By Brakhage: an Anthology (1954-2001)
Criterion DVD (region 1)
d. Stan Brakhage; pr. Stan Brakhage; scr. Stan Brakhage; ed. Stan Brakhage
Filmmaker Stan Brakhage is acknowledged as one of the most distinctive and influential of American avant-garde artists.
In almost fifty years of personal filmmaking he has made over 400 films, mostly silent shorts, many even made without a camera as he scratched and / or hand painted film frames and leader. His non-narrative work is considered to be American film’s greatest exploration of the subjectivity of perception. Needless to say, Brakhage’s work is far removed from conventional Hollywood methods and represents perhaps the ultimate in individual expression on film: moving visual art as music or poetry. Brakhage’s personal life is to an extent equally enigmatic, a man who confessed he withdrew from conventional reality and took his family to seek a home in the Colorado mountains and dedicated much of his life to his almost solitary art. By Brakhage: an Anthology is a two-disc DVD release by Criterion of a selection of his most known, influential and representative works, covering the length of his career. Avant-garde filmmaking was irrevocably altered by Brakhage and many of his techniques have since been incorporated into both feature filmmaking and especially in the so-called MTV aesthetic. His films offer a chance to see and experience what film is truly capable of achieving outside the mainstream.
From Mothlight
The two DVDs in this set collect some 26 short films, selected with Brakhage’s approval.
They range from his most controversial early films – the beatnik inspired Desistfilm, the complete epic Dog Star Man and the morbidly beautiful autopsy film The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes – to his celebrated early shorts – the fascination of birth in Window Water Baby Moving proving a reference point for his thematic stresses – and his collage films – with Mothlight and The Garden of Earthly Delights (his response to painter Hieronymus Bosch) amongst them – through to his striking hand-painted films – The Dante Quartet (years in the making), his response to television’s effect on the eye in Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse, Stellar (his visualization of the cosmos), culminating in the transcendental joy of Love Song. The majority of the works are on the second disc in this collection, which does convey the search for a spiritual awareness. All are non-narrative works (though some deliberately tease with notions of narrative and especially progression – the journey being an important motif) and mostly silent, the theme of perception central to them as Brakhage seeks for a one-on-one relationship between film and viewer. It has often been said that Brakhage’s films are made for one person alone to see in the dark and react to as an individual, making his works the antithesis of the mass audience aesthetic. Deliberately mythopoeic at times (especially in Dog Star Man), the short films in this collection reveal his progression as a filmmaker and in particular his growing obsession with hand-painted film (ranging in length from nine seconds to over ten minutes). Viewing film is ideally a perceptual and thus sensual experience, the eye at the center of one’s identity being a prospect that seems to intrigue him.
From Glaze of Cathexis
Brakhage is fascinated by color, shape, texture and the fragmentary rhythm of projected film. If there is a theme that runs through the works in this collection it is in terms of the subjectivity of perception – the ability of film not to capture an objective reality but to literally give form to a unique perceptual experience.
For Brakhage, film is the very form of perception, with content representative of the filmmaker’s vision. Perception is sensual and in turn represents the search for connection with one’s identity and life (and God?), hence his almost ritualistic fascination with sex as a shared perceptual experience which in turn gives form to that very perception – a new life (the birth of which he films in minute detail in Window Water Baby Moving). Perhaps for Brakhage, perception is life and there is nothing beyond its implied subjectivity – the move to hand-painted works being thus explicable in terms of his desire to capture his own vision (especially what he termed “closed eye vision”) – to give it a tangible form only possible though film: to create perception. It is this theme, this obsessive searching for perceptual validation in a sense that shapes the mythic resonance of Dog Star Man and most of his subsequent work: to confront and capture the individuality of vision. In this sense viewing the both alarmingly real but almost abstracted footage in The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes becomes a sensual experience – the response to an autopsy.
From Dog Star Man
There are an extraordinary variety of responses – intellectual, emotional, sensual – possible when seeing Brakhage’s work, and these will undoubtedly differ from viewer to viewer as his films essentially defy categorization or easy explanation.
They are confronting and challenging works. For Brakhage, to document perception is in a sense to study the individual self. Every slight camera movement, every edit has precise meaning for the filmmaker and the cumulative effect is an essentially personal, subjective experience shared with the viewer – film thus allowing perception to become a true form of interpersonal communication. Thus, what is important is exactly that individual and subjective reaction to these films, yet his control of images is such that he can evoke recognizable, shared moods, from joy to melancholia. In this world, the viewer is intended to be not a passive recipient but a participant, engaged in the search for form and meaning. This was interpreted by film theorists as a radical redefinition of the relationship between film and viewer and has been much commented on in the plethora of writings about Brakhage. It makes his films a truly unique gift, wherein the camera almost becomes (as Brakhage has stated in his theories of filmmaking) an extension of the camera operator’s own optical / nervous system. There is nothing on film quite like Brakhage’s works and on viewing this collection it is easy to see why he has been hailed as one of filmdom’s real artists. For capturing the sheer potential of film as an art form, this Criterion DVD release is invaluable.
DVD DETAILS:
Vision
The visual transfer is irrefutable in that it perfectly captures these films: they are all taken from the original sources and given new high-definition transfers with Brakhage’s approval. His personal style is perfectly evident in the emphasis on color, shape and the jittery movements of a hand held camera (considered unprofessional in Hollywood, these jitters are explained by avant-garde theorists as Brakhage’s rendering of his own nervous system affecting his perception). He has admitted his fascination with not only closed eye movement but rapid eye movement and this is frequently seen in his work – indeed, his calmest film is The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes as the autopsy room becoming a kind of de-assembly line, and even that becomes a contemplation of the colors and textures of the dead body as it is cut apart (the cutting of the body a parallel to film cutting). He often uses soft focus effects and deliberately unbalanced (in the traditional sense) compositions. His editing rhythms are both jarring and oddly fluid, the interplay of light and shadow negotiating his emphasis on shapes and textures, from the remarkable way light disrupts the dark in Wedlock House to the moth wings fastened onto film stock and projected in Mothlight, the film that defines his fascination with ideas of collage, and repeated in The Garden of Earthly Delights especially (this time using vegetable matter stuck onto film stock). Many of his images last mere fractions of a second, resulting in films that move at great speed, his hand painted films a rapid succession of “abstract” still paintings capable of unusual rhythm.
Sound
Brakhage has mentioned his dislike of sound as essentially distracting from the visual images rather than enhancing them. However, his editing rhythms, compositions and movements ably strive for a kind of film-as-music. Many of his films simply do not need the accompaniment of sound. Most of the works in this collection are thus aurally silent. Some of them, however, do have a soundtrack, rarely “authentic” in the sense of creating a traditional realistic or diegetic ambience and indeed frequently stressing the separateness of sound and vision. When this is the case, the transfer preserves the original monaural intent of the material. The sounds Brakhage uses are often telling, from the recitation of poetry to accompany The Stars Are Beautiful making for a comment on the discrepancy between sound and image as shown, to the inclusion of home-movie type footage of children speaking. Often the sounds he uses are distorted (again implying a subjective rather than objective perception), strikingly so in Crack Glass Eulogy which features the almost screeching beeps of a “music requiem” by Rick Corrigan as a kind of traffic flow. The most affecting sound film is In Dreaming, done to a collage of musical phrases from Stephen Foster by Joel Haertling, perfectly evocative of sadness, a state in which Brakhage admits he finds much beauty (hence his silent IMAX work on Nightmusic).
Special Features
From Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse
There are numerous special features. The films can be viewed and selected individually or played continuously in succession.
The menu screen for each film features a quote from Brakhage about the film. Most of the films also have a commentary option in which Brakhage talks of the individual film – about its origins, what it means to him, how it fits into his theories of film, philosophy and art and what he sought to achieve by the film – the comments making clearer his avowed fascination with vision, sex, death and the creation of myth. He also intersperses details from his personal life (marriage and children especially) in terms of how they affected his filming methods and content. His comments make it clear that he considers film as the ultimate form of perception, an individual film in a sense being the creation of what he considers “a new self” (hence his comments on Glaze of Cathexis). He also talks of which films he finds the happiest experiences and which he finds almost cathartic (believing that Commingled Containers points the direction of his future filmmaking endeavors). Each disc also features two short sections from a documentary entitled “Brakhage on Brakhage” which has been divided into four sections overall. In this he talks of his own vision problems (his own rapid eye movement), the people who relate most to his films, his thoughts on Hollywood and on video as opposed to film. He further elucidates his ideas of “visual music” as it relates to hand-painted film. He also mentions his super 8mm work (a sample of which is not included in this DVD collection) and on his idea of the mountain man (the character type that informs perhaps his most celebrated film Dog Star Man). He talks of the function of hand-held camerawork as uniting the camera with the filmmaker’s own nervous system and confirms that his films are about birth, sex, death and the search for God. There is also a collector’s booklet which features an informative essay by film historian / analyst Fred Camper which functions as an introduction to Brakhage, the complexities many have found in his work and how they have been variably interpreted over time, as well as offering information on how best to view Brakhage’s work. The second section of the booklet consists of brief paragraphs designed to introduce each film. In all, Criterion has done another fine job and in preserving Brakhage’s work in particular have one of the very few DVD examples of avant-garde American cinema currently available.
