Reading Responses

The Film as an Original Art Form:
It's apparent to me that Richter's main point in the article is that the entertainment industry in today's world has a view of cinema of being less of a filmic sensation in art, but rather a mechanism that captures other forms of art, like performance. Richter claims that there are two forms of cinema that still value the camera as a form of art, and that is documentary and experimental. He states that both forms are more cinematographic than your average entertaining narrative. I value his opinions, but I still believe that the act of filming anything, including narratives, still acts as a puzzle piece in the grand scheme of things to form the art itself.

Introduction to Avant-Garde Film:
This article to me was more of a review than anything. In previous classes such as History of Avant-Garde Film, we spent very much time going over the kind of attention and effort you need to put forth to really grasp the experience of watching Avant-Garde movies. It was also a review for me to read about how the average person is in a way trained to view movies in a classical way, like hollywood narratives and then do not know how to accept an experimental film. The latter part of the article was also a review that goes back to classes such as World Cinema and History of Film, when explaining the earlier aspects of cinema with the Lumiere brothers and Eadward Muybridge and their contributions to cinema today. I didn't mind reading it though, because a refresher is always nice.