Contrasting Meshes of the Afternoon and You Can Drive the Big Rigs

by Julianne Arnstein

I have seen Meshes of the Afternoon three times now, and it seems like a very easy film to make sense of. Maya Deren has clear symbolism between the key and knife and dreaming and being awake. Her film is of surrealist style, trying to tap into the unconscious mind, especially in dreams; she almost creates a narrative. Her film is also experimental in its camera movement and characters. The cameras sway with the movement of the character up the stairs and angles jaggedly upward to see into the bedroom. The characters repeat themselves in continued actions, such as chasing the cloaked figure and picking up the key, and with their bodies, such as the three Maya Derens. Deren also creates a comfortable set with a slight breeze and a homely villa, but she distorts it by adding sharp knives, keys, and mirrors, and by tipping herself (or the camera) upside down and sideways in seemingly dangerous angles.

You Can Drive the Big Rigs has a completely different feel. It is definitely an experimental film based on images and sounds and not on any type of narrative or subconscious narrative. The only continued characteristics are the sound of the beating fan, the clack of the turning clock, and the clinking of a man’s coffee cup. Leighton Pierce focuses on the images of the sticky-feeling diner with its older patrons who seem tired of life. Pierce photographs the diner as it is and presents it with no comment or change. He pieces together sound to create situations that do not exist. The viewer is not trying to figure out a point to the piece; the viewer simply watches and chuckles at the random customers caught on tape.

Deren and Pierce have created very different films, but have also managed to photograph places and situations in a very different light from the normal Hollywood style.

Worst Case Scenario

by Julianne Arnstein

I really liked this film because it was the first still image compilation I had seen where the movement was very slow. I liked the luxurious pace so I thought I would analyze this film. There are elements of conflicting motion or images put together. There is a place where it seems as though a train and a car have hit each other, there is a loud crash, and people turn and react. Then the car is removed from the frame, then the train, and we realize that these are just layered images. Our minds try to piece together a story with what we see and hear. But the people looking in one direction are pieced together in a string to make it look like they are seeing something. The car and the train were in that place at different times and our mind just puts them together because the images fit so well: they are from the same camera position and focus. The crashing sound could be from any moment in time or synthesized or not even be a car crash. But because John Smith has placed these all at the same time and in a string of events, it seems like a car and a train have crashed together. This same Kuleshov effect is achieved when there are repeated images of a deliveryman running into his car door. People seemingly turn and look while the man is continually being slammed into his opening and closing door. But some minor movements of the door and the man have been edited together to create this situation. I liked the fact that everything moved very slowly. The long pauses of images of people looking or walking around create a leisurely effect. The action speeds up sometimes but I enjoy the peaceful pauses. I think Smith is trying to say that these are normal people, but there is no reason why we should not stop to enjoy what we see. Instead of witnessing life at its regular pace, we see every detail and can enjoy it more.

monday 19 november

The goal of experimental film and perhaps all film is perceive the world in new and unexpected ways. Both Piece Touchee and Close Quarters take an intimate part of the world, both familiar and comfortable, and exult them creating new beauty and terror and awe. Martin Arnold’s Piece Touchee takes a very short clip of found footage from The Blackboard Jungle and by manipulating the movement between frames creates an elaborate dance out of a middle-aged man walking through the door, greeting his wife. The dance, however, is not an erotic one, more erratic and terrifying. The simple act of kissing his wife on the cheek becomes violently beautiful as he jerks back and forth over her head and visibly spins over her. However, the actual content is irrelevant in the face of the formal beauty that Arnold creates by manipulating this piece of found footage.

Jim Jennings similarly seeks out and evokes a deeper beauty from the quotidian not through carefully manipulated frame progression but through meditations on the composition of his apartment. Nothing appears in this film that isn’t easily recognizable and used daily. Likewise, nothing is seen outside of the world that isn’t seen through the drawn blinds. With in these parameters, Jennings uses the extreme, natural lighting, creative angles and graphic matches to turn his flat into a text for the extraordinary mundane. His solving of these limitations create brilliance: by cutting between the silhouette of a bird flying past and the cocked head of his cat he creates a subtle interaction that was most likely not there; by considering the lateral lines of his blinds as a refrain through out the film, he creates a moment of awe by rack focusing the normal shot of the blinds to see a crystal clear world through the confines of a tiny hole in one of the shades.

wednesday 14 november

Bridges Go Round, a study of the effects a soundtrack has on a film’s images, presented the same footage of a bridge in the same way altering only the soundtrack. The first presentation employed jazz improvisations that, though a 50’s film, took the mood to a 1940s noir film, as the saxaphone floated into and tangled with the wires of the bridge. The second employed early electronica. The clicks and beeps were synced with edits and various moving images that took the film into the realm of a sci-fi atmosphere or an episode of The Twilight Zone. The film itself is a montage of bridge images with color tinting. Shirley Clark, the filmmaker, took viewers through, over, across and under various bridges of New York city, in a swift but not manic journey. Water- and cityscapes were superimposed behind the bridges.

Likewise Leighton Pierce took some mundane footage of truck stop restaurants and paired it with an exquisite soundtrack that lifted the images from pedestrian to powerful. A ceiling fan is just a ceiling fan until paired with the dramatic swooshes that later accompany it. The visual style puts no interpretation on the images, they simply are. An old man stirring a cup of coffee is very unassuming until we hear the anxious clink clink clink.

Both of these films seem to draw on the Kuleshov effect in which one shot is meaningless until paired with another element (be it another shot or in this case a sound).

Experimental Film/Video of Special Interest to 116 Students

Available for check-out at the East Wing of the UWM Library/Multimedia Desk:

Alaya, Nathanial Dorsky 1976-87 / VHS
All My Life, Bruce Baillie 1966 / VHS
Ballet Mecanique, Fernand Leger 1929 / VHS
Bridges-Go-Round, Shirley Clarke 1958 / VHS
Castro Street, Bruce Baillie 1966 / VHS
Daybreak Express, D.A. Pennebaker 1958 / VHS
Deconstruction Sight, Dominic Angerame 1990 / VHS
Emak Bakia, Man Ray 1926 / VHS
Entr’acte, Rene Clair 1924 / VHS
Glimpse of the Garden, Marie Menken 1957 / VHS
Man With A Movie Camera, Dziga Vertov 1929 / VHS
Meshes of the Afternoon, Maya Deren 1943 / VHS
Mothlight, Stan Brakhage 1963 / VHS
Nocuturne, Phillip Solomon 1980 / VHS
Passage A L’Acte, Martin Arnold 1993 / VHS
Report, Bruce Conner 1963-67 / VHS
Riddle of Lumen, Stan Brakhage 1972 / VHS
Valentin de las Sierras, Bruce Baillie 1968 / VHS
Window Water Baby Moving, Stan Brakhage 1959 / VHS

List of Experimental Films/Videos Screened

Experimental Film and Video Screened in
Moving Image Meditations, Nov. 12-19th 2007

Aspect, Emily Richardson 2003
Bridges-Go-Round, Shirley Clarke 1958, (music by Teo Macero, Louis + Bebe Barron)
Castro Street, Bruce Baillie 1966
Circling the Image (on the work of James Benning), Reinhard Wulf 2004
Close Quarters, Jim Jennings 2004
Incidents from the life of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, Paul Bush 2000
Man, Road, River, Marcellus 2003
Meshes of the Afternoon, Maya Deren 1943
Piece Touchee, Martin Arnold 1989
Porter Springs 3, Henry Hill 1994
Sea Change, Joe King and Rosie Pedlow 2005
Valentin de las Sierras, Bruce Baillie 1968
Wurst Case Scenario, John Smith 2005
You Can Drive Big Rigs, Leighton Pierce 1988

Response for Wednesday Nov. 14th

Today in class we watch Maya Deren's fame Meshes of the Afternoon. A film I have seen about 5 times, but seems like a million. The first couple of viewings to me were really significant because I was trying to figure out what it was about, but the more that I watch it the more I try not to figure out what it is or what its trying to say but I appreciate it for what I think it is. Maya Deren really did something extremely different then anyone else in that specific time frame that she made this film. It is amazing to think that coming off a second world war that this film was made.
One of the things I never knew until it was mentioned in class was the talk of the soundtrack and how it came about. How Daren originally had the film silent and then the sound was added ten years later by her new husband. So the whole time I watched the film and pretended there was no sound and it felt so empty to me. To me I realized that may have been one of my favorite parts. The haunting moans and strings in the background were so drone and thematic that I couldn't picture the film without it. I think that Teiji Oto's music made the piece in my mind. That could also be because I never originally saw the piece without Oto's music. Regardless Meshes of the Afternoon is to me one of the main blueprints for surrealist film. It led the way for films like The Science of Sleep, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Without filmmakers like Daren these films wouldn't have existed.

-Chris Elkendier