Filmmaker Presentations Sep 28th, 2017

Great presentations this week! I feel as though we’re getting increasingly spikier in our experimental aesthetics, and branching off from the home-spun tenderness and grand-fatherly personality of Jonas Mekas.

Beginning with Stan I guess it takes a Stan to know one. His presentation on Brakhage did really well in focusing on his artistic charge of exploring human understanding through visual perception. From what I can see, this artistic goal can be seen throughout his decades of work. I really enjoyed the humanist and domestic feel of Window Water Baby Moving ’59, and I am definitely going to finish watching the film at my next convenience. As we have seen in Brakhage’s work, and will continue to see with the Kuchar Brothers, there is definitely this thread of domestic/home-movie filmmaking in the collective body of New York-based experimental artists. I’d be curious to know just how much of Mekas’s personal style and filmmaking philosophy influenced other avant-garde artists, or vice versa. Again, Stan had a great presentation, and I’m happy that he added an image of Brakhage painting over his film stock. This really gives us more understanding of the physical manipulation of film.  

If you couldn’t already tell from her presentation, Christian really paired well with her zany filmmaker, George Kuchar! So far, I think that she (along with Ryan’s presentation of Maya Deren) was one of the few students truly and fully engrossed with her subject filmmaker. I think that Christian and George would have made great companions had they ever met! Both vibing off of one another’s organic and often sporadic way of receiving the comedic nuances of the world around them. Even the day before her presentation, while I was stressing over compiling the camera log for Ass. 1C, Christian was sitting across from me just reeling in excitement and intrigue over the compilation text of George Kuchar lended by Pro. Kase, which she used for majority of her presentation. And with respect to our professor, I think that Shannon has done a great job of paring the interests and personalities of certain students with their respective filmmakers.

There’s definitely this creatively sarcastic, eccentric approach to his work. And even through the sheer body of films that he crafted, it is easy to see how Kuchar’s mind must’ve been constantly churning, and reaching out for new cinematic explorations and ideas. Kuchar’s seemingly endless collection of films, doodles, paintings and personal letters provide us a great outlook of a man teeming with creative impulse.