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.

Vertigo

I think when everyone sees Jimmy Stewart's character and meets him for the first time, you want to love him. He just seems like a normal, average, decent guy. As both the movie and his obsession with Madeleine progress, you start to second guess yourself and eventually say to yourself, "this guy is one, creeeeepppppy sob." You identify with him in the respect that yes Madeleine is beautiful and you really could easily fall in love with the image of her. She is what he and the audience desires. He is simply doing what his friend asks him to by following her around and it quickly turns into an obsession that eventually he cannot control and one that consumes him. This is part of what the scopophilia refers to. He starts to receive visual pleasure in watching her and also we as viewers receive this same pleasure watching the film.
Madeleine reminded me of Laura in a way that we fall in love with the image or idea of her, and yet we never really learn who she is. She was just so visually relaxing and I didn't get a feeling of pleasure but more of a feeling of relaxation and relief when I saw her. Scottie (Jimmy Stewart) quickly falls in love with her and when he meets Judy, she reminds him of Madeleine, but it is not enough for him. He also becomes obsessed with transforming her into an exact image of Madeleine and wont stop until every detail is exactly as he remembers from her. I guess Madeleine represents an ideal image of what society finds glamorous and beautiful.
Midge represents the opposite. She seems very normal and plain, wears glasses (which personally, I prefer) and just isn't what you see when you look at 50's glamour girls. She is very normal and I really liked her in the beginning and even when she flips a switch, you still are like ahhh weird but.......she can't be that weird. I like her because she seems like she tries to keep Scottie grounded throughout the film as a friend/almost motherly figure. She then tries to find information about what Scottie is doing and then attempts to find more and more information about the case Scottie is working on and eventually realizes that she will never get it out of him. Her painting of her face on Carlotta's body really jarred me and freaked me out, but I still liked her.
Vertigo is one of the most interesting/freaky/disturbing movies I have ever seen. I saw it once a while ago and didn't remember many details going into this viewing of the film. I am a pretty big Hitchcock fan and was excited to see this on the list.

Laura

Laura was probably one of the more interesting and unsettling movies I’ve seen in a long time. Waldo Lydecker was such a little weasel. I felt very uneasy about him from the beginning of the movie. His qualities included more than just a slight pinch of flamboyance. He just seemed to me like Laura’s homosexual best friend and certainly protected and advised her as if she were instead of a lover. As the film went on, he pulled Laura’s strings and seemed to just control Laura’s actions like a puppeteer. He would write the columns on the men Laura had been seeing and picking apart their flaws. Laura would listen to these, laugh and almost agree with Waldo, and never really got mad at what he wrote.
Shelby Carpenter was the most normal to me out of the three. He embodied the typical player or pig-headed male having many women to amuse himself with. Shelby also seemed to display a hint of homosexuality (no not because it was Vincent Price), although I couldn’t really figure out why.
McPherson, although he seemed pretty normal, he could have been the most messed up one. When he snooped around Laura’s place sniffing her perfume, going through her drawers, and going through her closet, he just seemed to become obsessed with her.
Laura herself was never really a person. You got three ideas of who she was, but you never really knew who Laura was. You get perspective from Waldo, the intelligent, puppeteer-like, but sexually inferior man, Shelby, the mindless doofus, and McPherson, the rugged, manly man. You get their ideas and what they shape what they want Laura to be, but Laura never really has an identity or an original personality. Laura, dead or alive, is just a name and nothing more.

Citizen Kane

The post-modernist approach by Welles was extremely effective but the movie itself didn’t interest me very much. The fact that the film never really allowed us to know who Kane was annoyed me the most. The camera angles were distracting, leaving me confused as to what I was trying to focus on, which was the point I guess. Welles’ theatrical background was very apparent in this film but my favorite element used in this film was time compression, something very difficult to do on stage, showing Welles’ abilities when it came to filmmaking. I was also very hung up on paying attention to details about “rosebud” and trying to figure out the meaning of it, which ended up being a whole lot of nothing. Welles “magic tricks” seemed to me a way to distract people from the fact that there wasn’t much truth to the film at all. A view of Kane from several different people and their opinions doesn’t add much to the information you are given in the beginning of the film about Charles Kane, which is probably a result of the film being told about a dead Kane rather than a live Kane. The “No Trespassing” signs from the beginning and the end of the film symbolize that you will never have a real and clear idea about who or what is Charles Foster Kane.