Jeff's response to Rush's Introduction

I enjoyed Rush's introduction, but found its brevity to be somewhat annoying. He attempts to summarize the history of a few various movements and ignores much larges influences. He mentions Stan Brakhage's name, but fails to give any information about his work (similarly, he includes him in a list of filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren, neither of which are mentioned more than once). The summary of the fluxists' work is interesting, but their film projects seem so undeniably influenced by Brakhage's hand-painted films that I can't completely understand why he would skip over such an important artist. It seems that he obsesses over a few random avant-garde artists and then mentions a couple more mainstream artists as a counterpoint. The inclusion (and obsession over) Jean-Luc Goddard and Sergei Eisenstein's films, giving them both far more credit than either deserves (admittedly, he does give a brief description of Vertov's work, but he seems to credit Eisenstein with some ideas that Vertov should have been credited with; Vertov, in my readings, has talked much more about technology and industrialization than Eisenstein). He also credits Griffith with the idea of "montage," but he was only one stepping stone in creation of the idea that ultimately came together beginning with Lev Kuleshov's writing in the late 1910s.

From the brief bit I've now read about them, the Fluxists' ideas fascinate me. I particularly enjoyed the idea of Paik's Zen for Film. There's just something really cool about a strip of film being passed around, slowly collecting more and more dirt, debris, and scratches. It becomes, in a way, a very fascinating historical object: a complete blank slate on which anything could be written.

I've included Brakhage's Mothlight, a film that is literally just moths that he collected from a light in his backyard a taped together and perforated to go through a projector.