Intermittent Mechanism

Manon Piernot

The following films explore the disappearance of nature and the taking over of the natural world by humans. Architectural kaleidoscope films show images of industrialized cities and portray them as somewhat dangerous and sinister. In Deborah Stratman’s film Energy Country, she shows energy companies in Texas fenced off with warning signs as eerie music plays in the background. Images of industrial buildings letting out smoke into the atmosphere feels toxic and unnatural. The mood of this film is rather melancholic. The point of these films seems to be exposing what mankind has done to our Earth. Bruce Baillie’s Castro Street shows scenes of flower fields interrupted by a train making loud industrial sounds. It feels unnatural to simply look at the train going through the field as an aesthetic choice, it instead gives off the impression that the train is disturbing this natural scenery.

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JB Fry

The avant-garde, experimental films of the late 1960s put their audience in the darkness of the theater with radical images and speculative subjects. The viewers were left to wonder “What am I watching,” “Why is this happening,” and ultimately “What went wrong?” Which is the same question that Blonde Cobra presents at the end of its duration. Naturally, we question the intentions of artists in this movement. Blonde Cobra flaunts its awareness of failure to unravel film and identity. It reminds us the world is not a spectacle easily observed but a reminder that we are cinema. We are no longer bought into the heteronormative conventions in the mainstream of Hollywood. Thus we begin to realize our position as spectator in relation to what is being viewed. In the “Introduction (to Flesh Cinema)” by Ara Osterweil, we are immersed into the ideas behind Ken Jacobs’ Blonde Cobra of embracing failure and queering the image in the corporeal turn of the avant-garde.

“Failing” is pivotal in the films of the American underground cinema. “Losing, forgetting, unmaking, un­doing, unbecoming, not knowing may offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” is what Judith Halberstam has manifested in the ‘queer art of failure.’ Osterweil introduces us to the platform in which Jack Smith performs for Jacobs’ Blonde Cobra. Described as “the worst film ever made” by critic David James, Blonde Cobra is the composite of Bob Fleischner’s parody films of Blonde Venus (1932) and Cobra Woman (1944) with the narration of a live radio. Jacobs deconstructs the fictional world that lives in cinema by taking away the image, playing the audio throughout the theater opposed to speakers behind the image. The blackout of the image, a persistent feature in the film, is the instance of what could’ve been a mistake. Rather its failures are key and used to queer cinema from heteronormative commerciality that is capitalism.

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Daniel Champion

One theme that seems to have come up consistently throughout this semester, is the idea that the avant-garde film makes the viewer aware of the medium of film itself.  This quality can make a film like Stan Brakhage’s material inspired “Mothlight” modern under Greenberg’s definition of modern art that we looked at in the reading “Modern Painting.”  A realist painting tries to seduce the viewer into giving in to the illusion of the scene while a work of modern art is fully aware of it’s position as an object in a gallery.  In his article for Film Comment “Bad Movies”, J. Hoberman takes on this abstract push and pull between the modern and the classic view of art and puts these ideas into the context of mainstream film in the 20th Century.

With film, it seems, the relationship between art and reality becomes slightly more confusing than it is with painting for example, due to the nature of the medium.  With painting the original goal was to capture reality and try to render three dimensional objects on a two dimensional surface.  A film camera however, is always capturing some piece of reality, no matter what it is pointed at.  For many commercial films today, the film maker’s goal is also to capture a piece of reality, but one that is not the actual reality of the people the camera is pointed at and is instead a fictional space that is created when the people in front of the camera pretend to exist in that fictional space.

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