The "Document" Correspondence of Stan Brakhage

Abstract

Throughout Stan Brakhage's career, the quality most often ascribed to his work has been "visionary". Certainly many of the statements the filmmaker has made over the years concerning his motives and methods have evoked such an understanding. Indeed, he has encouraged the development of a critical vocabulary concerning his work that centered around the presentation of a "way of seeing." However, Brakhage has also insisted, from the very beginning of his film career, upon the relationship of his film work to the world around him. The films themselves testify to the range of his attention. In his work Brakhage has depicted the daily, seasonal, and enduring processes of nature and of human nature. He has scrutinized flora and fauna, pondered geology and cosmology. He has meditated upon the society within which he and his family and all other Americans live. Through the imagery he has extracted from his surroundings, he has contemplated its assumptions, its belief systems, its practices--its institutions and its s tructures. He has confronted its taboos. His films on sexuality and death have been landmark explorations of the territory, and have inspired controversy as much for the daring of their subject matter as for their treatment of it. Despite Brakhage's occasional claim that he may be the "most documentary of filmmakers," he has been consistently critical of documentary film techniques. Troubled by what he considers to be the unquestioning identification of film or television imagery with the complex reality existing in front of any camera, he has consistently foregrounded this skepticism by reminding his friends and colleagues as well as his students and audiences of the built-in perspectival7 conventions that a camera lens imposes, and by drawing their attention to what he believes are the "19th-century dramatic structures" lurking behind the presentation of television news and many documentary films. From the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, while Brakhage was coming into his own as a filmmaker, the documentary film was undergoing a transformation in style and practice as well as an accompanying surge of popularity. Changes in documentary technique, style, and theory would come to serve throughout these years as a ground for Brakhage's changing style. The positing of an ideal documentary form, in which the subject of the film could be captured directly, without any interpretative fashioning of the filmmaker--as held against the acknowledgment of the likelihood, the desirability, and ultimately, even the inevitability of the filmmaker's shaping sensibility--provided documentary filmmakers with a central dilemma, complex and highly significant for both their theories and their practices in the 1960s and throughout the 1970s. As a consequence of the range of theoretical views of documentary that were being put forth, which included the sense that documentary film had a specific and intimate relationship with the life around it, the documentary became a particularly vibrant and vital form during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This dynamism attracted many filmmakers to the intricacies of its practice. Among those filmmakers was Stan Brakhage, who had come to include such masters of documentary form as Richard Leacock and Robert Gardner among his colleagues and friends. After the completion of Dog Star Man (1961-1964) and on through the late 1960s, changes in Brakhage's filmmaking practice became increasingly evident. Although he moved quite swiftly from Dog Star Man to Songs (1964-1966) and from Songs to Scenes from under Childhood (1967-70), Brakhage's correspondence from 1965 onward delineated a nearly continuous dissatisfaction and occasionally a degree of desperation in his search for new creative methods. (1) Brakhage's first efforts to change his style resulted in an increased simplicity of presentation. A tension had arisen in his working methods in films made during this time between what he had come to view as the primacy of the photography, as it captured what had been in front of the camera, and his own need as an artist to shape the film experience. …