Reading Response 2

1. Sitney argues this because in Reflections of Black we see the film through one man's "eyes" and or mind. Brakhage works to represent both the images existing before the man and the images the man imagines, simultaneously. Brakhage also "affirms" the physical nature of the film by directly manipulating it.
2. The filmmaker plays the role of the protagonist and the audience is prespented with what he or she sees as well as their reactions. The camera movements resemble the movement of the eyes of a person as they look around. These films bring attention to their "flatness" as well as the whiteness of the screen, which make the viewers recognize that they are watching a movie, thus moving them away from illusion.
3. Marie Menken's film style was mixing the world she saw before her, which she would lightly manipulate to suite her purpose, with stylized camera movements and technical manipulations of the equipment, to express this world on film.
4. I'm confused on this one. Is soft montage when a super imposed image is slightly seen in a shot and works as a preview to the next shot in the montage?
5. He believes that people do not consciously realize everything they see and everything involved in the act of seeing. Vision is a collective experience of everything one's actual eyes see, the movements of the inner parts of those eyes, and the shifts in focus, added with what the "mind's" eye see in memories and dreams and the moving colorful shapes behind the eyelids and on the eye's surface.
6. Because of his use of fast camera movements, quick editing, and direct film manipulation and his use of depth of focus as a tool of expression, at times almost eliminating the "deep space," (z-axis?)
7. The archetypes of innocence, experience, rationalism, and imagination are significant motifs in "Dog Star Man" and are associated with writers such as Blake and Northdrop of the Romantics movement.
8. The filmmaker distorted his lenses, used circular and other creative camera movements, and inter cutting; through these techniques he would often distort space. He managed to create a relationship between space and perspective, this was a new concept for "subjectivist" filmmakers and inspired others after him.
9. Some similarities between the two films are the use of camera tricks and the chase sequence. The films differ since Entr'acte was more focused on comedy, mocking the audience, and playing on taboos, while The Cage had a more aesthetic focus, did not use comedic relief, and did not make fun of its audience.
10. His students wrote a thesis that argued that the meaning of ballads over time becomes distorted and irrational. Peterson used this idea in the film by combining and interlacing two old ballads. He also used the props his students gave him, the scuba suite and the hamsters. In one of the ballads he replaced the knights armor with the scuba suite.
11. I understood the mother son relationship and the symbolic death of the son. I didn't comprehend the concept of the mother having to divide her love equally between two sons, and am still confused on where this is represented in the film, aside from the hopscotch game. The knife and bread sequence which Parker describes as a symbol of the castration rite, i interpreted as other people benefiting from the protagonists death. I was also convinced that the score to this piece was carefully thought out, while in the book it states that it might have been created subconsciously.