golden avant-garde

Last Thursday was a strange night for me, and I'm sure I'm not alone there. Just as my eyes got used to watching the gliding, pulsing, and shifting of basic shapes for minutes upon minutes, I was faced with new challenges--like the crazy kaleidoscope repetition of Ballet Mecanique: the haunting, but oddly beautiful image of an unfolding smile framed by dark lipstick, among other things. By the time the Dulac film was over, I felt pretty violated and was pretty sure I'd lost my mind.

The film I felt the most connected to was Richter's Ghosts Before Breakfast. I found the images in Richter's 6-minute piece to at once stand out individually and to meld together to create a vivid, cohesive whole. It's the film that I remember the most, I believe because of these stark images--the hats, the barking goose, the spinning hose, the peering men. As aesthetically pleasing as this film was, I felt there was a message conveyed in it that was beyond my comprehension (perhaps having to do with the text at the beginning stating that the Nazis destroyed the sound version of the film, labeling it "degenerate art."). There was a beginning middle and end, but definitely not in the Hollywood sense. This part, I felt, conveyed a sense of Dadaism that was strongly apparent in the film--a distrust of authority and a movement against it.Though I don't think I could trace any kind of narrative for most of it, there was a distinct concept of time in Ghosts Before Breakfast that didn't exist in some of the other films we watched (even without the giant ticking clock, I think this sense of time would exist...).

As for Dali's Un Chien Andalou, I am completely lost. It was an extremely interesting (and disturbing) collection of images and scenes, but I felt pretty lost throughout it. I did find out that this film is the inspiration for a song called "Debaser" by the Pixies, who I really love. I was always wondering what they were referring to when the chorus speaks about "slicing up eyeballs..." I'm still curious about what the song and the film are actually about. Here's a video pairing the two:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOYZ_WZHt0E

Also, I'm glad we weren't warned about the eyeballs. We should learn not to let our guards down--this is what we signed up for!