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Originally Posted by demonrail666
I can see why you say that but I've never understood why people who can listen to the most extreme music have such a problem with more overtly-experimental areas of film. Couldn't pretty much everything you say about Brakhage, etc, be just as easily levelled at a lot of the more experimental types of music that get so much support here?
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I was thinking along those lines when I read $5&*4 saying that he found some of those films boring and after looking at what's on offer on the DVD. I think that with a lot of experimental movies, particularly with stuff that came out in the 50s, 60s and to an extent the 70s, one of the things that can be misguiding is the fact that there are many works normally referred to as examples of movie-making, when today probably we'd rather call them video art or something similar to that. I can't think of someone like Harry Smith as a movie director on the same level as Kenneth Anger or John Waters, to name two people who came out from underground films, because to me Smith has a more ''painterly'' attitude to creating moving images, whereas people like Anger and Waters have a proper ''cinematic'' approach to films, regardless of their initial primitivism. It's no coincidence that a visual artist like Warhol had to usher in the expertise of someone like Paul Morrissey to give his experiments with film something resembling a more traditional approach, even though his early work was influenced by the classic black and white Hollywood age by his own admission. To me he was incapable of distancing himself from his visual artist approach to images when using a video camera, and that's why he sort of gave up and let someone else do most of the work.