week 10....late

I couldn't find week 11 reading and i missed week 10 so here week 10. I enjoyed this reading not only cause it was really short but also how it talks about how we see things. Everyone see things differently and has different reaction to object but we also want to understand how other see things in this world. Through cinema we can attempt to walk in someone else shoes and understand how other see things. This is also a problem because the cinema is often over done and becomes fake but this is still how we will think other see the world causing us to become more fake to act like how we see in the movies.

Stan the man

So.... Stan Brakhage is pointing out that almost everything we know is actually an invention. Every perception is a reality, just for existing in our reality (even just as an idea). Language, for example, has come to represent ideas that have been invented before we realized we were inventing them. It is interesting to study the different cultures on the globe, and how they can invented their reality and ascribed meaning to everything. These ideas dictate our life and our psyche, whether or not we are able to acknowledge them. I think that this also can represent the power of art and artist- for it is a blank canvas open to a new language that is being created by the artist. A new way of communicating. Why ascribe language when you can make your own?

The Dreamer and the Cynic

I guess this man was already a bit cynical even before he reached old age. He says that once a person loses their innocence as well as their imagination. Furthermore, he states that intellectual pursuits can get some of that perception back. For all this perception that we lose when we are forced to grow up, I do think all the intellectual reading and scholarly thinking would be the thing that would bring such things back. I think that taking the time to really look at something away from distraction like we were once able to, away from cities and technology, just might bring it back. Even with his belief that artists would be the one's to bring back this perception, I think artists have that power to do that but not them alone, but who?

Dorsky–Devotional Cinema

In Devotional Cinema, Nathaniel Dorsky explores the qualities which he finds present in the films he deems successful. He begins this exploration by relating to the reader the experience of being “completely cured” after attending a student production of a Mozart opera. The reason for this, he asserts, is that great, “uncompromising” works of music, just as great works on film, resonate in their timing and rhythm with the metabolism of the viewer or listener – are “transformative to it – and therefor realign the metabolic energies in a harmonious fashion, producing a feeling of wellbeing or rejuvenation.

Next, Dorsky turns his attention to the material qualities of film, and how these are experienced in the cinema. He compares the human skull, a dark space illuminated by visual images, with the cinema. He maintains that from this point of view two distinct possibilities of seeing the world, or of making films, emerge. The first is grounded in the own psyche, and is concerned with a view of the world emanating from one’s own consciousness. According to this view, a tree falling in the woods with no one there to hear it produces no sound. The second view can be considered to be the polar opposite of the first one. In this mode of vision, the viewer is considered to be a part of their surroundings, and the surroundings themselves are seen as continuous, whether or not they are inhabited by the viewer.

Dorksy then goes on to explain that, in his opinion, the best films are those which achieve a a delicate, yet forceful, balance between these opposites. Dorsky strongly favors films which are firmly grounded in an objective temporal reality of continuously unfolding time and narrative, but which also allow for the possibility of transcending that reality in favor of preserving or extending the present moment, and which ground the viewer in that sense of presentness throughout the film. This is when watching a film becomes akin to a religious experience, or as Dorsky put it, when film becomes Devotional Cinema. 

While I have experienced sensations similar to what Dorsky describes in his text when watching films, those experiences seem to be few and far apart, and their occurrence seems more probable when I’m not watching big budget American movies. That is not to say that those movies aren’t entertaining, they are. However, they seem to function more as a device conducive to escapism and temporary oblivion, rather than to presentness within the “now” and transformative experiences.   

Vision

It's interesting to see how Brakhage put into thought how much our eyes and brains are filtering the world around us. As artists, we have been taught to create pieces with certain kinds of composition that allows us to make them as interesting to look at as possible. Though, what if we were never taught was was supposed to be the right kind of set up for a work? How differently would we try to create things if there was no set lines of what's right or what's wrong? But the idea isn't just for the artist to think about, it's merely something we should all think. If we were to get all the rules we have already set up, would we start to create our own set of rules, or would we simply go back into constructing it back all over again.

real scenes

Brakhage first opens the reading by asking the reader about our differences in perception and how defined ideas, such as labels for different colors, limit true perception. He then asks us to accept everything we see, whether it is in "real life" or in a day dream... as it is all equally important to visual understanding.  He says that the primitive man had a better understanding of perception, as they didn't allow popular labels and pursuits affect their view of things. Brakhage seems to feel that popular images of things, such as: "birth, sex, death, and the search for God" limit our perception as we focus on these familiar ideas instead of delving into the realm of true perception.

vision

The reading is an attempt to show how important vision is and how crucial it is to humans, specifically. It says that vision is one of the most important ways to perceive and that we should accept all vision like they were real scenarios. When he talks about accepting dreams and day dreams and hallucinations as real-life occurrences, it made me think that we as a whole society would have a much greater sense of things because we would be looking at things from a different perspective, giving us more understanding through exploration. With cinema i think that it takes vision in a whole new direction, it allows for seeing more than one image at a time, and this will change the perspective of the viewer, being able to seeing and attach meaning to more than one image creating more sensations that will allow for more understanding and interpretation.

metaphors on vision

What I pulled from the reading was that, perspective of something new, could be anything endless. There are an unlimited number of colors that we can see until we run into the man made establishments of blues, greens, and reds. Once someone puts a label on it, you're no longer seeing things through your own eyes, but through theirs. It reminded me of a thought I had a long time ago, what if we don't see the same colors but we all call them the same thing? Like for example we'll say that grass is green(unless it's dead, or natural grass) but we all see it as a different color, maybe I see it as blue and you see it as red, but everything that I see that is blue I call green, and everything that you see that is red, you call green.

anyways here is a cat gif...

Stan Brakhage

What begins as a pleasant thought experiment about perception, sharply turns into a loaded philosophical rant against our lais a fair attitude towards existence. The mainstream of us have been spiraling downward in our understanding of the world, amounting to less understanding of our place in time than the relative existential knowledge of cavemen. Quite the argument. This reminds me of Terrance McKenna who warned us that "culture is not your friend"and who stated "we are led by the least among us." This also ties into the work of Joseph Campbell whom I quoted in my last entry. So what? I tend to agree with these attitudes, but what can be done? It is easy to forget and become absorbed into the humdrum of society, experience mundane, prescribed reality, rather than having deep human moments or perceiving the world as an outsider looking in. However, polls show that the "millennial" generation (people 18-33) are less religious and less political than previous generations. So it seems that we are collectively dropping out of earlier mainstream attitudes. We are also more educated that previous generations. Could any of this mean that we are more capable of understanding our place in the universe and experiencing a reality that is not prescribed to us? Not sure, but it's interesting to consider. How does one measure the spiritual deepness of a generation or society? Maybe less war, less hunger, more cooperation...less phallic, more yonic (funny that spell check doesn't recognize that word)... a balanced yin-yang utopia. OOOOOOHHHHHHmmmmmmm

Vision

I have read like 3 times already, and I cannot fully understand where does this idea comes from and where is trying to go. I think I am taking it too literal what the author says, therefore, in his “metaphors”, I get lost. Somewhere in this tangled reading, it reminded me of Baudelaire’s “flauneor”. If I remind it correctly, the flauneor is like a flying eye that nobody notices it, but the eye sees everybody. It acts as a tourist with no purpose but to wonder and watch. This reading also reminded me of our kino-eye reading, which is nothing and everything at the same time, as the flaneuor.

For what I understand, the author talks about the live and disasters of a watchful eye. As a person’s eye, camera’s eye, etc., is everywhere but nowhere at the same time. the author makes his point across about that knowledge and innocence are two things that does not together. A watchful eye always gets something and cannot ignore whatever it is watching. He also mentions about death, symbols, and children, but I did not get why exactly. I think that he wants us to understand that, as artists, we have a mission: to let the world know what we want let them know.

We fight for what we think is right.

In metaphors on vision Stan Brakhage sets out a vision for a cinema that could "create a new language made possible by the moving image," a new language which could be used by new visual artists to "deal imagistically with–birth, sex, death, and the search for God."
Brakhage seems to be calling for a generation of artists, presumably film makers, to begin with the production of works which dispense with conventional approaches to subject matter, and instead focus on conveying meaning through the "pursuit of knowledge foreign to language and founded upon visual communication."
Finally, he implores the reader to accept formerly shunned forms of vision as creative sources. "Allow so-called hallucination to enter the realm of perception, ... accept dream visions, day-dreams or night-dreams, as you would so-called real scenes, even allowing that the abstractions which move so dynamically when closed eyelids are pressed are actually perceived."

I cant believe its been 8 weeks....

This reading was very interesting to me. It felt like psychology reading in a way on us as human beings. like in the formal situation part it describes our basic human feeling that are our natural animal instinct. I did like how it ended talking about the film maker finding a hidden world with in his film I think alot of us do that not only when making a film but when watching we immersed ourself into a film or even reading a book we sometimes feel like we become the main character. over all I enjoyed this reading. I hope every one had a good spring break!

                       Cat I saw on the Great Wall of China!...... it didn't like humans though... 

week 8

I really liked this reading so I created my own response by quoting the text.

"As human beings we find ourselves in a strange situation.

We have the same basic qualities, problems, ernotions,

and interests that animals have: we experience

danger and often need to defend ourselves, we need to

eat and sleep, we feel anger and tenderness, and we

reproduce. At the same time we also have the ability to

observe this entire experience". "The temperature is at 

least reasonable, and we have the freedom to walk around 

and look at things. At times we feel alone; we desire, we fall

in love." "Yet we didn't make up any of these possibilities." 

"We did not make up our emotions. We did not make up the 

fact that we find things beautiful or that people fall in love.

After all, I don't even know how I move my hand or turn my 

head. I don't even know how I'm speaking. All I know is that 

I can participate in this situation." "With humility, we can 

perform an act of alchemy and transform what might feel 

like leaden claustrophobia into an expression of openness 

and clarity" "I realized" "there" "is" "something" "beyond
its intellectual or narrative content". "I began to become
more sensitive to these" "experiences and the qualities"
"that might produce health" "and" "possibly extend to
another media." "We view films in the context of darkness."
"This situation is a metaphor for the nature of our own vision."
 "it can be a way of approaching and manifesting the
ineffable"- "it penetrates to the very core of our being,
and vibrates in a way that is close to this core."
"Existence and nonexistence alternate at an
extremely fast speed". "This intermittence is part of our 

daily experience". "The nature of our life" "is" "truly

disturbing".

dorsky

In the reading, Dorsky is stating that cinema is religion and relates both together. He says that there is an entire process behind what the cinema, not only the film but the area and feeling and all the people involved that help produce an alchemy. He goes into the post-film experience and how that helps create a certain feeling after a film. This vulnerability or invulnerability helped the film and showed that people all experiencing the same thing can have opposite or feel the same depending on how they interpreted the film. i like the idea of interpreting and trying to find out the effects of post-film experience, i had never thought about analyzing peoples reactions after films, and i like him talking about "no" time. The "no" time is when during relative time, we as human stop it by not having an interactions with the physical world around us, and try to almost pause time until the event is over. It is a cool realization and i would like to explore it because it was never brought to my attention until now.

Influence

He tries to make an emphasis that the human body and the film are alike. I didn’t fully understood it, but he says that “we are both appreciators and victims of material existence”. That the body and film, both touch, expedient, and desire. I took an interest in his idea that “we might think that all this is our own discovery, that we are actually responsible for all this. Yet we did not make up any of these possibilities… We did not make up our emotions”. As a machine of ideas, we think that most of our ideas are new, twisted, or unimaginable. In most of the cases, more than we want them to be, have already being done. We, as avant-garde, did not invented the warm water. To touch and twist, or modernize, it can change an old idea to new. However, we should have always in mind that “The filmmaker seeks the safety net of an idea, or something to accomplish that is already known.” Don’t be afraid, there will always be somebody out there that will get it and like it.

As I read, I got his point, but what happens when I change it a little. He was explaining about Voyage to Italy, he says that “these two people are stuck, each in their own view of life and their view of each other”. What would happen if he change his sentence about the couple and about each other, and use the producers (directors, cast, and everyone) and the audience? Both are stuck in the entertainment desire, the producers with an idea of what the audience wants and their lives, while the audience is expecting maybe cheesy film and have their own view of the other. At the very end, the relation between the producers and the audience is forever changing, “they snap at one another to the point of absolute impasse, until there's no way out except through divorce or renunciation”. Some audience and producers will give up on each other.

I will agree that film, television, radio, mass media and communication, and all of them, of course that changes our lives, so it does not surprise me that in his case “everyone was completely accessible and vulnerable to one another, looking at each other, all strangers”. Does anybody remembers what Wall-E did to the audience? People suddenly started to recycle, be green, and environmental. Influence is everything and will always be everything.

Dorsky

Dorsky pinpoints what I have found to be evident of great artworks regardless of media: transformative power.

"When film does this, when it subverts our absorption in the temporal and reveals the depths of our own reality, it opens us to a fuller sense of ourselves and our world."

Perhaps cinema is more visceral than other art forms because it demands a specific amount of time from the viewer as well as presenting both a visual and audio experience. Also, the combination of projected light in a dark room makes it easy for us to become enveloped in the action. Now compare this to a room of brightly lit paintings hung on white walls—it's a completely different kind of event. In the gallery or the museum setting, we are able to choose our route and hover at a piece as long was we desire. In the exhibition space, I would argue that it's more difficult to have an immersive experience; or at least, it takes a different kind of mental preparedness. With cinema or TV it can be as if we get helplessly sucked in. This sort of brainwashing can happen with religion too, but that's besides the point Dorsky is trying to make. He is more concerned with the metaphysical.

Dorsky reminds me of Joseph Campbell, who was a mythologist and quite the philosopher too. Here are some quotes:

"The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant."

"Poets and artists who speak of the mystery are rare."

"A real artist is the one who has learned to recognize and to render the 'radiance' of all things as an epiphany or showing forth of the truth."

"What the artist must render is a living moment somehow, a living moment actually in action or an inward experience."

"One looks, looks long, and the world comes in."

Perception becomes the key player in all of this. If we are open enough to take the journey to have an experience with art, then transformation, awe, and evocation of spirit can happen; but still, the experience relies on the artwork's ability to communicate, and so it works both ways between the viewer and the artwork. As with anything, some will "get it" and some won't, but it's likely that when most get it, there's really something to it! Hurray for the Beatles!

" 'no' times", like the present

Conceptualizing your skull as a theater.
Conceptualizing your skull as a church.

These are interesting experiences which can illuminate the process of video making for us today.

If we address the existence within our own experience and the inescapability from it, we can conceptualize the importance of video making.
The expression of viewing within the current understanding of vision then becomes our responsibility.
How do we understand sight in 2014?
Our eyes have mechanical and biological function, but what we see is increasingly fragmented, fast paced, overlapped, moving and impermanent.
We have made attempts in portraying 3-D vision, but how can we expand that cinematic experience to be as immersive as the visual experiences we are accustomed to?

The present solution I have found over the break in movie making are:

"Blue is the Warmest Color" - Abdellatif Kechiche

"Nymph()maniac" - Lars Van Trier

Although these are prime examples of creativity, they are not the "video art" that we have been taught to acknowledge. (they are cinematic, highly acknowledged, you sit, you stare, you leave. These are films. Emotionally captivating, but not-so-much physically (aside from sexually). I watched them on my laptop-- how can we address this mode of viewing?)
Perhaps the solution to expressing the contemporary self requires a more immersive experience of the moving image.
The viewer must acknowledge their presence within the space to fully experience it.
As per the reading suggests, there's an awareness required to not be overly "solid" and leave breathing room for the viewer.
perhaps a closer answer is this:

 https://vimeo.com/56893066 << "High Maintenance" (hilarious vimeo youtube series)

Even still, we are vieweing on-screen. Where else can we go?
I'd give examples, but it's spring break, so make them yourself!

Devotion to Cinema as Devotion to Religion

In Devotional Cinema, Dorsky compared all of the devotion of an organized religion to that of the cinema. His reasoning for this is that film has grown in such power that it may equal the power of religion, in the sense that it could completely change the reality of a person upon walking out of a theatre, for example.

For all this power that he stated the theatre has I must agree that it does have a great deal of power of people. They are pulled into all of the worlds and realms that the cinema creates, giving them nothing more to focus on afterwords. Even the grandiosity of it all seems to create a cathedral like air. This I wonder, if the the film industry should be more carful with what they put out than what it makes at the box. It seems that something to say is still bigger than the money behind it.