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.