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.