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Let There Be Light

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Since the Razzo screening of this week consists of multiple movies. I would like to divide my response into two parts. The first part focuses on the key qualities that make Let There Be Light such an iconic documentary and also the source of its supression by the government. The second part focuses on the experimental films: Meshes of the Afternoon, Fireworks, and Rose Hobart.
Let There Be Light stood out in the documentary genre firstly because of its reliance on unscripted interviews. It is mentioned in the article that some thousand hours was spent on footage that would meaningfully make up a 1-hour documentary. All of the interviews are exemplary of showing the narrative the documentary was trying to convey: how war affected the soldier …show more content…

Meshes of the Afternoon is the most visually appealing one. Mentioned in the article, the film has a sort of rhythm that is symbolic in most of Deren’s movies. It deals a lot with identities and identifications, like the scene of multiple instances of the protagonist, or the scene with the hooded man with a reflective face. Here, I interpreted the scene as that there were a lot of side to the protagonist and the mirror is to reflect into self, which later on in the movie we can see that in the reflection is the husband. Also dreamlike in narrative is Fireworks, which was basically considered to be within the post-war avant-garde genre in the article. This short, primarily a comedy, has a lot of sexual inuendos embeded into the visual coding. It portrays that the protagonist is in search for fullfilment and sexual satisfaction within the depths of his conscience. The article mentioned about “the not-so-subtle imagery and symbolism in the film”, with “the aforementioned pyrotechnic phallus, the river of milk standing in for semen”. The third short is a montage, which is a brilliant one with concentrated but dreamlike and open-to-interpretion narrative, with all the footage from East of Borneo. Surrealism is achieved once the narrative of the East of Borneo, with all of its drama, is stripped off to become something more mysterious and less revealing. And with the soundtrack, the blue tint, the image of the solar eclipse and the

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