1. What are some characteristics of the American psychodrama in the 1940s?

The American psychodrama of the 1940’s was dominated primarily by the trance films. One well known artist was Maya Deren and her film Meshes of the Afternoon. Trance films involve the character, or protagonist, struggling with external struggles in a dreamlike state or “trance.” The camera typically does not track; rather, it pans or tilts. Because of the trance state, the films don’t follow a linear structure. Another quality involved hard and soft montage, as in Brakhage’s The Wold Shadow. In this film, through soft montage, images of trees slowly become images of abstract images.

2. What does Sitney mean by an “imagist” structure replacing narrative structure in Choreography for the Camera? For reference, you can see the film here:
http://www.ubu.com/film/deren_study-in-choreography.html

Maya Deren is noted for the “imagist” structure because she believed that a film could revolve around a single image. In this film, a dancer is this image because we see him in all different sorts of settings.

3. Respond briefly to Sitney’s reading of Ritual in Transfigured Time (27-28); Is his interpretation compatible with your experience of the film?

I was able to follow the film as he wrote about it, but the imagist symbolism was very dense according to Sitney. For instance, the statues and what they represented in history was not something I readily knew. As a result, I knew there was much more to get (like Sitney) if I was aware of such histories behind the “imagist” structure.

Sitney, “The Magus”

Paraphrase the paragraph on p. 90 that begins “The filmic dream constituted…” in your own words.

Basically, during the 1940’s Avant-Garde, filmmakers such as Deren and Anger made films in which the camera was the subject and everything in front of the camera was to be interpreted, instead of a person in front of the camera having to interpret his or her world while a camera films it. The camera is literally the eye of the filmmaker.

According to Sitney, what is the ultimate result at the end of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome? How does his reading of the film compare / contrast with your own experience of the film?

He’s redeemed, but I personally hated the film. Sitney, as always, was able to interpret several parts of the film, but upon watching it in class (before any discussion) I didn’t see any structure to it whatsoever. It was a hard watch because the music was primarily the same and all I saw was colorful, distorted images of the same thing. Apparently Sitney got more out of it.

Sitney, “The Lyrical Film”

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

The protagonist’s point of view is represented through the camera’s point of view. Therefore, the films are jarring, with many angles and colors throughout.

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.]

Brakhage explains soft montage as something becoming another thing. Sitney describes “soft” montage similarly by explaining that images similar to one another are juxtaposed to one another until one item or subject “becomes” the other. “Hard” montage involves juxtaposing images that don’t have commonalities with each other, producing a jarring effect on the viewer.

8. 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.]

Brakhage says a lot about vision. First, his concept of the untutored eye involves the assumption that most of us don’t “see” (according to him). Because we have been brought up knowing what certain objects and colors are and/or what they represent, we do not look at the world with an “untutored” eye. He asks what grass looks like to a baby unfamiliar with the color green. He makes distinctions between open-eye vision, the way our eyes operate while awake and about, and closed-eye vision, the way our eyes see the back of our eyelids and also think back on memories. Brakhage calls them “brain movies.”

Sitney, “Major Mythopoeia”

9. 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.”

Brakhage was the first to incorporate other art forms into his films. He would scratch the surface of the film on certain frames to convey a particular idea. He would put dirt, leaf particles, etc on the film stock and photograph it. These were directly related to abstract expressionism and up to this point were unique and fresh to the world of Avant-Garde filmmaking.

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, damned, and liberated. Writers like Black, Pound, Stevens, and Witman wrote about these archetypes.