tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972321677173963357.post2876362376839219455..comments2023-10-30T11:12:12.313-04:00Comments on Gen X Video Blog: Maggie 2010: By Brakhagecjbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10564424188246226928noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972321677173963357.post-73391057221017180212010-06-18T20:31:22.395-04:002010-06-18T20:31:22.395-04:00Dear Maggie:
Thank you for your detailed thoughtfu...Dear Maggie:<br />Thank you for your detailed thoughtful reply.<br /><br />I''m giving the game away when I say that I had seen some Brakhage for the first time, in (gasp) 1970 and totally been able to connect to it. (I was 17 at the time) <br /><br />I had in terms of my own education at the time, zero art history and almost zero twentieth century American poetry of the Pound, Williams, Olson, Creeley etc. tradition that had so much of an impact on Brakhage. <br />In 1971-72 I had the astonishing good fortune (life changing for me really, nothing less melodramatic will do) to participate in a small seminar P. Adams Sitney gave at Bard College where I was a sophomore, in which he laid out his fundamental ideas about Brakhage. Luckily, in that particular iteration, Sitney was also working through his own complicated indebtedness to the literary critic/professor Harold Bloom (who had yet to publish anything really important yet but with whom Sitney had a close link)--in any case, Sitney "read" Brakhage in connection with Wallace Stevens--and this time I was ready. I was reading Stevens on my own for the first time at that time and the top of my head was coming off from a completely different place. The work opened up and I not only came to admire it enormously, but to learn some painful lessons about needing a certain kind of preparation in order for some work to be adequately appreciated.<br /><br />Sitney used a particular phrase to describe the framework of short lyrics by Brakhage, principally Riddle of Lumen, Siriius Remembered and The Dead (a phrase he derived from reading Stevens) he suggested that Brakhage replaced narrative causality with a poetic process whereby the film --like a Stevens poem-- "tested an image..." presenting a succession of test cases examining whether or not an image could be commensurate with cognitive-emotional experiences it sought to represent. Suddenly the films made sense. <br /><br />This notion of a visual structure that involves a subtly systematic "testing" of an image, has kept on reverberating for me for almost 40 years as a way of describing what difficult original fimmakers of all kinds are doing, not just Brakhage. (the notion works I believe fairy obviously, for the lyric cinema of Malick and in a different way the analytic cinema of Godard) So you could say in this case for me, an academic's descriptive vocabulary became a foundational first experience.<br /><br />This is more convoluted autobiography than I'm sure you wanted to hear. The question of how why and when any of us have got the context to read --or not be able to read--demanding original work is a mysterious and vexing one. Context is a disconcertingly <br />strong factor in anyone's response to anything (anyone whose watched their own reactions to new work, manically ebb and flow during a film festival's highs and lows, has an obvious and emphatic experience of this). I do think that it is one of the strange disconcerting parts of "learning" demanding new work ithat one has to either subsequently or retroactively create discover previous "foundational" experiences if it's going to make sense. <br /><br /> The more you have the capacity to internalize something new the more enigmatically enough, your past changes.<br /><br />any way, thanks again for your clarification and thoughts.<br /><br />best,<br />LG<br />breathinc@mac.comLarry Grosshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00365907228516281330noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972321677173963357.post-85521834798513325242010-06-18T19:42:41.687-04:002010-06-18T19:42:41.687-04:00Dear Larry,
Thank you for your response. I am sor...Dear Larry,<br /><br />Thank you for your response. I am sorry my original post was interpreted as a denigration of film studies to your eyes, but I feel you are responding to an entirely different sense of how the film studies curriculum intersects with this post.<br /><br />You speak from the vantage point of excellent academic discourse emerging around Brakhage, and I wholeheartedly agree that this enlightened discourse not only exists but also thrives. The only mention I made specifically to film analysis in a negative light was the attempt of general <i>reviewers</i> to make sense of his collections. I do not consider this at all in the same class of rigourous peer-reviewed academic analysis, and thought as much would be clear simply in my use of the word "review" in the original post, in conjunction with the nature of both this blog as a whole and the discrete instances of other film reviews therein. Perhaps I was mistaken in that assumption; or perhaps my review was such that you perceived it to rise above the normal range for film review, and so entered into that higher critical discourse unbeknownst to its creator (in which case, I am flattered, and will remain mindful of that possibility in future film response on this site).<br /><br />What my opening comparative was instead meant to invoke was the very common experience (perhaps more readily recalled by persons in closer proximity to their own formal educations) of tiring of a work, retaliating against the acclaimed genius of a work, or ultimately finding a work too rudimentary simply as a consequence of the imposed intensity of close study that emerges in academic environments. This happens with works of literature, it happens with philosophical and behavioural-based quandaries, it happens with political theory treatises and policy silos. In my experience, as well as in the observation of others who from time to time also find themselves reactive to an object of study solely due to their regular proximity to the work in question, the best medicine for this common happenstance is often preventative: to have had one's own, distinct experience set with the material prior to its manifestation in a classroom setting. There is, however, a considerable Catch-22 afoot here, which essentially reduces to the realization that one cannot mandate personal experience. As such, considerable luck of the draw is involved in the selection by any individual of material for personal, experiential pleasure that may later fall in the purview of a formal curriculum. And that sense of luck, of good fortune, was precisely the sentiment I came away with when viewing <i>By Brakhage</i>: by engaging first with the work on an experiential level, I now feel better protected against the aforementioned, exceptionally common consequence of good, close analysis of a work.<br /><br />I sincerely hope this better clarifies the stance with which I engaged the act of reviewing <i>By Brakhage</i>. I am most assuredly not anti-academic, and absolutely believe in the ability of film studies courses to, as you say, "enhance appreciation of cinematic aesthetics" -- but it's precisely the nature of that term, "enhancement," which, by implying a pre-existing state of film awareness that can then <i>be</i> enhanced in formal study, makes me exceedingly partial towards valuing in turn the good fortune (when it strikes!) of having a foundational first experience of a new work or aesthetic outlook that is entirely one's own.<br /><br />Best wishes,<br /><br />Maggie ClarkMLClarkhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01341888699787827333noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972321677173963357.post-50378280855396729742010-06-15T04:45:15.721-04:002010-06-15T04:45:15.721-04:00Dear Maggie:
Thank you for the many perceptive com...Dear Maggie:<br />Thank you for the many perceptive comments in this post on Brakhage's films. But your condescending denigration of academic film-studies and its presumed incapacity to enhance appreciation of cinema aesthetics misses the mark badly, especially in regard to Brakhage. Starting with P. Adams Sitney's magnificent Visionary Film, Brakhage's enterprise has been the object of an exceptional amount of brilliant description and analysis,by a succession of academically trained/ informed writers, including Annette Michelson, Paul Arthur and Fred Camper. And those are only the three best I can name off hand after Sitney. Indeed, I can think of few film makers in film history who have received so much significant and useful academic attention, analysis and description. Are there film-makers out there that the academy has distorted/and or gotten wrong: Absolutely! But Brakhage surely doesn't happen to have been one of them. It's wonderful that you got to your delicate perceptoin of Brakhage through your own self-created route of reading and study--to each their own route to aesthetic bliss! But don't shut down the possibility that others reading and appreciating your post, might benefit from others whose method and background are different.<br /><br />Yours,<br />Larry Gross<br />Breathinc@mac.comLarry Grosshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00365907228516281330noreply@blogger.com