Weiss and Marker

My two favorite films from last weeks screenings were Studie II: Hallucinationer and La Jetee (which I believe means the pier in French?) I was interested in how both pieces created film art using still (or mostly still) images, since most avant-garde film makers have been trying to make their films about movement. Studie II was perplexing because of its confusing (and slightly disturbing) sense of space. The figures Weiss created in the film were composed of two or three different people from both sexes from various angles and distances from the camera. While you were looking at a few well placed people, it looked like you were seeing one misshapen and ill proportioned induvidual. One image that sticks out to me in particular is the one where a huge head with an even bigger arm is cutting invisable food on a plate using two different sized hands. Because the frame was held still for so long, I was forced to take in and examine every inch very carefully. I supose the intent was to create the illusion of hallucination through film; its sort of weird that Weiss chose to do that with a series of static frames instead of a fast moving erratic series of lots and lots of distorted images. (Thats probably what I would've done) Perhaps it was done that way to make sure that the images stayed with you after the film was shown, so that the "hallucinations" lasted.