From: Jorge Lorenzo Flores Garza (email suppressed)
Date: Tue Mar 24 2009 - 12:41:59 PDT
This is all very interesting. I question a lot of this biased issues myself. I agree in a way with Cari. Pertaining Brakhage I think that a lot of what we appreciate from him comes basically from him saying and writing how right he was in doing work like that. And that's probably what is so great about new achievements like his, because we get to see things differently. If someone from the Hollywood tradition looks at a Brakhage film, they will most probably say that it is bad camerawork, and I mean really bad. But we can learn to appreciate it because we open up our way of seeing through the work. We can see different aspects that wouldn't be there if shot in the traditional narrative Hollywood way. That is exactly what Brakhage was after. But it is very interesting to me that in some circles or in some epochs, that was considered wrong but in others it is genius only after we learn how to see things in such a way. I am not saying that Martin's work is great, I haven't seen the piece, but I do think we can very easily have biased opinions depending on the filmmaker, especially when it comes to Brakhage and people like that. We probably appreciate her painting the way we do because we base our opinion on earlier example and she was working in a particular tradition knowned to us. Had she developed more film projects we might have come up with a way of validating it by noticing certain aspects that are explored constantly and make us look at it in a different way. But she only made one film. Had Brakhage done only one film it might have been forgotten and classified as bad work since there was no development of the aesthetic.
I guess I am not saying anything in particular, just interested in the questioning that arose from the conversations.
Jorge Lorenzo
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