Seeking (and Finding) Brakhage

Stan Brakhage was one of the most gifted, most prolific, and most scandalously underrecognized artists in cinema history. His hundreds of films range from a few seconds (Eye Myth, 1967, eight seconds) to several hours (The Art of Vision, 1961–65, 260 minutes) in length; their formats range from 8 mm and super-8mm to 16 mm and 35 mm, and a handful are in IMAX or the short-lived Polavision process; most are silent, but some contain music or spoken words; and while most consist of photographed imagery, in many the visuals are painted or scratched directly on the film stock, and the 1963 classic Mothlight was made by arranging insect wings and bits of plants between strips of clear perforated tape. In addition to his vast filmography, which began with Interim in 1952 and culminated with the Chinese Series in 2003, Brakhage wrote several books on cinema, displaying a keenly poetic style exemplified by Metaphors on Vision, published as a special issue of Jonas Mekas’s enterprising Film Culture magazine in 1963 and subsequently republished in book form. Its opening words have been quoted countless times by countless critics, theorists, and philosophers of film, myself included, but they convey the essential concerns of Brakhage’s esthetic so vividly that they deserve to be quoted yet again:

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure in perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of “Green?” How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the “beginning was the word.” (Brakhage 1963)

Connecting the insights expressed in those words with the specifics of filmmaking practice, the incomparable Brakhage exegete Fred Camper writes in his magisterial new book, Seeking Brakhage, that in Brakhage’s photographed works “the filmic appearance of [an] object is meant to represent the act of perception itself. Brakhage’s imagined world is a world of continually intruding perception; not something that you can lose yourself in directly, as if it had a life of its own, but rather something which is a dynamic, continuing process. An object never has a fixed meaning which can be ‘identified with’ by the viewer: it is rather, only, an element of perception. In this sense Brakhage speaks not directly to our imaginative sensibilities but rather to those sensibilities only as reached through perception” (Camper 2022, 254). In this passage Camper is discussing the long cycle of Songs that Brakhage made in (mostly) 8 mm between 1964 and 1969, but the principle is true of virtually all his films. One of Brakhage’s great enemies is “picture,” an image that can be rapidly absorbed and easily inserted into the standardized meaning systems we use to navigate through our everyday environments and intellectual activities; another great enemy, not mentioned by Camper, is what he called “clutch,” the ability of narrative movies (which Brakhage enjoyed watching, incidentally) to seize and hold attention by means of strategies that his own films vigorously foreclose. Camper’s analyses rightly emphasize the distinction Brakhage drew between “picture” and “active eyesight,” as well as his replacement of “what one knows” with exploration of “that which one does not know,” an “extreme” artistic choice that “expresses ambivalence about everything [Brakhage] has lived through, including his own self” (161–2).

Extreme, indeed. As are the esthetics of pretty much everything in Brakhage’s voluminous filmography. I’ve been watching and pondering his work for more than half a century, and today as always, their primary effect for me is one of speed – speed of camera movement, speed of editing rhythm, speed of shifts among shapes, colors, and juxtapositions, and speed of allusion to the teeming wealth of worldly knowledge, psychological speculation, and spiritual intuition that underlie the astonishingly dense manifestations of the films themselves. Camper has an astonishing talent for perceiving, registering, comprehending, and connecting even the most fleeting of forms, textures, colors, and edits, and his interpretive intelligence is equally sharp, relating individual films, sequences, and frames to the larger contexts of Brakhage’s artistic philosophy as it evolved over the long span of his career. While the book is not biographical, Brakhage’s cinema was intensely personal – a great many films use his home, his first wife and their five children, and himself as subject matter, raw material, or both – and details of his life occasionally filter into Camper’s discussions. Some of the details involve fateful matters, as when Brakhage stopped painting on film after learning that the coal tar in his paints may have caused the bladder cancer that killed him in 2003. Other details may be mundane, as when Camper runs through possible reasons for Brakhage’s turn from 16 to 8 mm in 1964 (he was low on money, someone stole his 16 mm camera, he wanted his films to be as easily purchased as paintings are). And some are unexpected, as when Brakhage says that a major influence on his style is the imperfect vision caused by his slightly defective eyes: “…much of what you and others have described as my experimentation is just my scrambling to come to an understanding of how you achieve sight” (160). On the latter point, Camper admits he was momentarily disappointed with the seemingly reductive nature of Brakhage’s comment, but then realized that the filmmaker’s description of how he sees is also a description of how he thinks, “the images standing for a thought process that never ceases to move, and hence, never reaches a conclusion that might feel like a resting point, or suggest a statement translatable into words” (164). Precisely.

Seeking Brakhage offers limitless opportunities for discussion, so I’ll quote a few passages to suggest the depth and breadth that characterize the book.

• On politics and the failure to “save the world” by means of art: “Make a work with specific references to political and moral battles…and you are forced to deal directly with issues of power and persuasion…. Follow Brakhage’s path, and few viewers will see commentary on current issues. Indeed, few viewers will see your film at all. And yet, in his attempt to create a new viewer consciousness separate from that fostered by mass culture, his films could not be more relevant….” (151–2)

• On antipathy for symmetry: “Symmetry is…a kind of knowing. It knows that left and right, or top and bottom, are identical. It represents a predetermined pattern. It is a cousin to knowing objects by their names. It is complete in itself, while Brakhage is a poet of continually unfolding incompleteness. His alternative to symmetry is a collection of temporary imagined sought-for nightmares and paradises, in which the viewer is as untethered as the filmmaker, always adrift in a world whose glory is that it cannot be fully represented or mapped or explained.” (164)

• On exploration: “[T]here should…be a place for experiences that take us out of dailiness, the world of what we already know, that which is already familiar, even that which has been made familiar through repetition within the structure of a film, offering instead visions of what we have not yet experienced, of what we had not imagined seeing, of what the artist himself admits, in the very structures of his unparsable and untranslatable films, he does not know.” (173)

• On the eponymous object in My Mtn. Song 27 (1968): “The mountain is not a real mountain, nor is it a mountain in Brakhage’s imagination; it is a shape of imagined perception. The mountain is not unlike the specks of paint in some of Brakhage’s other films which [he] says have to do with an attempt to render ‘closed-eye vision.’ This may be part of the reason for the strange distance that always seems to exist between the object and the viewer: it is like the distance of the everyday senses from the kind of shapes you see with closed eyes, or dreaming. The gulf between viewer and mountain is the gulf between sensual perception and unsensual imagination.” (218–19)

• On the lasting nature of art: “All art exists for the consciousness of the viewer, of course, but less rewarding art dies in a single instantly-transmitted mood, affection, or statement, the consumerist delivery of a triggered pleasure, while the best has an almost infinite life as an ongoing experience.” (275)

In the interests of disclosure, I’ll note that I knew Brakhage for the last 25 years or so of his life, and I’ve known Camper for more than twice that long. I initially met Stan when I interviewed him for the first of many articles I wrote as film critic of The Christian Science Monitor, and I first encountered Fred via screenings at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a student and ran the MIT Film Society in the 1960s. Brakhage was wonderful about keeping in touch over the years, and while my ongoing friendship with Camper has surely predisposed me in favor of his new book, my admiration for it is carefully considered and based on very long familiarity with Brakhage’s unique cinema. Nor is my approbation of the volume blind to the venial imperfections I’ve spotted here and there. It may be true, for instance, that the “tiny lights” in Song 11 (1965) “can be seen as clearly (during a careful watching of the film) if one closes one’s eyes” (267), but it seems to me that closed eyes and “careful watching” are mutually exclusive categories. At another point, the phrase “kind of,” a hazy locution in any case, appears three times in one paragraph.

More broadly, Camper sometimes falls prey to hyperbole, especially when evoking the high blood pressure aroused in him by certain films: some in-and-out movements in Song 9 (1965) are “terrifying” (265); Song 11 is “deeply terrifying” (267); close-ups of a dog’s corpse in the sublime Sirius Remembered (1950) are “horrifying” (295); The Wold-Shadow (1972) presents a “terrifying vision” (301); Fire of Waters (1965) contains “terrifying” fragments (82); Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse (1991) contains “utterly terrifying” images (324); the Arabics are “terrifying” (333); and so on. I don’t mean to impugn Camper’s accounts of his own feelings, but I have watched many a film with him, and since I do not remember him trembling with fear or fleeing the auditorium even once, I think his language in these passages may be a bit too strong. Then again, he may be describing uncommonly deep emotional resonances with an accuracy and candor rarely found in critical writing. When he states that his viewings of one film “have shaken the very foundations of my existence in the world” (280), and says of another that no film “has involved me more in its watching, terrified every fiber of my being, totally deranged my perception, and more deeply, everything that I’ve come to think of as my thought processes” (282), he appears to be expressing literal truths about experiences so intense that I can only envy him for having them.

Finally, some brief words about the structure of Seeking Brakhage, which came into being at the suggestion of its British publisher, Eyewash Books, and consists of diverse material; some was written as far back as Camper’s days at MIT, when his program notes were invaluable guides to challenging works by Brakhage and others, and some was penned as recently as the essay “Still Seeking Brakhage,” written expressly for this book. Since it is a compendium of essays and articles written at different times for diverse purposes, some repetition and duplication are inevitable, but for me the book reads smoothly and engagingly throughout. Stills made from short filmstrips punctuate the text, which begins with an introduction by film scholar P. Adams Sitney, probably the most prominent scholar of avant-garde cinema in general and Brakhage’s great contributions in particular; his comments on Brakhage’s intersections with artists in other fields (especially poets as various as Dante, William Blake, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson) complement Camper’s occasional invocations of painters (Paul Cézanne, Clyfford Still), composers (Olivier Messiaen, Johann Sebastian Bach), and choreographers (Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham) whose influence makes any comprehensive Brakhage study an interdisciplinary study. No critic, scholar, or cinephile is better qualified than Camper to keep Brakhage’s messages alive and make them alluring, not to mention comprehensible, for new generations of viewers. Reading his book is very different from watching a Brakhage film, but it too is an adventure in perception. Camper writes that he is still seeking Brakhage; for me, he has come remarkably close to finding him.

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Notes on contributors

David Sterritt

David Sterritt, editor-in-chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video, wrote about Stan Brakhage’s work in many articles for The Christian Science Monitor, where he was film critic for almost 40 years. His writing on avant-garde cinema has also appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Blimp: Zeitschrift für Film, Senses of Cinema, Film Quarterly, and elsewhere, and he has lectured on the topic at such venues as the Harvard Film Archive, Lincoln Center, Baylor University’s Art & Soul Conference, and the Foundation for Hellenic Culture.