Brakhage's Songs (1966)

Abstract

Cinematography is still so young that a ten-year-old boy who went to the first movie of them all, Louis and Auguste Lumiere's film of unrelated, everyday scenes, would now be only eighty, and might conceivably have seen all the movies ever made. It is not, then, either coincidence or design that the first film found subjects that the most seeing of eyes--Stan Brakhage's--are still inspecting. Lumiere's three subjects were "Feeding the Baby" (Brakhage's Song 11), "The Card Party" (Song 19), and "The Arrival of the Train at the Station" (Song 13). An earlier Lumiere, in fact the very first to be made, shows his employees leaving the factory, a milling of people kin to Brakhage's Song 12, the movements of people at an airport. By 1896, a matter of weeks after the December premiere of these films that merely watched the world, the public could see a gardener placidly watering his flowerbed. A neighbor comes to kibitz, and naturally stands on the hose, which goes dry. The gardener peers into the nozzle. The neighb or steps off the hose. Spurt. Dance of indignation. Brakhage deliberately went back to the first Lumiere, and is still not satisfied that he has exhausted, or ever will exhaust, the potential implicit in that arrangement of world and camera. When Brakhage comes to photograph the train, he is in another train, moving in the opposite direction. He is aware that the other train is doing what the shutter of his camera is doing, and what the gate of the projector will do afterwards: it is slicing up the strong landscape beyond into intermittent bits. He is also aware that he is photographing his own reflection, the only still thing in a film so busy of movement that the audience feels the same dismay as Lumiere's when it shifted nervously as the train it watched kept chugging toward them. Brakhage is photographing a scene most of us choose not to experience; there is something disturbing in the movement of trains witnessed in a moving (or still) train. Once we are past childhood, we prefer to stare at our stable shoes until we can see a less dizzying movement. We are content to call the first non-dramatic films "studies". From Muybridge's first analysis of motion onto six, twelve, and even twenty-four plates to the action clips of Donisthorpe and Skladanowsky, the camera was, as Cocteau noticed, a cow's eye. The newsreel and the scientific film have been allowed to look with a cow's eye (or eagle's, or lynx's) but the film has otherwise spent its sixty-eight years watching the gardener's face when his hose went dry. Once Brakhage had made Anticipation of the Night(1958) he had discovered that the camera had developed strenuously but one of the modes latent in the simple fact that it was an eye that could share its sight with any other eye. Brakhage's eye had learned, is still learning, to see in what may prove to be as many modes as physiology and spirit allow--which sounds fatuous until we realize that every eye is pattern-bound in what it sees at all, and beyond that severe limitation is unskilled, stupid of movement, dull, blind in a very real sense. The arts have always taught us to see; for the first time in the history of the world a generation has grown up aware that it can see a figure in dim light as Rembrandt and the autumn trees as Jackson Pollock, or the other way round. The eye's intelligence must be learned. A year and a half ago, having finished his first masterpiece, Dog Star Man, after some forty films all distinguished in one way or another and all pushing outward the possibilities for seeing that Anticipation began, Brakhage turned to a series of songs, as he called them, in 8 millimeter, short studies only a few minutes long. The Songs began as a pause. Dog Star Man had folded out into The Art of Vision. Brakhage had turned to the short film, to Pasht, the contemplative act of a cat washing itself. As the art of the century goes monstrous, Brakhage moves inward, into silence, into the small gestures, the essential quiet (a Galapagos turtle walking high up in the water, a bug on linoleum, children). …