Category: Viewer

Week 12: Viewer Response

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My experience of viewing Vertical Roll (Joan Jonas, 1972) was certainly a complicated one. The persistent sound of metal tapping, spanning a daunting 18 minutes, not only constantly diverted my attention from the visual but also stirred a sense of irritation in my mind. Jonas’s use of this sound, as I interpret it, follows a similar approach to Buñuel’s famous eye-slicing scene in Un Chien Andalou (Buñuel & Dali, 1929). It presents a challenge and even a taunt to the audience while implicitly underscoring that the work is not designed solely for entertainment. As the film commences, we observe images of a woman emerging in the vertical direction, coming closer and then away from the screen. This design not only echoes the film’s title but, more significantly, emulates the operation of a film projector. Given the era when the work was created, it is reasonable to deduce that Jonas intentionally made this choice to illustrate that video art, as an emerging art form, held a broader potential compared to film as it could produce a similar outcome with greater ease. Another piece of evidence supporting this notion is that each segment of the sections in which the motion of the feet and legs of the woman is captured is a dynamic video sequence rather than a static photo as in traditional film projection. Therefore, the audience is offered a series of moving videos instead of images.

As the film proceeds to its end, a woman enters the screen, disregarding and disrupting the projection-like framework. Slowly, she turns her face to look directly at the audience which shatters the fourth wall. After maintaining this gaze for a while, she slowly departs from the screen along with the vertical motion of the background frame. This design distinctly ends the resemblance between this video and a traditional film projection, serving as a vivid reminder to the audience that they are engaging with a completely new medium that can offer diverse presentation forms.

My questions for this work are:

  • First and foremost, what is this video about? Is the woman who appears at the end the same individual as the subject of the video?
  • How can we interpret the breaking of the fourth wall in the final scene?

Week 11 Viewer Post

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Global Groove:

“This is a glimpse of the video landscape of tomorrow, when you will be able to switch to any TV station on the earth, and TV guide will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book.”

What follows this sentence is a video of woman dancing dressed in fashion of the time the film came out. The image has been altered with electronic methods I am not familiar with.

What follows the dancing are television clips or other videos with celebrities in them. I believe this urges us to reflect on the presence of media in our lives (of course, when this film came out it was still in the 70s in last century). I am not an expert on the female music performer, but I do connect Allen Ginsberg with the hippie movement that is in its prosperity then, and his relationship with the Beat Generation. When audiences watch this video now, this information might not be immediate to people who are not acquainted with this culture, but at the time, it should be obvious. I assume it is the same reason why John Cage appears in the film as well — public figures on media platforms, delivered by the medium of a video.

       I have some reflection on the film’s name: Global Groove. “Groove” is a term specifically associated with African American music, but the adjective “global” is added before it. It might indicate the period in which the film is made is a time of globalization. To state that, there are clips of performances derived from different cultures juxtaposed together. The video itself is also a manifestation of how technology connects people of different races, from different places, and with different believes, together.

       Anyways, the whole film is a mashup of all sorts of videos. I guess that is also one of the reasons it is called “video art”.

Above are unfortunately all I can interpret from this film.

Questions I have:

1, The clips selected must have some significance. Two are music performers, one is a literature representative. They all appear in the same film. What does that mean?

2, What is the relationship of this film with commercials?

Week 9 Viewing Post

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Peyote Queen (de Hirsch, 1965) was a wild viewing experience full of psychedelic animations and kaleidoscopic images. In the flashing, multi-colored drawings over black that occur forty seconds into the film, there are the symbols of male (♂) and female (♀), along with other undefinable images. When the split screen shots begin, we are treated to a barrage of abstract, kaleidoscopic images of varying colors, most prominently red and yellow. Two minutes and seventeen seconds into the film, de Hirsch finally gives viewers a decipherable image, seemingly a woman’s breast, but even this definable feature is still abstracted into a kaleidoscopic form. Shortly after, there is a stark music change, jumping from an intense drum beat to an upbeat tune (3:07). With this shift in sound, de Hirsch presents us with colorful, flashing drawings of lips, flowers, eyes, breasts, and a clock, just to name a few. However, this upbeat section is short-lived, as we once again return to the intense drum beats over abstract drawings and kaleidoscopic images. The final two minutes are by far the most abstract, presenting us with blurry, kaleidoscopic shots of indecipherable objects. I don’t know if there is any concrete meaning to the film, but it seems de Hirsch sought to give viewers an experience of sensory confusion, ultimately attempting to make us comfortable with viewing something we can’t understand in words. The use of symbols in the film might relate to the idea of how humans interpret arbitrary signs into certain meanings, and it is interesting to note that the upbeat music plays over the section in which these decipherable symbols appear. When the intense drum beat is playing, the images are much more abstract, possibly representing how humans fear looking at things they can’t understand. I relate to this, as I at first tried to find concrete meanings in the abstract images of Peyote Queen. However, by the end of de Hirsch’s film, I found that I had accepted the incomprehensibility of the images and simply appreciated the abstractions on-screen. Do you think the drawings of lips, flowers, eyes, etc. serve any deeper meaning in de Hirsch’s film? 

Samadhi (Belson, 1967) was an entrancing film of celestial-like imagery that felt incredibly grand in scale. What fascinated me most was the fact that I could not once decipher any of the images I was seeing or figure out how Belson created/filmed them. It is interesting to consider that Belson’s film was influenced by his experiences with yoga and Buddhism. While I don’t have much knowledge or experience in either of these fields, I would describe the vibe/feeling of watching Samadhi as meditative and can understand how Belson sought to create a “trip through the chakras” (de Chardin, 172). What do you think of Belson’s statement that Samadhi is “a documentary of the human soul” (de Chardin, 171)?


T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (Sharits, 1969) was a challenging film that toyed with my aural and visual perceptions. The film primarily consists of four rapidly shifting shots: a man holding scissors to his tongue, a hand over the man’s mouth, a close-up of an eyeball surgery, and a close-up of genitalia. Throughout the entire runtime, a voice repeats the word “destroy,” but the word quickly becomes abstracted in the mind of the viewer through its rapid repetition. By the end of the film, “destroy” had morphed into “this straw,” “distraught,” “his story,” and numerous other sounds in my mind. After our screening, Professor Zinman mentioned that this was an anti-war film. While I don’t completely grasp the connection, it might have something to do with the idea of how someone’s mind can be manipulated into holding certain meanings. Through the repetition of the word “destroy” combined with flashing imagery, my brain conjured up different words and sounds even though no other words are spoken in the film. This might show the power that the presentation of words and images has in shaping a person’s perception, relating to a country’s indoctrination of its soldiers into blindly fighting for their side. What do you think the images of the film have to do with the anti-war message?

Week 6: Viewer Blogging

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Prelude: Dog Star Man (Stan Brakhage, 1961, USA)

Viewing Dog Star Man was quite an intriguing experience as I observed myself transition from complete confusion to a gradual appreciation as I shifted my focus from making meanings out of each frame to the extensiveness of the visual elements of this film. The film is heavily edited at an extremely rapid pace, making it free from the confines of traditional narrative cinema. Almost every frame is constructed with superimposition so viewers are saturated with massive information at all times. Such a design conjures a sense of hallucination, chaos, and enigma. While I was not able to identify a coherent logic throughout the piece, certain intentional repetitions in the content were rather apparent. First and the most obvious one, the images of the moon and the sun (3:10-3:14, 5:09-5:12, 7:42-7:44) which directly correspond to the theme star from its title. Secondly, the footage of the forest (11:49-12:04) which is often distorted and diluted in color. Third, a bloody, pulsating heart (14:31-14:34). Lastly, the nude female body (10:41). In addition, Brakhage also included hand-painted, tinted shapes and lines that almost served as the transition between these diverse elements.  

My questions for this piece are:

  • While the film seemed to exhibit a natural, rural atmosphere, Brakhage included footage of traffic from 10:03-10:10. What would be his purpose in doing so?
  • Why would Brakhage maintain such a rapid pace in the film? Is this a deliberate attempt to disrupt the audience’s experience in a similar manner to Dali and Bunuel’s eye-slicing scene in Un Chien Andalou?
  • What message or emotion was Brakhage aiming to convey through his unconventional approach? Does the film have/convey meanings?

Fuses (Carolee Schneemann, 1964-67, USA)

Fuses by Schneemann is an autobiographical film that captures the intimate sexual relationship between the director and her husband. Under its boldness in the content selection back in the 1960s, Schneemann aimed to break the long-existing image of women as sexualized, voyeuristic objects subjected to the male gaze in mainstream cinema by “position(ing) herself ‘not as sex object, but as willed and erotic subject, commanding her own image’” (MacDonald, 2). Her dual identities as both the subject of the film as well as the filmmaker empower her to deliberately present her body in a way that conveys her sexuality, desire, and euphoria instead of merely showing her sensuality to please the audience. In a similar manner, Schneemann extensively applied superimposition throughout the film: while the viewers are shown footage of Schneemann and her husband having sex, it is often veiled with other materials, thus cutting off the voyeuristic pleasure. Moreover, many shots are arranged in a way that makes it hard for the viewer to immediately distinguish the difference between male and female bodies, which further challenges the phenomenon in mainstream cinema that only female bodies get exposed to attract attention. I personally appreciate Schneemann’s bravery in including close-ups that capture female orgasm in the film especially considering the time her work gets created. She certainly confronted the stigma of female sexual desire and unquestionably laid the foundation for feminist cinema.

My questions for this piece are:

  • Shana MacDonald in her article considered Schneemann’s cat, which constantly appeared in the film, the actual “voyeur” of the film. What would be Schneemann’s intention to cut from a sex scene to her cat? Are we as viewers seeing the film from the perspective of a cat?
  • How should we interpret the scene in which Schneemann walks toward the sea? Does the sea here have a similar significance to the sea in Meshes of the Afternoon?

Week 5 Viewer Post: Initial questions and insights of three Maya Deren films

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1, Meshes of the Afternoon

The film is a repetitive loop that happens to the main female character. We see three same females doing the same thing at one point, only in different time orders. As P. Adams Sitney states in his book Visionary, The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000 (Oxford University Press, 2002), “The transitions between cycles are subtly achieved” (Sitney, 11). A lot of match cuts, the traditional editing used by Hollywood cinema to hide the cuts, were utilized to help create a sense of continuity and repetition.

There are four major elements in this film that serve as symbols although it is still not certain to me what they symbolize. The first one is flower. What comes to mind is virginity, innocence, female beauty, and seduction. The second one is mirror. This is an easy one — self-reflection and reflection of others. Sitney claims, “Deren, with her hands lightly pressed against the window pane, embodies the reflective experience, which is emphasized by the consistent imagery of mirrors in the film” (Sitney, 11). This is a heavily reflective film, as in this scene, window is another reflective element. The third one is key. Key symbolizes the idea of leading to something. This key unlocks confusion, sex, horror, and death. Keys can not only open a door, but also close it. It symbolizes the self-entrapment. At last, the knife. It is self-defense and feminine power. It shatters the mirror.

Questions: How does the protagonist die? / Why does it mean when the key and the knife changes into each other? / Is the mirror related to Lacan’s theory? / Most importantly, what exactly does this film tries to convey, beneath the surface of a dreamy drama?

2, At Land

This film’s scene transition to allude to space change is innovative at the time. The landscape of setting transition always follows a close shot of Deren’s body part. Her feminine soft body is a contrast to the harsh landscape, the hard table, or the mysterious architecture.

She seems to me to derive from the ocean and come to land with curiosity. It is an Odyssey for her. The chessboard was the role. She rebels and breaks the rule. However, she has to return to the cycle by returning that piece she loses during her journey.

Questions: Does the chess playing of The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957) has anything to do with this film? / What does the scene transitions symbol? Is it related to nature and modern life? / Sitney mentions in his book that “No one seems to notice her” (Sitney, 18). Why is that, and what does it mean?

3, Ritual in Transfigured Time

I have no idea what this piece is about, but one element I noticed is the “stopping” of time in framed scenes that create photos. It is also an interesting frame at first when the whole screen is split in two by the wall in middle.

Questions: What do the deaths mean in this film? / What does the yarn symbolize?