January 29th Class

I had come late to class this day and came in towards the end of what I think was the first film to be shown. I was pretty tired and ended up sleeping through most of the films. One I shut my eyes on purpose a couple of times before giving in to sleep because the visual was making me dizzy. There was a bunch of things moving around at once...it looked like black and white photographs of buildings...

My favorite piece was Commingled Containers. I thought the concept of putting the lens underwater was unique and made some nice visual artwork. Before I knew the lens had been underwater, I thought the work looked like clouds, bubbles, and water.

As for the readings for that week, I did not enjoy Jonas Mekas' as much. The last piece had and interesting idea of a person's skull being like a dark theater in which we view movies. Stan Brakhage's passages on the second page of our text were interesting; I particularly the first two--the one about the eye that "does not respond to the name of everything..." (like green grass) and the one about deliberately changing the film or lens to create new ways of filming.

I would say my favorite was the first reading (by Maya Deren) talking about how amateur film-makers should use their freedom to their advantage. I liked how she was talking about how to use the "movement of wind, or water, children, people, elevators, balls, etc ..." in the work and that "your mistakes will not get you fired"; this is something that college students should keep in mind as they are learning, even if they are not film majors. Amateurs don't have to worry about big budgets for their work. She also talked about how a human can make the equiment work to its full advantage.