Ghosts, lights, and confusion

Ghosts Before Breakfast or actually, ghosts before mid-day, was one of my favorite films from last Thursday, and judging from the class' comments on Tuesday seems to have been enjoyed by almost everyone. I particularly enjoyed the clock that kept advancing towards noon and gave us a sense of how much time was left before the ghosts departed. It served as a constant reminder that the nonsense would not last forever and that life would eventually return to some sense of normality. The scenes with the tie and the hats were also rather amusing in their whimsicality and frustration for the main characters. This film had some semblance of narrativity and was easy to follow and understand as well as being rather entertaining. I thoroughly enjoyed this film.

The films with the random shapes on the other hand were much more complex, even though there was less substance to them. Lichtspiel Opus, Rhythm 21, and Diagonal Symphony were all rather interesting to watch and made me wonder what the message or purpose behind them was. I enjoyed the complex shapes of the diagonal symphony as well as the cool effects in rhythm 21. The way the shapes interacted with one another was interesting to me as well as the way the movement of the shapes coincided with the music. After reading the article by Richter I began to wonder what emotions and feelings he wanted us to feel when watching his films. I didn't really perceive any real emotions or feelings when I was watching those films, and I would be interested in knowing what the directors had in mind for their audiences to feel when watching those films. Perhaps I just don't get it. I did enjoy these films however, and wouldn't mind reexamining them and trying to discover what hidden feelings lie within the movements of those rectangles.

The two longer films however merely confused the hell out of me. The Seashell and the Clergyman only made me wonder why this man wanted to strangle everyone he saw and question as to why he was so jealous of the general. I also didn't understand how he got from being a chemist to being a priest with an unhealthy appetite for murder. An Andalusian Dog disturbed me from the beginning with the eyeball scene and then continued to be unsettling as the cross dressing man on the bicycle performed his weird antics and sexually assaulted the woman who was trying to take care of him. I didn't understand either one of these films and we'll be glad to discuss them in class tomorrow.