Tales of the Tribes

Abstract

Introducing Andrei Tarkovsky to an audience at the 1983 Telluride Film Festival, Stan Brakhage declared: I personally think that the three greatest tasks for film in the 20th century are 1) To make the epic, that is, to tell the tales of the tribes of the world. 2) To keep it personal, because only in the eccentricities of our personal lives do we have any chance at the truth. 3) To do the dream work, that is to illuminate the borders of the unconscious. (1) Although he praised Tarkovsky as "the greatest living narrative film maker" and the only one who "does all these three things equally in every film he makes," Brakhage seems to have been acclaiming Tarkovsky for independently replicating his own agenda, most obviously in the requirements for personal filmmaking and explorations of "the dream work." In the nearly twenty years since he made that introduction, Brakhage has accelerated his own version of affirming the "tales of the tribe": Anazazi Indians, Dante, Marlowe, Goethe, Novalis, Stephen Foster, D. H. Lawrence, Plato, Rilke, Mann, and Stein have been evoked in the titles and themes of various films. An even more revelatory catachresis of the words "telling" and "tales"--implicitly acknowledged by Brakhage's use of quotation marks--appeared in a theoretical text of 1993: Some ur-consciousness also then must be inferred--each cell both shaper and carrier of every spark struck from and through it, affected by each impulse-backlash and in synaptical montage with each previous and following impulse: the whole organism feeding its varieties-of-fire into this interplay between brain and eye, as finally each cell of the foetal body can be intuited to be "telling" its "story" interactive with every other cell's story throughout the developing body, over-ridden by some entirety of rhythming light (as every individual heart-cell is conjoined to the dominating beat of each heart-part's over-riding beat) in the conglomerate rhythm of the whole heat-light of any given organ...of which each cell is a radical part compromised by every other cell's variable interaction, all contributory to the organic "tales" of these cells in concert. (2) Through an ironic loop in the history of avant-garde film theory, here Brakhage offers, in 1993, a physiological phantasmagoria in justification of what Hollis Frampton once facetiously called "Brakhage's Theorem" (1972)--that all films are narrative. More narrowly conceived, the Biblical and Classical tales of the tribes have been elliptically retold in Brakhage's films, off and on, since the 1950s: Oedipus (The Way to Shadow Garden [1954]), The Descent to the Underworld (The Dead [1960], Dante's Styx [1975]) The Sinai theophany (Blue Moses [1962]), Apocalypse (Oh Life, a Woe Story, The A Test News [1963]), Genesis (Creation [1979]), The Fall (The Machine of Eden [1970], The Animals of Eden and After [1970]), The Vision of Isaiah (The Peaceable Kingdom [1971]), The Afterlife and Orpheus (The Dante Quartet [1987]), and Plato's Allegory of the Cave (Visions in Meditation #3) [1987]). In Creation (1979) he recorded a visit to Alaskan glaciers during the period he was completing the Sincerity/Duplicity series. The proximate inspiration for the sublime vision of a world of massive ice and scarred rock was the art of the nineteenth-century American landscape painter, Frederic Edwin Church, whose works Brakhage had studied for more than a decade. Behind Church's paintings of icebergs lay a rich pictorial and literary tradition highlighted by Caspar David Friedrich's Artic scenes and the Antarctic fantasy of Poe, in his conclusion to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. David Huntington called upon Church's writings to supply the spiritual context for his art: The artist, we read in The Crayon in 1857, should restore things "to what they were at Creation." Or, on another page of the same journal, he should paint "the image of the World redeemed. …