Dasies is a 1966 Czechoslovak comedy-drama film written and directed by Věra Chytilová. Generally regarded as a milestone of the Nová Vlna movement. It follows two teenage girls (played by Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová), both named Marie, who engage in strange pranks.

I know the assignment was to go watch it at like a museum or a screening event but, we had a brief conversation about this film as a class and it sounded really interesting so I decided to watch it on Youtube.

according to wikipedia.com, “novatively filmed, and released two years before the Prague Spring, the film was labeled as “depicting the wanton” by the Czech authorities and banned. Director Chytilová was forbidden to work in her homeland until 1975.” This film is huge for the women empowerment movement in that it’s one of the first international films to be written, directed, and starred by women, which was unheard of at the time.

Throughout the film, the girls go on dates with various older men. In each scene, the girls cavort and eat lots of food while mocking their date, who is driven to the end of his patience, at which point the girls say that they are late for a train, and then ditch the man at the train station.

 

What resonated with me from the early stages of the film is the strong sibling dynamic these two girls have, very playful very in sync which gives it the real feel. When they go out to eat and the girl in the white dress eats like she never ate before is hilarious because she seems so out of place.

 

Throughout the film I get the vibe of a satire show on a late night, mostly because of the ridiculous scenes that appear along the film. the girls eventually go to a nightclub and cause a mini brawl. Marie II also goes to the apartment of a man who is a butterfly collector. In this scene, there are a lot of butterflies shown as still frames. The man repeatedly declares his love to Marie II, whom he calls Julie. At the end, she says that she wants to eat. In later scenes, the two girls lounge about in various rooms while listening to their suitors profess love for them over the phone.

 

While there is certainly an air of whimsy to this film, it is also made with serious themes – relative to both its origins, and to a much more far-reaching time and place. Daisies, and its creator, are major proponents of feminism; agendas clearly stated from the onset of the film. The Maries are frustrated with the labels imposed on them, being young attractive females. Remarking that society see them as “dolls,” they are forced to abide by these societal guidelines. They should not become scientists, they cannot be artists, they would never make it on their own; they must have fun while dating around, and quickly find a husband.

Constantly accosted with the knowledge that beauty and youth are fleeting , they are only told to have fun while they can, never to better themselves to ensure a brighter future. Any outburst from the duo is quickly recognized as improper: women are to speak gently and be polite, it is men who have large appetites and can speak brashly.

 

 

I saw an exhibition called Chiron by an Italian artist Adelita Husni-Bey at New Museum on April 25th. The origin of the title comes from the Greek mythological figure Chiron which evokes the notion of the wounded healer. She addresses themes such as migration and displacement. The exhibition is located at the very end of South Galleries on the first floor separated from other work by a hallway and doubled black curtains. It created an interesting feeling in myself, feeling of not knowing what’s on the other side and of finding out what’s behind the curtains. Among the three short films exhibited, I liked the one that touches on immigration reform in the United States.

The film starts with a group of young women and men, who address themselves as lawyers, discussing laws whether they are tools of the law or the law is a tool for them. The footage includes close-ups of their hands and faces and uses techniques of pulling focus and taking one shots. Its soft focus and how it adjust the focus on the subjects create a feeling the camera is floating around the room not in an intimidating or surveilling way. Gaze of the lawyers is shared among them and does not directly address the existence of the camera. Two long shots reveal that the lawyers are in a typical-looking conference room and in an office. I thought heavily relying on the close-ups and using blue lights were very productive and creative ways of shooting the space since the conference room and office has almost nothing that’s visually pleasing to look at. What’s interesting is the subjects themselves and what they are talking about. B-rolls include observational footage of the abandoned houses, the lawyers pretending like they are typing something on a computer whose screen is turned off, and experimental/performative exercise. The computer footage, I think, is a symbol of them resisting to the system but not getting any feedback as they mention how the system(the law) in the United States does not support immigration and undocumented people and they face frustration of not being able to use the law to help and protect those people. Even though I know a little about theatrical exercise and technique which cultivate body-to-body relationships and break the physical and mental barriers among people, I was not quite sure what the participants are engaging themselves into for what purpose.

In a book called the World of Creativity(Sozo no Sekai), a Japanese writer Ayako Sono talks about how artists don’t have to explain anything further than the work itself as it should tell just sufficient amount of information the audience needs. I have learned that in visual/experimental  production, we don’t necessarily explain everything. However, reading the exhibit’s explanation really contextualized what I just watched. I learned that the film features members of an non-profit organization UnLocal that provides free legal representation to undocumented immigrants in New York City. Husni-Bey conducted a series of workshops there throughout last fall to address oppression, emotional depletion, and the psychological consequences of immigration enforcement. The participants of Husni-Bey’s workshop use theater and creative writing as means to de-individualize pain and to understand its political ramification.   

If I didn’t see the explanation board which I red after watching the piece, how much story and information I could get out from the artifice itself? The film is truly significant and experimental as it does not employ a conventional interview style, but it is still crucial to consider what details a filmmaker includes and omits in her/his work to effectively tell a story while maintaining aesthetic visual presentations.

I went to see Enthusiasm or Symphony of the Donbass an experimental film by Dziga Vertov. I saw this screening at the Anthology Film Archive downtown, it was my first time attending a screening there and it was a great experience. The film begins with a young woman sitting outside at a table. She puts on headphones and then starts adjusting dials on a radio. It then cuts to shots of people praying in a village square. Vertov shows many different people kneeling and bowing their heads at the feet of a statue of Christ, after they finish their prayers they are shown kissing both of the icons feet. These clips are intercut with shots of Russian architecture, crosses, more statues of Christ, as well as alcoholics drinking and passed out in the square. I took this as a statement about loss of innocence. Following these shots are clips of groups of people parading through the streets and tearing down a church. They start to disassemble the church, taking out all of the religious paraphernalia and ripping down the crosses on the top of the steeples. The rest of the film shows different coal factories and factory workers doing endless amounts of labor, and then farm workers also working the fields. The reason this film is considered experimental is because it is the first film that Vertov created with sound. It is considered a symphony because the sounds of the rallies, workers, chants, and that of the coal factories and machine sounds create this almost rhythmic musical essence. What I noticed is that the sounds do not sync up with what is being displayed visually. This was somewhat jarring at first but then became hypnotizing. To me it seemed that the audio could be considered a character of the film on its own. This  I believe was Vertov’s intention.

After reading a description of the intention of the film I realized that some of my assumptions were correct. Vertov intentionally did not sync the score of the film with the visual video aspect. What I found out was that the film was created to promote and celebrate Stalin’s Five Year Plan, and the Donbass region was a sort of epicenter of the plan. Due to the large amount of coal in the region it contained a lot of this natural resource. The Five Year Plan helped this region attain its full form of industrialization. During the film,  there is an announcement made which states that the Five-Year Plan was completed in four years, which I did not catch while watching the film due to the fact that I do not speak Russian. This was possible because of the efforts of the workers, with their enthusiasm and dedication. Despite their completion of the Plan, they continue working, and the cycle never ends. Ending the film with showing the farm and field workers is a way of juxtaposing the old way of life to the new industrialized way of life that socialism formed. This specifically shows how the old way has been formally superseded by the industrialized and socialist world. In very thought out way, Vertov juxtaposed images of the role of religion and the field workers of the past with images of industry, production, and mechanization.

Towards the end of last week I was able to visit the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Whitney has been showcasing Andy Warhol’s art throughout the museum since the start of November 2018, through March 31, 2019. I have visited the Whitney in the beginning of December and haven’t visited since. They added a miniature screening theater to showcase his short experimental work. The Whitney had already used an entire floor to show most of his videos on TVs and projectors, this addition was held in the middle of other works of art besides just video.

I sat down to watch two different pieces with the same concept behind them I would say. Both pieces were about eight and a half minutes long and both of these videos were screen tests. Andy Warhol encouraged the subjects to follow strict rules, like to sit as still as possible without blinking, for the whole roll which was a little over three minutes. I only learned that Warhol wanted his subjects to do this after my viewing, this fact did make the pieces make a little more sense. The subjects that I sat and watched were Ethel Scull and Edie Sedwick. Ethel Scull was first on the screen and she was sat directly in front of the camera, set up for a close up shot, for the length of the roll film in the camera. At first she was opening her eyes wide and stayed sitting in the chair. After a minute or so when she began to blink she gave in a little bit and did not sit up as straight as she did in the beginning. She began to try again to keep her eyes open as long as she could, but the roll of film seemed to be longer than she expected.

At the end of each of these pieces you can tell the whole roll of film is used up because of the flare effect that happens when the roll is used up. This happens at the end of Ethell Scull’s and Edie Sedwick’s film. Edie Sedwick was trying her hardest to keep a straight face without blinking when it was her turn in front of the camera. Even though she might’ve lasted a little bit longer than Ethell Scull, after she blinked and smiled she wouldn’t try after that. She would continue to blink, but still try and stay still for the camera like Warhol wanted them to behave. She was different from the first woman Ethell Scull because she wasn’t trying to stay serious the whole time. Even though she blinked and was beginning to laugh in front of the camera, she still tried to stay still.

These short screen tests for both women interested me because it made me think why would Andy Warhol want to make films like these. It made me wonder if Warhol wanted to show how human these two women are and just like any of us they can’t stay still. He could also be demonstrating how difficult it is for people in general to keep still and people just want to keep moving. These two pieces were short, but had a lot to say in the short time that they had.

 

Time Piece is a 9 minute experimental film by Jim Henson released in 1965. It was directed, written, and produced by Jim Henson, who also stars. I watched the film at the Jim Henson exhibit in the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. The piece was shown on a small screen alongside Henson’s other experimental and mainstream work. This was one of the few pieces that was live-action, in that it didn’t involve puppetry. Most people know Jim Henson for his work on The Muppets and Sesame Street, which are positioned as cultural icons in the American media canon since the 1960s through modern times. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Henson’s creativity has been used in a more experimental way while still remaining playful, provocative, and entertaining.
 

The man goes to work, goes on dates, and lives his relatively mundane life until he is imprisoned for shooting the Mona Lisa, and escapes wearing different disguises until he is shot down by military force.s The film’s end reveals that Henson was experiencing his life condensed in the last moments before his death. The camera moves from the lifeless body to the doctor, who is revealed to be Henson, and he winks at the camera.

The piece begins with Henson at a doctors office in a hospital gown receiving what looks like a routine check up. However, the doctor comes into a problem when he cant find his heartbeat. The film then goes through a series of seemingly unrelated short shots cut together rhythmically, with brief interludes of brightly colored construction paper animation. (The film was actually not written, but each shot was fully storyboarded, which comes across in the visually striking and graphic framing, usually created to make a graphic match).

Each shot lasts only a few seconds, creating a dizzying viewing experience. The soundtrack by Don Sebesky roots the film in a consistent pulse. This is also aided by a lack of dialogue save for Henson’s few utterances of “help”. The film, although distinct from most of Henson’s other work, still very much feels like a Jim Henson project. The acting and direction feels disorienting and bizarre but humorous and relatively accessible. The film uses some visual metaphor (like the repeated shot of painting an elephant pink to represent intoxication) that creates a layer of distance between the viewer’s experience of what is actually a pretty sad life story. It seemed to have its roots in Russian montage, and at times reminded me of DIga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera.

I went to go see the films Blue God part 1 and 2 by Carl1 at Spectacle theater in Williamsburg. What first struck me was how little information there was about the film besides the trailer on the theater’s website.

The first film starts out with two school girls hanging out on a roof and talking with each other. There is atmospheric music but the dialogue is shown through text on monochrome frames like old silent movies, making it hard to know which character is talking. The lack of audible dialogue is a feature of both films, besides a scene in the second part. The two school girls talk about being tired of everyday life, finding it mundane and repetitive. They decide to run away and scenes of them walking through streets at nighttime follow until they eventually reach a beach where the first part ends on a long shot of the sky as it transitions from day to dusk.

The Second part is more abstract as it follows the school girls as they perform a ritual to summon the “Blue God” in a series of scenes. One scene features an older woman who cryptically speaks english set in a classroom where one of the school girls cuts the head off a chicken, the camera paying attention to the dripping blood. The second part of the film depicts the two school girls as they get infatuated with the indifferent and male, Blue God. There are many shots of the schools girls moving in unison. One of the school girls eventually performs a sex act with the Blue God, prompting the other girl to run to a cliff’s edge, the camera work and editing implying suicide.

After seeing the movie I was left confused about the meaning of the second part. The first was seemingly about the naivete of adolescence as the two girls seek to escape a modern world, that is in their opinion, too predictable and suffocating. After talking to my friend who I went to see the movie with the second part came to make more sense to me as he saw the films as an allegory for sexual maturity and growing up. The two girls act as representations of one person, the one who eventually commits suicide being the other’s innocence. This is apparent with the many shots of both girls moving in unison, essentially unifying them as representations of one person. The focus on the blood and the school room setting of the second part makes one think of the moment of having one’s first period. The death of innocence follows the girl’s first sexual experience, which essentially overshadows the naive and childish want for escapism that is presented in the first part.

After coming to this conclusion I came to appreciate the film a lot more, even though there is a lot of imagery and apparent symbolism that I didn’t pick up on. I was struck by the beautiful cinematography of the films; the first part features many tight shots of building walls that match the color of their surroundings and create interesting geometrical patterns in the layout of stones and tiles. The music used in the film is very atmospheric which made the whole project feel more like an art piece than a film. There are moments that dragged and felt like the creator was making them that way in order to have the film be more ‘artsty.’ Overall I enjoyed the film, I was really interested in the concept of making puberty into a surreal an metaphysical journey. As a moment that changes a person both physically and emotionally, puberty is in a way an event that feels jarring, awkward, and transformative.

When it comes to experimental cinema, I am particularly attracted to animation. Animation can be seen as the foundation on which cinema is based, and by it’s very nature allows for a reconstruction of cinema itself. If cinema or video reflects the world, animation exists outside of reality. There are no rules in animation, save for how well you can draw (or digitally sculpt), and how much patience you have.(The exception being stop-motion, which does require a connection to the world around you.) Much early animation involved playing around with moving drawings, creatively scratching the film stock, or discovering the magic of stop motion. It can be said then, that experimental animation is often about craft.
The program I attended at the Metrograph, Griffiti: Animation by George Griffin, reflects this focus on craft. The first short in the program, Rapid Transit, was done by arranging beans and other objects on a white, lit background in stop motion to create “kinetic, percussive” imagery in time with the background music. (The short was celebrating its 50th anniversary.) the second short, Trikfilm 3, alternated between a surreal hand-drawn animation and scenes of Griffin drawing the piece on a notepad in stop-motion. The stop-motion segments feature Griffin at a table drinking coffee when he decides to start the piece—creating art out of just a notepad and boredom.

One of the more interesting pieces was Flying Fur. The piece was set to the background music from the Tom and Jerry cartoon, Puttin’ on the Dog. Knowing nothing about the source of the music, Griffin animated what he thought would be happening based on the score, only finding out where it was from later. (The piece was shown as Puttin’ on the Fur, in which both the original cartoon and Griffin’s piece were shown side by side. Similarly, Ko-Ko was an an animation using cutouts, animated in rhythm with music by Charlie Parker. The piece was intended to be part of a larger project involving Parker that was never completed.
Midway through the program, there was a documentary by Griffin and DeeDee Halleck, Meadows Green, featuring the Bread and Puppet Theater, a politically radical puppet theater. It was, not surprisingly, an outsider among the rest of the shorts. In a Q&A afterwards, DeeDee claimed that it was difficult to find distribution for the piece on American television. The short simply shows the theater’s antics at their annual Bread and Puppet Circus, occasionally broken up by Griffin’s animation. One of the first questions brought up by executives at PBS was why there wasn’t a narrator, which I found quite telling about the television industry back then: even PBS wanted to play it safe. One short piece near the end, The Bather, stood out to me. The film features a live-action shot of Griffin’s wife bathing behind the shower door, as a drawing of the woman plays in the foreground. In lieu of titles, a description of the short, including plot, genre, and themes, scrolls across the screen, eventually giving the audience some context that would not be otherwise apparent.

The best piece by far, however, was Lineage. A half-hour in length, and combining various types of stop-motion with hand-drawn animation, the piece deconstructs the nature of animation itself in, as Griffin’s Vimeo page puts it, “an anti-cartoon essay on animation’s contradictory legacy: comedy and formalism.” In one part of the short, The character Griffin creates interacts with the version of itself from the previously-drawn frame of animation, before stealing scissors and cutting itself free. This character, in stop-motion, is itself shown using a hand-cranked device to create an animation with moving lines. One section of the piece involves Griffin drawing on photocopied film stock, which moves in stop-motion as he colors it in. As this scene plays, he laments that the capture of images has gone from an art to a means of profit.
I found these pieces interesting and amusing, often in equal measure. All of them and more can be found at
https://vimeo.com/geogrif.

About three weeks ago I had a chance to visit Whitney Museum of America Art. The exhibition was dedicated to a very unique and in a way weird art of Andy Warhol. There were many different paintings, pictures, caricatures and abstract drawing on display at the museum. The whole Andy Warhol exhibition occupied three floors of the museum. The only things that I felt a genuine connection with were many different photos and color swapped pictures. Than one that I really liked was a picture of Marlon Brando in his leather jacket and a bike from the movie “The Wild One”. And to be completely honest, many film that were shown on the exhibition felt bizarre. I could not concentrate on one particular film because there were so many and all of them were strange.

However, the one that strikes my memory the most is shown on a third floor and screen shows Andy Warhol eating a burger. As I stood there watching I was thinking about the thought process behind this film and I might be wrong but there was nothing special about that piece. People around me were fascinated with this piece but I kind of was not.  After that I watched some other short film which were shown on small old TVs with a dedicated headset for someone who would want to listen. These film were also very odd in a way. One showed a lady cleaning her room, the other showed two people staring and arguing with each other. I felt as if I was watching aliens on screen who try to replicate people’s behavior and interact with each other. Maybe that was the whole point after all to create a feeling of alienation to a  viewers or it might be that I did not understand something. It is hard to tell because one of my friends was definitely interested and very invested in all the art pieces. When I asked her to explain it to me, she could clearly deliver the message though.

At the end of the day,  the thing that I took away from this is that we live in a world which is too contemporary in a way that every media that we consume now is commercialized. Everything is picked out very carefully. If it is a car then it is the most luxurious car that you can find. If it is a model then it is the most stunning model on screen. If it is a sunset on a beach then it is the most breathtaking and colorful sunset. And then seeing something as simple and weird as a man sitting in a white room eating a burger, it simply does not spark the same interest and attention to it. The only thing that it does spark is a feeling of awkwardness.

This weekend, I went to the Whitney museum in the Chelsea neighborhood and observed the exhibit Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018. The exhibit was a compilation of art created by all levels of programming that were at once introduced in the Whitney at one point of time. The exhibit deals with all types of experiments and productions that people worked with in art.

One of the most notable productions was a “choose your own adventure” laser that detailed the life of a women who spent a month without leaving her home because of Agoraphobia. I found it interesting, because I had no idea what was going on, but the idea was “gimmicky” or interesting enough to keep me pressing the different options and seeing how the adventure could end until I felt like I stayed at the piece too long. The piece is surrounded by a fake living room with a really comfy couch that lets you change the menus with a DVD remote, and I felt so comfortable watching everything, I felt uncomfortable sitting for too long when other people began to gather.

Another piece, which was the star attraction of the exhibit, was a giant multi-television media which was programed to use every monitor as part of the same piece. He video switched mainly between a video of David Bowie performing a dance with a woman, a blue faced computer-generated face, and a video of a naked lady walking with funky video effects. The piece gave me different feelings, as some of the things that the televisions showed worked in unison to create a piece, while other times, it felt random. I enjoyed it when the televisions flashed in union with a Bowie Song in a sort of pseudo music video only possible with the sit up of televisions. I initially did not care for the other seemingly random stuff, but after some time to effect I find myself looking fondly at the randomness and appreciative about the work someone made to program the televisions to do them, which isn’t normal for me.

The rest of the exhibit felt like the usual. Stuff that’s almost intriguing but is so far away that I didn’t really see the beauty of it. Although the aesthetics didn’t please me, I was always intrigued to learn how the artists were able to create their work, and in learning the goal of that artists and learning the steps and work they took to get there. When it comes to programming, a thing that is often unseen questioned, it was cool to see people ask their own questions and experiment with it in both the real and virtual worlds. In the end I felt like I gained more then ever thought I would.