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.