Brakhage's Contradictions

Abstract

1. Stan Brakhage is among the most inclusive of filmmakers. The almost omnivorous impulse behind his choices of subjects and styles makes it difficult to characterize his work in particularizing terms. Included in his films are the sun and the moon, television images, mountains, children on a merry-go-round, open-heart surgery, domesticated animals, a movie theater, tiny blood vessels, portraits of friends, abstract replications of "closed-eye vision," still photos of family members, Alaskan glaciers, Freud's house in Vienna, the filmmaker himself taking a leak, a Paris cemetery, Colorado's governor, childbirths, urban skylines, footage taken by his children, frames of solid color, found footage from an instructional film, and the filmmaker Paul Sharits making love with his wife. While many of Brakhage's films contain no representational images, others are photographed in a manner most would call reasonably "realistic." Underlying all of his films is an impulse to include the richness and variety of a fully live d life, from mundane experiences of dailiness, to images drawn from dreams, to attempts to produce abstractions unlike anything he's seen or imagined before. At close to 400 films, his oeuvre can seem confusing, and it may be that only Brakhage himself has seen every one of them. I find it useful to divide his output into two categories: the "main line" and "applied Brakhage." The "main line" represents most of his greatest work; it consists of films that evidence a quest which, while difficult to pin down, has an "isolating" and "abstracting" tendency that at least superficially seems to contradict the inclusiveness their variety of subjects would suggest. Key "main line" films include Anticipation of the Night (1958); The Art of Vision (1965); The Horseman, the Woman, and the Moth (1968); The Process (1972); The Riddle of Lumen (1972); Aquarien (1974); The Text of Light (1974); the photographed numerical series of the late 1970s and 1980s such as Romans, Arabics, and Egyptians; most of the parts of "..."(1998); many of the recent handpainted films; and the two photographed series of the last decade, Visions in Meditation (1989-90) and the "Vancouver Island films " (1991-2000). In each of these very different films one gets the sense that Brakhage has pushed his vision to a new level of isolating intensity. The images they contain are severed from previously predictable ways of knowing; in each film he reinvents his vision by explicitly undercutting any expectations (about subject-matter, composition, rhythm, and so on) created by his previous work. The "applied" films, in which he uses some aspects of his already-established style to render an individual subject, include Window Water Baby Moving (1959); "portrait" films such as Song 24 (1967), Hymn to Her (1974), Clancy (1974), and Gadflies (1976); the stunning nature film Creation (1979); and the 1971 "Pittsburgh documents" (eyes, Deus Ex, and The Act of Seeing with one's own eyes). Most of these are wonderful films in themselves, and one can find here, more than in the "main line" films, particular attitudes expressed toward specific themes. In The Act of Seeing with one's own eyes, there is a tension between the awfulness of corpse imagery seen during an autopsy and Brakhage's attempt to create a light-poem out of these human fragments, but this approach will already be familiar to viewers of the more extreme vision of death presented through images of a dog decaying in the woods in the rhythmically tortured Sirius Remembered (1959). There is a powerful moment in The Act of Seeing, in which a face is lifted off a skull during an autopsy, that finds its analogue in brief images of the dog's skull in Sirius. But those images in Sirius have the quality of genuine apparitions: because of the way they interrupt the camera's wildly swooping arcs, they are experienced as perceptual events that impinge on the viewer's entire sensorium. In comparison, the autopsies in The Act of Seeing come across as little episodes of narrative storytelling. …