I also finished the reading of <From metaphors on vision> before the reading adjustment was made, and I was impressed by several points the author made.

Brakhage first explains that our eyes are always moving, scanning in response to all visual stimuli, and that we are not only influenced by the visual phenomenon, but vision never stops even when we dream or close our eyes, though now the visual understanding is almost abandoned by people, directing to the importance of visual understanding. Like the two required readings we read, Brakhage also expresses his contempt towards the linguistic and conceptual confines of vision, towards the conventional labels of signification, by listing out different limitations of machinary. He calls for, instead of describing a thing with a name, it’s better to depict an image in its natural richness and ambiguity. He strongly criticized that nowadays, few artists continue visual perception and transform their inspirations into cinematic experiences, which our human eye’s capacity of imagining are bended and blocked by the camera eye somehow. The “absolute realism” of the motion picture image is a human invention coming from our illusions and spiritual experiences, and that’s what makes cinema attractive. In other words, he repudiated all the dominant categories of cinematic poetics—shots, montage, scripts, sound, plot, actors, mise-en-scène, depth of field, lenses, but put all emphasis on the language. He urges filmmakers to abandon the classical optical and mechanical norms in order to “approximate their idiosyncratic visual experiences”.