Re: Looking for prints to screen / From JONAS

From: marilyn brakhage (email suppressed)
Date: Fri Sep 11 2009 - 18:52:26 PDT


Well, I doubt if it's as simple as that. Different people get upset
about different things in every era. Certainly Stan felt that the 50s
were very repressive, and when he was showing Window Water Baby Moving
(childbirth) in the early 60s, his life was sometimes threatened, and
for that matter, I can remember a screening of "The Act of Seeing with
one's own eyes" (autopsy) on Staten Island in 1988, when Stan
mentioned that it was a film that kids sometimes like to watch, and a
man in the audience said that if he (Stan) showed it to kids on Staten
Island he'd never get off the island alive. . . . As for images of
naked children, I suppose that's always open to possible misuse (uses
that Stan would have abhorred), but in the case of "Lovemaking,"
perhaps it was the film as a whole that made it problematic for some
people. . . . I don't know exactly what Jonas Mekas's reaction to
film was at the time. It's true the film was included in the
Essential Cinema collection at Anthology. But Stan also claimed that
P. Adams Sitney thought the film was a serious "mistake." Perhaps he
was speaking aesthetically, perhaps he just considered it a failure.
I really don't know.

Marilyn

On 11-Sep-09, at 5:37 PM, Jim Carlile wrote:

> I have to disagree with this take that naked children on screen in
> the late 60s would have immediately elicited cries of child sex and
> other illegalities, and as such, Brakhage was somehow condemned by
> anyone at the time for it.
>
> This kind of rabid reaction is a new phenomenon, fostered by nutcase
> clowns like Nancy Grace and others in our now near-fascist mass media.
>
> If you look at old film and photography magazines, there are all
> sorts of pictures of family and child nudity in them, and no one
> went nuts about it.
>
> We are living in really crazy times nowadays, where everyone wants
> to make everyone culpably guilty of absolutely everything. So don't
> anyone project our present day psychosis and fear back on a much
> more creative era, one that had-- I dare say it-- fewer "hangups"
> and hatreds.
>
>
>
>
> In a message dated 9/11/2009 3:56:48 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, email suppressed
> writes:
> maybe his life does but thats' his choice
>
> i didn't think it was possible
> but i dislike woody allen even more now
>
> cari machet
> nyc 347-298-9818
> AIM carismachet
>
> __________________________________________________________________
> For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
>
>

__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.