Week 8 Trinh T Minh-ha

Surname Viet, Given Name Nam was probably my favorite film of the quarter and that is because I'm Vietnamese. The moments where the women recite what I will assume are translated passages in English were particularly interesting to me because of the artificiality of them. There is something about thick Asian accents that makes me associate them with simplicity, and that has a lot to do with my mom probably. The women were speaking rather eloquently through their accents and that was a pretty jarring contrast to me. It seemed performed, and for all I know these could be passages written by these women from the heart. Minh-ha's decision to have them performed in this way, staring off into space and uttered rhythimically, does really bring up questions about foreignness.
It kind of makes you wonder if these women even know what the hell they're reciting out loud, and that's what's ugly about the stereotype of accents. Right now I'm reading a review of the film on imdb and someone complains:

"the film would seem to be about women's life in Vietnam but it can't seem to understand that when people watch a movie they need to understand what is being said to comprehend it. actually it seems to know this very well teasing the viewer with subtitles that come on after the Vietnamese women has been speaking in unintelligible English but then taking the subtitle away before you can finish reading it so you are lost as to where the hard to understand English is and you can't remember what you read cause you were straining to read it so fast. then a strange poem will have lyrics written underneath the screen further distracting you from the broken English that you are trying to hear."

I have been wondering about the subtitle thing as well, and I do understand that part of the reasoning is to create more interaction with the spoken word performances than the actual text. This reviewer is completely missing the point with their conventional reading of this film, but it is very interesting that they lament this "broken English" over and over. They are very well frustrated with these accents and it is probably this kind of reading that Minh-ha is trying to engage in her performances.

Week 7: Final Paper proposal

I want to intersect avant gardism, specifically the surrealist movement, with bourgeois form. I want to focus on Un Chien Andalou in developing my thesis, its avant gardist approaches to narrative and whatnot. I will specifically need to address its conception between Bunuel and Dali in comparison to its reception with the general public and the artistic community. Within the artistic community I will have to differentiate between the aestheticist and the avant gardist critical receptions. My argument will focus on the dream logic of the surrealists and their goals in subverting not only divisions between aspects of bourgeois culture but also in their contribution to developing new aesthetics in post-modernist artwork.
I will rely heavily on the surrealist manifestoes to hash out my thesis. There will be some overlap with avant garde sublation of art as I will continually refer back to bourgeois praxis of life and its relation to art. There are specific moments of unique editing in Un Chien Andalou, and I will mention them in relation to Bunuel and Dali's writings.

Week 6

Fuses was pretty wacky. I liked the fact that the physical film stock was modified because it helped abstract the whole sexuality of the piece. It was a little bit reminiscent of scrambled porn, which I think doesn't help Carolee's intentions. I don't know if there is a way to escape perversity when depicting sex on film. Movement adds so much, and stimulates the mind however peoples' individual minds naturally get stimulated when seeing actual sex. The manipulated film stock is a nice try, though. Perhaps it would be more helpful if the images of her frolicking on the beach were completely removed, because that's kind of out of context and a little bit of a display, which should be avoided when trying to present the shared equal de-eroticized experience of sex. Also, that twitching penis close-up was a little too frequent for my liking, just had to throw that out there. Erect twitching penises are the worst.
On the other hand, Looking for Langston was all about objectifying the male body/sexuality. It was a pretty huge contrast to see the focused camera all over these sculptures and dudes' bodies, and because we were seeing objects (sculptures), the movie makes a pretty good reference to that objectifying sexuality point. It was similar to Fuses in that it represented sex through focusing the camera on the unexplicit parts of the sexual act, such as when you see the legs of the men who are assumingly making out or doing something weird up there. It reminds me of this scene in Wet Hot American Summer, actually, when Michael Ian black and Bradley Cooper, two straight actors, have a male lovemaking scene, and a lot of the humor is through keeping the camera only on their socks for the most part. For some reason seeing their socked feet moving around all hornily was a lot gayer feeling than if they had showed the performance explicitly. Maybe that has something to do with the power of the imagination and is why Fuses seems to fall a little short of its perceived goals. That and the scary twitching boner.

Week 4 Burris/Suarez

I think the most interesting point about modernism that Burris points out is that it would have inevitably led to postmodernism. The idea of continually foward-minded thinking seems to have a cap on it, until we run out of ways to expand our minds about a certain form and have to move on, either to new teachnology/mediums or right back onto itself and start making fun of everything. So it makes perfect sense how video, a medium developed around this time of artistic thought, was such a suitable medium for postmodern art.
I think it's great that there was so much modifiable elements of video that could not be achieved with film, such as with the idea of the visual synthesizer. I think that the video synthesizer actually supersedes Berman's idea that "new works are not triumphs but repetitions," in that a "moving" visual tapestry created by the device is a completely new form of art.
Suarez' explanation of political postmodernism seems like it relies heavier on utilizing preexisting norms to create new meaning, or possibly "spin." This is pretty excellently conveyed in Kenneth Anger's videos in which he gays up, through editing and suggestive music and mise en scene, a heterosexual, masculine activity such as maintenance of a hot rod. As a medium, this is pretty different from the use of a video synthesizer. The video synthesizer is rooted in progression of the medium, while Anger's video is rooted in reusing old social form into something new. You can still see that the artistic goals of both these pieces do have the modernist, progressive thinking at the very core of them, though the directions go elsewhere. This shows that modernism might always be a part of postmodernism.

Week 3 Deren

Maya Deren at one point in her anagram describes the artistic feud between the realists and the surrealists. She explains that the realists strive for mass appeal through commonality in their works. The surrealists on the other hand, are bent on exposing an interior reality which is not one of commonality, but a completely new one which is generally unspoken of at the time (sexual lust, violence) and thus can not be a part of bourgeois normality. I thought it was interesting how she united the two factions through their "very righteous contempt for the group loosely characterized as the 'romantics'" because of, well, their romantic notion of everything. I wanted to see how similar Deren's decription of some aspects of surrealism were to Breton's first surrealist manifesto.
Breton begins with talking about logic, which seems to me what he attributes to realism. He continues to describ this logic as a suppressor of the other things such as superstition and fancy, which I now know as important parts of surrealist thinking. It does seem in Breton's early writing that surrealism is meant to combat these forces of logic/realism, yet there is no mention that I can find of romantic escapist art, which probably came about after the surrealists had established themselves after the writing of this manifesto.
When Deren mentions the artist needs to create a whole piece of art, it makes me think about Stan Brakhage's Window Water Baby Moving. His piece to me, when viewed as a whole, is a memory piece from the perspective of a first-time father holding the camera. The anachronic editing and various close-ups allow for an intimite look at this birth. I noticed that any clip of the film could be taken out of its context and viewed almost in a similar way, though. Brakhage keeps his style and lighting consistent throughout the film, and so there is really would be no important moment missed for continuity's sake or anything. However, if I were to have viewed a clip of the film knowing it was a clip and not the whole thing, I would be always wondering what I was missing. Filling in the blanks as a viewer would probably piss off Deren, because she says that it's not what the viewer interprets but what the artist intends. So in her eyes, you either watch the whole thing or nothing at all.

Week 2 Burger

I think Burger sums it up well when he says that Duchamp's ready-mades are not works of art but manifestations. The aestheticist Bourgeois notion of art does not allow for the idea of ready-mades because the art is neither planned nor made from his own hands, as I understand it. Slapping the signature on the thing signifies it as so, however. I can see why this stirred up so much hullabaloo in the art world. Art is no longer defined by its traditional terms. Now it's realized that art is all around us. I'm sitting at a table right now and I'm noticing that there are rounded edges and a textured top, and despite the fact that it's a table, and could even be used as a stand to hold a more traditional piece such as a sculpture, somebody somewhere designed the thing and it could be under bright lights with an accompanying placard in a museum somewhere and it would be fine.

Week 1: Benjamin's Aura

The aura that Walter Benjamin speaks of in an object is its "value," measured in terms of distance. In Anemic Cinema, the art which is being mechanically reproduced is the sonic pun of the sentences displayed on screen. The original source of the art is the reading or recitation of the sentence from one person to another, or a person to his or herself. By reproducing these sentences on film, Duchamp is affecting the aura of the sentence, from its "original" source. The effect is not quite similar to an instance of one beholding a photograph of the Mona Lisa rather than the actual painting, since the original source of a sentence is not concrete (Though the Ten Commandments or the Magna Carta may suggest otherwise due to their status as "cult objects").
In this case, I don't think the aura of the puns are removed. This is a silent film, and so the important part of the pun is its reproduction in one's mind. If this film were made in 2008 with Morgan Freeman reading the phrases out loud, the aura will have been decreased even more so, I think. It's important to note that mechanical reproduction is exhibited rather literally in this film. The words are physically embedded in a spiraling piece of metal (or whatever it is), and perhaps that says something about the decrease of aura through mechanical reproduction. I really don't think that the aura has been decreased, though, as the art is words and I think the true essence of literary art is in its reproduction.
This is getting a bit confusing.