Sunday, August 31, 2008
Thursday, August 28, 2008
600 or so words of you asked for it: Scratch Junkies Response
The film was fast moving and hypnogogic, it reminded me of random mental projections one experiences subtly, but won’t necessarily remember. Kind of fever dreamy. It was choppy and yet there was a flow. The images of people and tangible objects were welcome amidst the abstract forms, shapes and swirls. I thought the drum solo was a great choice to go with something manipulated frame by frame. There weren’t notes but a collection of instantaneous strikes, crashes, which went nicely with the jumpy staccato flow. Percussion is appropriate to film. Neither have notes that last, they have tiny moments in a pattern that looks/sounds like continuity.
The flame sequence was when it became vividly internal looking. It was as if one saw the flame and the mental distortions became visible, like if you were squinting, or on drugs on drugs on drugs. Associations came freely, the black and red shifts like trying to sleep on a road trip where the sun is alternately hidden by trees and burning your eyelids off.
In my limited exposure to experimental film I tend to get bored. Mothlight? Ballet Mechanique?? No thanks. But this was good. Kept my attention, provoked thought, ruminations, ponderings, daydreams. The Scratch Junkies aimed to please, not to please themselves. Or maybe they did both.
Avant-Garde film really yanks my chain, and many others when it postures as something higher than everything else. It’s not. It’s just farther out, the cutting edge and what not. While I’m very much interested in border pushing, the idea of Mothlight irks me. Its fame is disproportionate. I don’t think its Brakhage who is grinding my gears, though it might be, I haven’t heard his side of things. It’s the idea of a tiny shred of film gaining such revere, for so long, because of a conceptual innovation. Art has function. Paintings beautify a space; fashion beautifies a person; literature, theater, and film entertain, engage, and provoke thought. Where do you experience Mothlight? An experimental film class? Is that it? My problem with Mothlight might not be valid. I realize that my trifle with this film stems from previous expectations of what film and art can and should be, and that these expectations have been anticipated by this filmmaker and others. My consciousness of this makes me want to be more open minded and yet my qualms are somewhat unsatisfactorily resolved. Who watches Mothlight and is upset when it is over? Who owns the DVD and complains when he loses it? How? Why? I just don’t have the understanding of the guttural umph of that film, the part that would justify it’s fame. Maybe I’m just not interested in art that doesn’t entertain. I’m all for the moths, I just wish they were more exciting. The Scratch Junkies weren’t boring. Come on Stan Brakhage, thy lord protector of thy avant-garde, why can’t you be more like the scratch junkies?
I’d like to learn more about this disjuncture. The big brains, old schools and college professors tend to think a certain way about these things. Why is that? I can respect experience, and readily believe in the superior knowledge of the filmic elite of myself, a trifling knave. Yet, is it hegemony? An outdated hierarchy? That was my theory in sound film. I’ve had similar rants with only myself as my witness against the omnipresence of Citizen Kane in intro film courses. I have a persistent hunch that one mustn’t believe the hype.
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