Brakhage, Lyrical Film, and The Cage

Sitney, “The Lyrical Film”

1. While Brakhage’s Reflections on Black is a trance film, why does Sitney argue that it anticipates the lyrical film?

Reflections on Black anticipates the lyrical film because it shows the "visions" of a blind man. It is from the blind man's POV most of the time, therefore putting him behind the camera and letting the audience "see what he sees".

2. What are the key characteristics of the lyrical film (the first example of which was Anticipation of the Night).

3. Which filmmaker was highly influential on Brakhage’s move to lyrical film in terms of film style, and why?

Joseph Cornell was highly influential on Brackhage’s lyrical films because he was the one who first forced Brakhage to make a film without any skeletal drama and without a person as the main subject.


4. What does Sitney mean by "hard" and "soft" montage? What examples of each does he give from Anticipation of the Night? {Tricky question; read the entire passage very carefully.]

Hard montage being the juxtaposition of two completely different ideals such as day and night, while soft montage eases the viewer into the juxtapositions by creating a sort of pattern with camera movements or colors which ease the viewer into the next juxtaposition and makes it less jarring.

There is hard montage by juxtaposing children at a carnival with shots of a moon, and soft cutting with the colors of sleeping children and temple scenes with blues and yellows, moving into shots of exotic animals and more shots of the same things, but with color changes.

5. What are the characteristics of vision according to Brakhage’s revival of the Romantic dialectics of sight and imagination? [I’m not asking here about film style, I’m asking about Brakhage’s views about vision.]

He talks about how we are trained to look at things in a certain way, and he wants to try and capture the “untrained eye” and what it might see, the colors, the way it is framed, etc.


Sitney, “Major Mythopoeia”

6. Why does Sitney argue, “It was Brakhage, of all the major American avant-garde filmmakers, who first embraced the formal directives and verbal aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism.”

By covering the surface of the film with paint and scratched, he eliminated the “perfect picture” that film provides, and garnered a more expressionistic view of what was filmed.

7. What archetypes are significant motifs in Dog Star Man, and which writers in what movement are associated with these four states of existence?

Innocence, experience, rationalism, and imagination. This is associated with William Blake and the romantics.


Sitney, "The Potted Psalm"
[This is an addition to the syllabus. After reading the introductory paragraphs, focus on the discussions of The Cage and Entr'acte (p. 47-54 and The Lead Shoes (p. 68-70).]

8. According to Sitney, what stylistic techniques are used to mark perspective and subjectivity in The Cage, and why is this an important development in the American avant-garde film?

The distorted imagery of the film represents that of the perspective of “the eye” He uses other new techniques such as a spinning camera intercut with flying furniture to subvert our gravitational orientation. This is important to American avant-garde film because he breaks new ground, uses radical techniques to demonstrate Romantic ideals, something that didn’t really come about until much later.

9. For Sitney, what are the key similarities and differences between Entr'acte and The Cage?

Entr’acte is more of a satire than The Cage, but they both draw inspiration from slapstick comedy.

10. How does Peterson synthesize the seemingly incongruent suggestions of his Workshop 20 students into The Lead Shoes?

He turned their ideas into two “ballads” which become irrational and disjunctive after a period of time, and weave them together.

11. Compare your response to The Lead Shoes with the descriptions by Sitney and Parker Tyler.

I correctly assumed that the hopscotch represented something to do with the woman, but instead of a balancing act (as Sitney suggests) I felt it represented a sort of cyclical notion of doing a lot but not getting anywhere. I failed to get the Cain and Abel reference, as well as the birth/death of the scuba diver.