Stan Brakhage Pencils Us In *

* (restored)

 

Intro

‘Stan Brakhage’s great subject was light itself, its infinite varieties seen as manifestations of unbounded and unrestricted energy and its concretization into objects representing the trapping of that energy, and his great desire was to make cinema equal to the other arts by using that which was uniquely cinematic — by organizing light in the time and space of the projected image — in a way that would be worthy, structurally and aesthetically, of the poetry, painting, and music that most inspired him. The subtleties of his work, the intricacy with which he used composition and color and texture and rhythm, resulted in films that virtually demand multiple viewings. The best known and most important of avant-garde filmmakers, he was also in my estimation among the half-dozen greatest filmmakers in the history of the medium — and, as I believe time will establish, one of the very greatest artists of the 20th century in any medium. …’ (read the rest) — Fred Camper, Senses of Cinema

‘Stan Brakhage has left the world a legacy larger than we’ll ever be likely to get a handle on. With a body of work as large as his, one might find it difficult and ultimately pointless to try and reign it all in beneath a single umbrella. But there is a sheltering concept under which his vast array of films enjoys a bond: Brakhage wanted the world to learn to see again. He wanted us to rid ourselves of the shackles imposed on us by the rules of Renaissance perspective, to abandon the search for ever greater levels of visual acuity, definition, clarity and detail, and to re-embrace those parts of our experience that we have learned to let go unnoticed, or consider to be flawed by the standards of High Definition culture. As P. Adams Sitney notes, “When [Brakhage] decided to become a filmmaker he threw away his eyeglasses” (Sitney 1979:149). That about sums it up.’ (read the rest) — Randolf Jordan, Off Screen

‘Those who consider cinema a narrative art form, and believe that films should have a beginning, a middle and an end – in that order – will have problems with the work of Stan Brakhage. His films were difficult also for those not willing to shed the conventionalised illusion, imposed by rules of perspective, compositional logic and “lenses grounded to achieve 19th-century compositional perspective”. For Brakhage, the goal of cinema was the liberation of the eye itself, the creation of an act of seeing, previously unimagined and undefined by conventions of representation, an eye as natural and unprejudiced as that of a cat, a bee or an infant. There were few filmmakers – film director is too limiting a description – who went so far to train audiences to see differently.’ (rest the rest) — Ronald Bergen, The Guardian

 

 

Brakhage on Brakhage

This is to introduce myself. I am young and I believe in magic. I am learning how to cast spells. My profession is transforming. I am what is known as “an artist.” Three years ago I made a discovery which caused me dis-ease at the time: neither the society in which I had grown up nor my society of that moment, my college, knew what to do with me. They were wary of me. — Dartmouth, 1955

I am devoting my life to what is inappropriately called “The Experimental Film,” in America, because I am an artist and, as such, am convinced that freedom of personal expression (that which is called “experiment” by those who don’t understand it) is the natural beginning of any art, and because I love film and am excited above everything else by the possibilities inherent in film as a means of aesthetic expression. — in answer to a questionnaire, 1957

I would say I grew very quickly as a film artist once I got rid of drama as prime source of inspiration. I began to feel that all history, all life, all that I would have as material with which to work, would have to come from the inside of me out rather than as some form imposed from the outside in. I had the concept of everything radiating out of me, and that the more personal or egocentric I would become, the deeper I would reach and the more I could touch these universal concerns which would involve all man. — interview with P. Adams Sitney, Metaphors On Vision, 1963

OF NECESSITY I BECOME INSTRUMENT FOR THE PASSAGE OF INNER VISION, THRU ALL MY SENSIBILITIES, INTO ITS EXTERNAL FORM. My most active part in this process is to increase all my sensibilities (so that all films arise out of some total area of being or full life) AND, at the given moment of possible creation to act only out of necessity. In other words, I am principally concerned with revelation. — letter to Sitney, 1963

 

 

Brakhage resources

Complete filmography
Descriptions of all Stan Brakhage films
Stan Brakhage on the Web
Stan Brakhage @ Wikipedia
Filmed Interview with Stan Brakhage
Stan Brakhage @ the Criterion Collection
Obituary @ Indiewire
Stan Brakhage’s Sound Recordings

 

10 films

The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971)
‘In this third part of The Pittsburgh Trilogy (following “Eyes” and “Deus Ex”) Stan Brakhage photographed autopsy — a term which comes from the Greek, meaning: “The act of seeing with one’s own eyes.” “… Stan Brakhage, entering, with his camera, one of the forbidden terrific locations of our culture, the autopsy room. It is a place wherein, inversely, life is cherished, for it exists to affirm that no one of us may die without knowing exactly why. All of us, in the person of the coroner, must see that, for ourselves, with our own eyes.”‘ — Hollis Frampton

 

Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse (1991)
‘The primary “Molten Horror” is TV–though there are other horrors metaphored in the film. Four superimposed rolls of hand-painted and bi-packed television negative imagery are edited so as to approximate the hypnagogic process whereby the optic nerves resist grotesque infusions of luminescent light.’ — Light Cone

 

Window Water Baby Moving (1959)
‘Like a lot of Brakhage’s work, Window Water Baby Moving celebrates the natural processes of life with a mix of poetic and plainspoken imagery. The film starts with the image of Jane’s full belly as she reclines in a bathtub. Then comes a sequence focused on the birth. We see the literal emergence, in extreme close-up, of his newborn daughter. The film does all of this without music or sound of any kind, which makes the experience both confrontational and strangely serene.’ — Paul Harrill

 

Sirius Remembered (1959)
‘I was coming to terms with decay with a dead thing and the decay if the memories of a loved being that had died and it was undermining all abstract concepts of death. The form was being cast our of probably the same physical need that makes dogs dance and howl in rhythm around a corpse. I was taking song as my source of inspiration for the rhythm structure, just as dogs dancing, prancing around a corpse, and howling in rhythm-structures or rhythm-intervals might be considered like the birth of some kind of song.’ — S.B.

 

The Dante Quartet (1987)
‘This hand-painted film work 6 years in-the-making (37 in the studying of the Divine Comedy ) demonstrates the earthly conditions of Hell, Purgatory, (to Transition), and Heaven (or existence is song, which is the closest I’d presume upon heaven from my experience) as well as the mainspring of/from Hell (HELL SPIT FLEXION) in four parts which are inspired by the closed-eye or hypnogogic vision created by those emotional states, Originally painted on IMAX and Cinemascope 70mm. and 35mm., these paint-laden rolls have been carefully rephotographed and translated to 35mm. and 16mm.’ — Filmmakers Coop

 

Dog Star Man (1964)
‘One of the most spectacular things I have ever seen: the sole effect of being severely waterboarded by the forces of the Universe, from the origin of space and time to the crowded modernity. A tremendous juxtaposition of the visions of a man that has towards superior forces, towards transendence and towards our inherent spiritual perpetuity, contemplating the vastness of existence and the beginning of humankind and its continuation through procreation. I must also highlight that this colossus predates Kubrick’s odyssey by six years and there is an overwhelmingly substantial amount of traces that would be seen in Kubrick’s more than legendary achievement. In the meantime, this is the transition between Dadaism and impressionism through a lens that experiments with the line between animation created by optical effects and live-action subjective artistic appreciation. It is not strictly Surrealism, but the dream of an artist that flows with its own essence. A monumental achievement.’ — Edgar Cochran

 

Mothlight (1963)
‘As Brakhage explains in the remarks on this (and other films in the set) that he recorded in 2002, mere months before he passed away from cancer the following year, Mothlight was a product of intense angst that he was feeling at the time, as his consuming passion for making films that were utterly non-commercial, obscure and perplexing to most viewers was costing him dearly in his personal life. One night as he was watching moths and other insects swoop to their doom into an irresistible flame, he drew the mental connection between their self-destructive but uncontrollable instincts and his own drive to express himself in ways that didn’t help provide for his family’s needs and often invited scorn or rejection from people too quick to dismiss the courageous, beautiful short films that he was creating out of a pure love for the medium. Though he had internalized that negative feedback to the point of considering himself a failure and contemplating suicide, Brakhage somehow persevered in his craft. Gathering up the remnants – wings, antennae, legs, and other components – of dead moths along with grasses, leaves, stems, petals and various flaky bits no longer easily identifiable, Brakhage found an artistic way to redeem their annihilation, giving these anonymous ephemeral life forms a form of cultural immortality. In the process, he created a visual phenomenon that challenges viewers to regard the natural world from a different perspective as the shapes, textures and colors explode across the screen, dazzling our eye and exposing us to new patterns of organization that would never have occurred to us if these elements had not been embedded on film in such a unique arrangement.’ — Criterion Reflections

 

Black Ice (1994)
‘I lost sight due a blow on the head from slipping on black ice (leading to eye surgery, eventually); and now (because of artificially thinned blood) most steps I take outdoors all winter are made in frightful awareness of black ice. These “meditations” have finally produced this hand-painted, step-printed film.’ — S.B.

 

Water for Maya (2000)
‘As the blur of colours and textures explode and disperse, a second layer of images reveals itself, gradually, over the course of the film. A ghost story – non-narrative, but a story all the same – moving beneath the surface. This spectral play of shadows, where the glimpsed faces become almost explicit, is where the real power of the film rests. Not simply as a tribute to the American filmmaker Maya Derren, as hinted at by the film’s title, but as a truly sensory cinematic experience. In this remarkable montage, every frame has the power of a Pollock or a Kandinsky. On screen for less than the normal time that it might take for our eyes to register its form, but still vivid, vital; a series of images open to interpretation. The accumulative effect of these images when viewed against one another in a quick succession, creates something that is difficult to define, and even more difficult to express in words. It is something that can only be felt through the process of viewing.’ — lights in the dusk

 

Interviewed

You’ve been involved with film for over 40 years — as a maker, thinker, writer and academic. Has your sense of film as film changed?

In one sense it hasn’t changed: from the beginning I had a feeling for film as vision. I didn’t think it was related to literature or theatre at all, nor had it anything to do with Renaissance perspective. I was staggling the time against the flypaper of other arts harnessing film to their own usages, which means essentially as a recording device or within the long historical trap of ‘picture — by which I mean a collection of nameable shapes within a frame. I don’t even think still photography, with few exceptions, has made any significant attempt to free itself from that. So I had certain instinctual feelings about film even before I made one.

What do you mean by ‘vision, and how is it related to film?

For me vision is what you see, to the least extent related to picture. It is just seeing — it is a very simple word — and to be a visionary is to be a seer. The problem is that most people can’t see. Children can — they have a much wider range of visual awareness — because their eyes haven’t been tutored to death by man-made laws of perspective or compositional logic. Every semester I start out by telling my students that they have to see in order to experience film and that seeing is not just looking at pictures. This simple idea seems to be the hardest to get through to people.

But is it really so simple? In your films, to see without picturing is a composite of many visual processes, only one of which is open-eye vision, or what we call normal everyday vision.

Open-eye vision is what we are directly conscious of, but there’s much more going on that we ignore. Seeing includes open-eye, peripheral and hypnagogic vision, along with moving visual thinking, dream vision and memory feedback — in short, whatever affects the eyes, the brain and the nervous system. I believe that all these have a right to be called seeing since they enable us to inherit the spectrum of on optic and nervous system.

Can you define them?

Hypnagogic vision is what you see through your eyes closed — at first a field of grainy, shifting, multi-colored sands that gradually assume various shapes. It’s optic feedback: the nervous system projects what you have previously experienced — your visual memories — into the optic nerve endings. It’s also called closed-eye vision. Moving visual thinking, on the other hand, occurs deeper in the synapsing of the brain. It’s a streaming of shapes that are not nameable — a vast visual ‘song of the cells expressing their internal life.

Peripheral vision is what you don’t pay close attenion to during the day and which surfaces at night in your dreams. And memory feedback consists of the editings of your remembrance. It’s like a highly edited movie made from the real.

How is film predisposed to embody these?

Over the years, I have come to believe that every machine people invent is nothing more than an extension of their innards. The base rhythm of film — 24 frames per second — is sort of centred in its pulse to our brain waves. If you start a film at 8 frames per second and with a variable speed motor slowly raise it to 32, you put the audience in the first stage of hypnosis.

So the natural pulse of film is a pulse of Film is a corollary to the brain’s reception of everyday ordinary vision. Then film grain approximates the first stage of hypnagogic vision, which occurs at a pulse within the range of film’s possibilities of projection. Also, during editing, film comes close to the way you remember. And finally, if you cut fast enough, you can reflect within 24 frames per second the saccadic movements of the eyes, which people aren’t ordinadly aware of, but which are an intrinsic part of seeing.

So virtually all your experiments were aimed at developing this relationship between film and seeing?

My cutting has always tried to be true to the eyes, to the nervous system and to memory, and to capture these processes, which happen very rapidly. At one point I felt my montage — inspired by Griffith and Eisenstein — had to evolve to do justice to memory recall, so I began to use the single frame to suggest what the mind can do during a flashback. Then I began to use superimpositions because these occur constantly in the saccadic movements of the eyes and in memory feedback and input.

I’ve done as many as seven superimpositions at one time — in Christ Mass Sex Dance (1990) — and I wish I could do more because there are more in vision itself. Then I shot out of focus to capture peripheral vision, which is always unfocused, or used flares to give a sense of the body when it has an overload in feedback and literally flares — something you can see with your eyes open.

In Loving (1957), a couple make love in the sun and their optic system flares — it’s really the nervous system’s ecstasy — in oranges and yellows and whites. I had noticed that when film flares out at the end of a colour roll, you get those same colours, and I put them in because they are intrinsic to human vision as well.

But of all these possible seeings, the hypnagogic has been the most important to you.

Yes. I sometimes like just to sit and watch my closed eyes sparking, or the streamings of my mind. They’re the best movies in town! But the flow is so rapid that to document it would call for a camera that would run 1,000 frames per second. All I can do on film is to grasp a little piece of it and then make a corollary. So my films don’t reflect what I see when I close my eyes — only a symbol of that. The extent to which I accept that is the extent to which I can be true to what film can do.

Since closed-eye vision is largely unfilmable, then, you had to find other means of representing it, and painting directly on to film became one way to do this.

At the birth of my first child, I was acutely conscious of my hypnagogic vision whenever I blinked my eyes. But it didn’t appear in the film I made of that birth — Window Water Baby Moving (1959) — so for the birth of my second child, which occurs in Part 2 of Dog Star Man and of my third in Thigh Line Lyre Triangular (1961), I painted on film to include what I had seen. I became very excited when I realised that my closed-eye vision resembled the work of the Abstract Expressionist painters I admired so much — all very Pollock-like and Rothko-like.

Did you sense that they were also doing the same thing — recording their optic feedback?

When I was living in New York in the 1950s and 1960s, I became an avid gallery-goer. I discovered Turner, who is probably still the most pervasive influence on me because of his representations of light. I was also strongly drawn to the abstact Expressionists — Pollock, Rothko, Kline — because of their interior vision. None of these so-called abstract painters — going back to Kandinsky and earlier — had made any reference to painting consciously out of their closed-eye vision, but I became certain that unconsciously many of them had. To me, they were all engaged in making icons of inner picturisation, literally mapping modes of non-verbal, non-symbolic, non-numerical thought. So I got interested in consciously and unconsciously attempting to represent this.

But it wasn’t enough to paint. To find as close a corollary to hypnagogic vision as possible, you had physically to manipulate the surface of the film strip.

I tried a number of different things, including iron filings under magnets! I would bake film before and after photographing to bring out certain chemical changes in the grain so that it would correspond to certain stages of hypnagogic vision. I once even herded brine shrimp into a pack to capture the quality of their movements. And I worked with household chemicals and dyes, and placed coloured powders under vibrators and magnets. The making of The Text of Light (1974), which involved shooting through a glass ashtray, was another way of capturing certain forms of both closed- and open-eye envisionment of light.

And you would scratch on film and write on it.

Words appear on film throughout my work. By scratching them I try to be true to the way words vibrate and jiggle when they appear in closed-eye vision — which doesn’t happen very often. Also, by scratching them I can at least make them more intrinsic to what film is — they become carriers of light. Photographed words relate more to memory recall or just to the open-eyed present.

Hand-painted sections appear in your work as early as Prelude (1962), the first part of Dog Star Man but in the past few years you’ve been making films such as The Dante Quartet and Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse (1991) that are wholly hand-painted. You even claim this is all you want to do now.

I now believe that film is much more predisposed to what you can do with Paint and scratches than with anything else. My hand-painted films are my favourites — I look at them again and again and they always feel like film not as if they’re referring to something else.

Do you see your work within a specific tradition of hand-painted film?

I’ve always felt drawn to the hand-painted films of Méliès, which are an extraordinary phenomenon in their own right and I’ve felt a kinship with film-makers such as Viking Eggeling, Walter Ruttman, Oscar Fischinger and Len Lye, who even batiked on film with his fingers. One of my main inspirations has been Marie Menken, and Harry Smith is often in my mind as I work. Many of them didn’t paint on film but their work has a hands-on quality that I admire.

What do you mostly work with?

Acrylics — mostly translucent acrylics — and India inks and a variety of dyes that are variously mixed with or not with acrylics. I have also made whole films with Magic Markers. I use brushes at times, but basically it’s paint on fingers, a different colour on each finger. Usually I prepare the film first with chemicals, so that the paint can dry and form patterns, then during the drying process I use chemicals again to create organic shapes and forms. Finally, I go over it a frame at a time to stitch these patterns into a unifed whole. If you watch me do it it looks as though I’m playing the piano – it’s very quick; very deft — but people forget that I have to paint 24 frames to get a second’s worth of film. I have hand-painted films like Eye Myth (1972), which is 9 seconds long, as well as Interpolations (1992) which runs for 12 minutes — the longest hand-painted film I have ever made.

You’ve painted on all kinds of film stock including 65mm Imax film. You also paint directly on footage you’ve found or shot yourself. What part of vision does that approximate?

Let me say first that painting on Imax was very exciting — it was as if an easel painter had been given a wall, it was such a large space to work with. The model for painting on photographed film was closed-eye vision mixing with open-eye vision. Not very many people can see that and it took me a long time before I could do both — see what I was looking at and also watch the nervous system’s immediate shape-and-color reaction to it.

So what is the new hand-painted work going to be?

What’s new is that I don’t have anything else as reference other than what the film itself is showing me. Every time fi1m reflects something that’s nameable, it limits what it can do. If I can make films that refer to things that can’t be lived through, then I feel that I’m giving film a chance to be in the fullest possible sense, and that makes me feel good. Now I really just want to fool around with paint on film, hoping to do so in such an open way that whatever is deep inside me, past all prejudice and even all learning, can come out along my arms to my fingertips, and with the help of these smudges and dyes sing a song like birds on a normal day.

(more)

 

In person

Legendary Epics Yarns and Fables: Part 2: Stan Brakhage (USA 1969)

Stan Brakhage exits the cinema and enters the Light of Day

Stan Brakhage phone call re: Phil Solomon’s “CLEPSYDRA” (1992)

Robert Creeley: on Stan Brakhage

 

Select frame enlargements

Anticipation of the Night. 1958.
16mm; 40 minutes; color; silent

‘The daylight shadow of a man in its movement evokes lights in the night. A rose held in hand reflects both sun and moon like illumination. The opening of a doorway onto trees anticipates the twilight into the night. A child is born on the lawn, born of water with its promisory rainbow, and the wild rose. It becomes the moon and the source of all light. Lights of the night become young children playing a circular game. The moon moves over a pillared temple to which all lights return. There is seen the sleep of innocents in their animal dreams, becoming the amusement, their circular game, becoming the morning. The trees change color and lose their leaves for the morn, they become the complexity of branches in which the shadow man hangs himself.’

 

“…” Reel 2. 1998
16mm; 16 minutes; color; silent

‘Brakhage’s new series of scratch-and-stain films, known as (…) or ellipses, are, among other things, a visual analogue to Abstract Expressionism. The onrushing imagery and the spatial conundrums it creates evoke not only Pollock but also the work of Franz Kline, Willem De Kooning, and even Mark Rothko – that is Pollock et al., at 24 frames per second. Eschewing the camera, Brakhage scrapes away the film emulsion to create a thicket (or sometimes a spider’s web) of white lines and rich, chemical colors. Some segments of the original footage appear to have been printed on negative stock or perhaps solarized – so that the blue and pink lines are inscribed on a white field. In any case, (…) is a cosmos. Rich without being ingratiating, the effect is one of rhythmic conflagration.’

 

The Dead. 1960.
16mm; 11 minutes; color; silent

‘Europe, weighted down so much with that past, was THE DEAD. I was always Tourist there; I couldn’t live in it. The graveyard could stand for all my view of Europe, for all the concerns with past art, for involvement with symbol. THE DEAD became my first work, in which things that might very easily be taken as symbols were so photographed as to destroy all their symbolic potential. The action of making THE DEAD kept me alive.’ — S.B.

 

Mothlight. 1963.
16mm; 3 minutes; color; silent

‘Brakhage made MOTHLIGHT without a camera. He just pasted mothwings and flowers on a clear strip of film and ran it through the printing machine.” – Jonas Mekas “MOTHLIGHT is a paradoxical preservation of pieces of dead moths in the eternal medium of light (which is life and draws the moth to death); so it flutters through its very disintegration. This abstract of flight captures matter’s struggle to assume its proper form; the death of the moth does not cancel its nature, which on the filmstrip asserts itself. MOTHLIGHT is on one level a parable of death and resurrection, but most really concerns the persistence of the essential form, image, and motion of being.’ – Ken Kelman

 

The Dante Quartet. 1987.
16mm or 35mm; 6 minutes; color; silent

‘This hand-painted work six years in-the-making (37 in the studying of The Divine Comedy) demonstrates the earthly conditions of “Hell,” “Purgatory” (or Transition) and “Heaven” (or “existence is song,” which is the closest I’d presume upon heaven from my experience) as well as the mainspring of/from “Hell” (HELL SPIT FLEXION) in four parts which are inspired by the closed-eye or hypnagogic vision created by those emotional states. Originally painted on IMAX and Cinemascope 70mm and 35mm, these paint-laden rolls have been carefully rephotographed and translated to 35mm and 16mm compilations by Dan Yanosky of Western Cine.’

 

Murder Psalm. 1980.
16mm; 18 minutes; color; silent

‘“… unparalleled debauchery, when man turns into a filthy, cowardly, cruel, vicious reptile. That’s what we need! And what’s more, a little ‘fresh blood’ that we may grow accustomed to it ….” (Dostoyevsky’s The Devils, Part II, Chapter VIII) “In my novel The Devils I attempted to depict the complex and heterogenous motives which may prompt even the purest of heart and the most naive people to take part in an absolutely monstrous crime.”’ — Dostoyevsky’s The Diary of a Writer

See many more Brakhage frame enlargements

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Cool, and nice comparison. ** Bill, Hi, B. Thanks about Marseilles. It’s a long story, but … shit happens is the easiest way to think about shit, so I’m going with that. Excellent about the dog! I’m guessing your weekend will involve a fair amount of playing fetch with it? ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey. Ben. Well, good news on the manager front! He does really sound like a pip. Have a lovely weekend. ** Thomas Moronic, Yay, the post got you in here to say hey! My pleasure re: reposting it. Thank you again from the future turned present. I’m good, I hope you’re good. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Well, not just France. The Spaniards, just to cite our next door neighbor, are very good at using the streets to force the government (or whoever) to get real. But, yeah, I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with the US. I mean, we’ve got social media here too, so the people blaming social media’s existence are just copping out. I hope something changes extremely soon. That motherfucker and the effects/results of his power have to go, like, yesterday by whatever means, violent or non-. I look forward to reading the interview. I just saw that there’s a new Tyler album, but I haven’t listened to it yet. Will do. ** Corey Heiferman, Hi. Yeah, the people at the Marseilles venue felt terrible and were super nice about it. It was not in any way their fault. No, I’ve been non-stop doing events for the film all week, so I haven’t checked out Jeanines or really done much of anything else, but I’m in the clear for the weekend at least, so … Bandcamp is my second home, kind of. Agree, it’s a mega-boon. ** Right. I’ve restored and slightly updated/improved an old post regarding the great film maestro Stan Brakhage that I hope you will scour at some point during your weekends. Thank you. See you on Monday.