intention of the voice over.
6. Paul Arthur’s distinction between the “realist” use of found footage and the “figurative” use of found footage as, the “realist” found footage is used in mainstream documentary, tends to be illustrative or analogical as archival footage as evidence to support the sound track, usually a voice over that articulates the central argument and in effect captions the image. Where figurative or metaphorical use of found footage in experimental film essays. I think the figurative use of found footage is important in Tribulation 99 because it is the use of metaphorical use of the found footage in this experimental film, with out this “figurative” found footage the film would not take on the same meaning.
7. Baldwin means “media jujitsu” as strategy of the symbolic power of the iconic, metonymic image can also be used critically against the official discourse that produces and sanctions it. “With found footage compilation, filmmakers engaged American culture by appropriating its Kino logy and developed strategies and structures for criticizing the culture that provided their material.”
8. Zryd argues the relationship between the use of clips from films such as Chariots of the Gods and Baldwin’s critique of American foreign policy, Baldwin is satirizing this obscure subgenre and its preposterous melding of exploitation and crackpot conspiracy thinking in which UFO fanatics, right-wing militias, and Christian fundamentalists indulge. Baldwin isn’t dismissive of these texts; rather he takes them seriously as distilled manifestations of extreme political positions, and metaphorical narratives that he posits as fundamental to U.S. political culture. Right-wing militarism, motivated by the Christian template of history, isn’t marginal but central-still-t dominant American government and ideology.