Abstraction
The abstraction screening was very interesting. I've never gone out of my way to watch films like that, so it was definitely a new experience. A couple of common themes I noticed in most of them was flashing lights, quick transitions, and a general feeling of uneasiness. I feel like as humans when we find something challenging to understand or cannot make out the meaning of something, it can make us feel uncomfortable. Specifically, with this genre, I notice that a lot.
Peter Campus's Three Transitions film was one of my favorites. I'm assuming in the clip where his face is turning into his face, he is painting on green paint, which is such a creative way to use a green screen. There are so many possibilities.
I also really liked Peter Mack's animation films. In his film Composition #1 (from many sources), the audio and the visuals match up perfectly. It gives off a feeling of high energy. The colors that are used are very bright but are mixed with very dull greys. Sometimes the drawings are very child-like, and sometimes they are intensely detailed sketches. I noticed a lot of opposites colliding creating a feeling of neutrality.
Another thing that I noticed about Oscar Fischinger's Wax Experiments was that it reminded me a lot of The Rorschach Test, which is a psychological test in which subjects see inkblots and give their perceptions. It's interesting to think these sequential images were made by pushing colored wax material through a slicing machine to create random patterns. It's astonishing how far technology has come since then.
Your deep engagement in these pieces is evident, Lauren, nice job. It's tough to make sense of a process like Fischinger's, for instance, but the historical reference for abstraction is so informative to our more advanced digital processes today. It's almost humbling to imagine how tedious the work of animation was for him, while we can so much more easily sequence little bits of digital information. I completely agree that this entire topic, at times, can feel a bit alienating and difficult to grasp. There is a good lesson in how Rist handles these questions, for instance, that so much of our experience in the world is actually associative and unstructured, yet we try to impose narrative meaning onto everything. There are moments when it can be liberating, and others when it's paralyzing! Thanks also for your note about the flashing lights, very helpful to me to keep in mind.
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