Remedial Reading Comprehension

“The favorite film at the London Festival of Avant-Garde Film 1973”-
The first image is a female head, horizontal and more or less suggestive of three-dimensional space. The next to last image is the same head, which becomes a white silhouette in a shallow white (not black) space. Compare the two grains of rice – wholegrain (brown) and processed (white). The white rice grain has lost its ‘essence’ (the germ) just as the silhouette has lost its three dimensionality. One thing this suggests is the process of removing substance to get a ‘purer’ product. The film-maker himself appears in the film, yet he tells us it is about us and “not about its maker”. Certain images – the rice, ‘Madge’s’ friend – are impersonal. They are facsimiles of images from TV commercials or industrial promotional films. There is a relationship between the first image and the next-to-last image. Before the female becomes a silhouette there is a transition period in which a struggle seems to take place between the three-dimensional form and the flat one. The rhythm of the soundtrack is the rhythm of this alteration.
Appearing: Jane Yablonsky, George Landow.