Tales of the Tribes

IF 0.1 3区 文学 0 LITERARY REVIEWS
CHICAGO REVIEW Pub Date : 2001-12-22 DOI:10.2307/25304809
P. A. Sitney
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引用次数: 2

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. …
部落的故事
在1983年的特柳赖德电影节上,斯坦·布兰克奇向观众介绍安德烈·塔可夫斯基时说:“我个人认为,20世纪电影最伟大的三个任务是:1)制作史诗,也就是说,讲述世界各部落的故事。2)保持个性,因为只有在我们个人生活的怪癖中,我们才有机会了解真相。3)做梦的工作,就是照亮无意识的边界。(1)虽然他称赞塔可夫斯基是“最伟大的活着的叙事电影制作人”,也是唯一一个“在每一部电影中都平等地做到这三件事”的人,但布拉哈格似乎一直在称赞塔可夫斯基独立地复制了自己的议程,最明显的是对个人电影制作和探索“梦想作品”的要求。在他做了这个介绍后的近二十年里,布拉哈格加速了他自己的版本,以肯定“部落的故事”:阿纳扎齐印第安人、但丁、马洛、歌德、诺瓦利斯、斯蒂芬·福斯特、d·h·劳伦斯、柏拉图、里尔克、曼和斯坦在各种电影的标题和主题中被引用。在1993年的一篇理论文章中,“讲述”和“故事”这两个词出现了更具启示性的变化——布拉哈格使用了引号,含蓄地承认了这一点:一些潜意识也必须被推断出来——每一个细胞都是每一个火花的塑造者和载体,受到每一个脉冲反冲的影响,受到每一个前后脉冲的突触蒙太奇的影响:整个生物体在大脑和眼睛之间的相互作用中提供了各种各样的火焰,因为最终胎儿身体的每个细胞都可以直观地“讲述”自己的“故事”,与整个发育中的身体中其他细胞的故事相互作用,在任何给定器官的整个热-光的综合节奏中,被一些有节奏的光所覆盖(就像每个单独的心脏细胞与每个心脏部分的主导节拍相结合)。其中每个细胞都是一个激进的部分,受到其他细胞可变的相互作用的损害,所有这些都促成了这些细胞协调一致的有机“故事”。(2)通过先锋派电影理论历史上的一个讽刺循环,布拉哈格在1993年提出了一个生理上的幻觉,为霍利斯·弗兰普顿(Hollis Frampton)曾经滑稽地称之为“布拉哈格定理”(Brakhage’s Theorem, 1972)的理论辩护——所有的电影都是叙事的。自20世纪50年代以来,布拉哈格的电影中断断续续地重复着《圣经》和《古典》中关于部落的故事,这些故事的构思更为狭隘。俄狄浦斯(通往阴影花园的路[1954]),下降到地下世界(死亡[1960],但丁的冥河[1975])西奈神通(蓝色摩西[1962]),启示录(Oh Life, a Woe Story, The a Test News[1963]),创世纪(创造[1979]),堕落(伊甸机器[1970],伊甸动物和之后[1970]),以赛亚的视觉(和平王国[1971]),来世和俄耳甫斯(但丁四重谈[1987]),和柏拉图的洞穴寓言(冥想中的视觉#3)[1987])。在《创造》(1979)中,他记录了他在完成《真诚/口是心非》系列期间对阿拉斯加冰川的访问。这个由巨大的冰和伤痕累累的岩石组成的世界的崇高景象的直接灵感来自19世纪美国风景画家弗雷德里克·埃德温·丘奇(Frederic Edwin Church)的艺术作品,布拉哈格研究了丘奇的作品十多年。在丘奇冰山画的背后,有着丰富的绘画和文学传统,卡斯帕·大卫·弗里德里希的北极场景和爱伦·坡的南极幻想在他的结语《阿瑟·戈登·皮姆的叙述》中得到了突出体现。大卫·亨廷顿(David Huntington)呼吁丘奇的作品为他的艺术提供精神背景:我们在1857年的《蜡笔》(the Crayon)中读到,艺术家应该把事物“恢复到创造时的样子”。或者,在同一份杂志的另一页上,他应该描绘“被救赎的世界的形象”。...
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CHICAGO REVIEW
CHICAGO REVIEW LITERARY REVIEWS-
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