Word 2

Personal

Main Entry:
per•son•al
Pronunciation:
\ˈpərs-nəl, ˈpər-sə-nəl\
Function:
adjective
Etymology:
Middle English, from Anglo-French personel, from Late Latin personalis, from Latin persona
Date:
14th century

1: of, relating to, or affecting a particular person : private , individual

Marlon Riggs

His self documentaries have allowed viewers to better understand the world and feelings of this African American caught in an identity struggle between his race and his sexual orientation.


Tongues Untied (1990)
















Black Is Black Ain't (1994)











Review of Black Is Black Ain't"

With BLACK IS...BLACK AIN'T, Riggs focuses attention on the "isms"that divide and separate, and challenges black people to "reconcile themselves to each other, to our differences ... We have to get over the notion that you can only be unified as a people as long as everybody agrees. You know we don't achieve freedom by those means."

For centuries American culture has stereotyped black Americans, but equally devastating have been the constraining and often contradictory definitions of "blackness" African Americans have imposed on each other. The right attire; hair from "conk" to Afro; ghetto slang or "proper" speech; "true" black religion versus the false; macho man or super woman; authentic, Afro-centric, or Euro-centric; sexuality and gender roles: Each one of these has been used as a litmus test in defining the real black man and the true black woman. But is there an "essential" black identity? Can blackness be reduced to a single acceptable set of experiences that African Americans should share or even aspire to?

BLACK IS...BLACK AIN'T forcefully confronts the identification of blackness with a hyper-masculinity born of the '60s Black Power movement. Colorism, the black church, the Civil Rights movement, family -- all continue to be defining factors in today's black communities. BLACK IS...BLACK AIN'T brings it all to the table, knowing, as Riggs says, that "there's a cure for what ails us as a people, and that is for us to talk to each other. We've got to start talking about the ways in which we hurt each other ... because nobody can unload the pain or the shame or the guilt by not speaking."


Stan Brakhage

Brakhage’s work, specifically his earlier work was a documentation of everything in his life. One of his earlier films Window Water Baby Moving was a controversial attempt by Brakhage to film the birth of his child. Brakhage was constantly looking for new ways to document his own personal life.


Window Water Baby Moving (1959)






















































Desistfilm (1954)















Review:

Brakhage's ambivalence about existence can be seen in his early film dramas, in which agonized individuals strain against imagined prisons; it can be seen in his first major work, Anticipation of the Night (1958), a testament to the failure of imaginative seeing, ending in the protagonist's suicide; it can be seen in the cosmic deconstruction that concludes the four-hour The Art of Vision (1965); it can be seen in what is perhaps his greatest achievement, the "Arabics," a series of 19 abstract films that are both glorious examples of light in motion and unsettling documents of seeing so "abnormal" that the viewer feels almost disoriented. And it can be seen in his five final completed works, being shown at the Film Center May 20 in a "Tribute and Benefit" to assist his family with the costs of his final illness. Four of the five are Chicago premieres (the 2001 Jesus Trilogy and Coda is not), and this is only their fourth public showing anywhere. (The two works left unfinished at his death are being completed by former students and will soon be released.)

Taking defiance of filmic forms to a new extreme, these works have qualities often found in an artist's late oeuvre. Brakhage refines his art to its essence, to an unpredictability that's nevertheless not random, neither borrowing from drama as in his earlier films nor supplying the potent symbolism of such late hand-painted works as The Dark Tower. The last four films in particular have an austere, almost autumnal visual and emotional evenness. All but one of the four — Max is the exception — were made by painting directly on the 16-millimeter film strip one frame at a time, and their shifts in perspective keep the viewer on edge to an almost delirious degree. Because each frame takes only one twenty-fourth of a second, Brakhage often chose to repeat each one two, three, or four times in the printing, resulting in between 6 and 12 images per second. At this speed, each painting is visible just long enough to be perceived in some detail but not long enough to become a static picture. The resulting tension between stills and implied movement is only one of the many ways Brakhage sets the viewer off balance.