Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage Shorts

Time and space are two things that remain completely constant in everyday life, but when it comes to film, time and space can be easily manipulated and the laws of physics mean squat. Maya Deren was great at this time manipulation, and her short film, Meshes of the Afternoon, showed how you could do these so easily with a camera and film. The scenes where she was crawling obviously stood out when it came to this kind of camerawork. It came to the point where I didn’t know which way was up, where she was in the staircase, or when it was going to end! I eventually ended up being like, okay...okay you can walk up the staircase now!! It was neat nonetheless. What I believe she was trying to say in her essay, which was oddly very literal and pretty matter-of-fact, was that through film, time and space can be manipulated. When you do this and when you slow film down the way she did, you can almost create something that wasn’t there in real time. You can create a whole new narrative, or a drama. You allow an event to become more fluid, rhythmic, and it can take on a sort of pattern. You allow the viewer to interpret this and almost create their own narrative. The physical act of slowing the film can affect almost every physical aspect within the film.

Stan Brakhage’s shorts were extremely fascinating to me. Window Water Baby Moving was extremely beautiful, just the lighting and textures (placenta shot was really neat and reminded me of a pomegranate for some reason) were very aesthetically pleasing. The way he cut from shot to shot really eliminated a narrative or a storyline and forced the viewers to just look. This also eliminated any sense of time. I guess if some watched this and kind of just blocked out most their preconceptions and thoughts or opinions they had about the birthing process, it may have been easier just to see this short film for what it was and not a film with characters or plot but as something purely physical, it may have been a little easier to swallow. I believe that these biology films we discussed were much more offensive to me just because I thought they were presented in the way that it was showing that women were only for baby-making, and this is their role which really, really bothered me. I would have rather been presented this in middle school. What I believe Brakhage is saying in his essay is an extension of Deren’s theories of camera manipulation of time and space. The way he put his short films together really takes the storyline and any context completely out of the picture and forced the viewer to just look and watch closely. Viewing events such as birth without any already known vocabulary or opinions on the matter would really help in an intimate experience of viewing, which I believe Brakhage wanted the viewers to have. He believe that slowing the film down could break down details and create some sort of “magic” in the sense that the camera and physical act of slowing the film can create a whole new physical reality.

Last Year In Marienbad

When we first watched this film, I thought it was one of the most difficult films to focus on, one of the most difficult to understand, and to be honest, kind of boring. The repeating lines, scenes, and the extremely annoying organ music almost lulled me to sleep. Situations and characters confused the heck out of me and I spent the whole movie just trying to make sense of a scene or a small piece of the movie. Did they meet before? The title suggests yes but as I watched, thought about the film, and tried to put pieces together, I don’t think that they ever met and this may have been just daydream in character X’s head or possibly a just a dream that he had. I had the strangest feeling of déjà vu throughout the film because of repetitive lines and scenes. Scenes that I was pretty sure I hadn’t seen before still visually felt eerily familiar. The names of the characters (X, A, M) were seemingly fitting because I felt as if everyone in the film was treated as an object or objects in a game that could be manipulated, like in the game that was played in the film. The shot of the people in the garden even looked to me if the garden was a giant game-board and the people were just little pieces of this game. I sense a definite disconnection between the two and even alienation of A from X because no matter how many times the man “plays out” and creates different scenarios, the girl never “remembers” last year in Marienbad.



I guess this is where solipsism comes in and also skepticism. Character X experiences this solipsism and thinks that everything that is happening is real, and the fact that he is trying to control A and prove that she is real as well. We as viewers experience skepticism as to if what is happening is real, and also if X, A, and M are even real themselves in this surreal setting and environment and even in the end, we never really know what happens between X and A.