Lalala

Avant-garde avant-garde avant-garde cinema. Finally. Like everyone else has said thus far, I left the viewing room last Thursday feeling as though we had finally explored some true, classic avant-garde films. Each of these movies blew my mind in a different way and I am so excited to know that we are reaching the crux of the course.

I am still upset to see that people are still genuinely unnerved by Prof. Langston's assertion that simple movement yields complex emotion. I do not necessarily want to speak for him, but I am pretty certain that he did not literally mean that acts of motion underlie human feeling. I mentioned my theory in class, but I am not sure if it was coherent. I think it is arguable that Ruttmann, Richter, and Eggeling were simply aware of subtle influences that the pairing of form and movement can have on the human psyche. They were able to use these common archetypes of movement and emotion to hopefully pioneer a new sense of expression and evocation from film. Sure, we may not have registered the process, but if we collected some sort of meaning from the film then the effects are still valid.

I planned to comment on the film Mechanical Ballet in my post for this week, but Seannie captured it perfectly. Thank you for loving it as much as I did. I fell in love with the simple aesthetics of the film, especially the classic beauty that the cinematography portrayed in the woman.