Martin Rumsby

As an amateur enthusiast working out of the Auckland Filmmakers' Cooperative in the early 1980s I stumbled across a pile of Canyon Cinemanews, the publication of the famous San Francisco film distribution cooperative. Flicking through the Cinemanews was a revelation. As page turned into page I discovered, for the first time, the existence of a film artists' movement in the United States. I had been wondering for some time why films did not reflect or echo the concerns of contemporary visual arts. One name, in particular, stood out in the pages of Cinemanews. Stan Brakhage, the dominant figure of the American avant-garde cinema. But what would his films look like? That question was answered for me in 1983 when I saw my first Brakhage films, which were included in the American Federation of the Arts History of the American Avant-Garde cinema program.

Stan Brakhage, who died on March 9, 2003, was one of the Twentieth Century's most original film artists. Born illegitimately as Robert Sanders in Kansas City, Missouri in 1933 Brakhage was adopted and brought up in Denver, Colorado.

Brakhage's films included WINDOW WATER BABY MOVING (1959) showing his first wife, Jane, giving birth to their first daughter, his magnum-opus DOG STAR MAN (1961-64), the startling ACT OF SEEING WITH ONE'S OWN EYES (1971) filmed in the Pittsburg Coroner's Office, THE TEXT OF LIGHT (1974) and THE ROMAN NUMEROLOGY SERIES.

In addition to his filmmaking Brakhage also wrote and published several books on cinema including, METAPHORS ON VISION, A MOVING PICTURE GIVING AND TAKING BOOK, THE BRAKHAGE LECTURES, FILM BIOGRAPHIES and THE BRAKHAGE SCRAPBOOK.

Brakhage's oeuvre poses this question of cinema ? How would the aesthetic principles that were applied. say, to the music of Bella Bartok, Edgar Varese or Charles Ives, the painting of, say, Jackson Pollock or Arshille Gorky, or the writing of, say, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce appear if they were applied to film?

The cinematic language that Brakhage crafted from these, and other, influences has today projected itself forward into the language of rock videos, television commercials and feature filmmaking.

So, you may ask, if Brakhage's influence has already been absorbed into dominant cinema why should we bother looking at his work? Well, there are a couple of answers to that question. The first is that in turning Brakhage's innovations to commercial ends they have often been trivialized and denigrated by their new masters. Of course Brakhage has helped to make the language of industrial cinema more interesting but, at the same time, the expressive gesturality and subjectivity that underlies Brakhage's aesthetic ethos are today most often rendered, by others, as redundant mannerisms.

Secondly, it is a mater of getting to the very root of things. To fully understand, say, rock and roll music and to create and innovate within that form it is helpful to have a grounding in black gospel, blues, soul as well as country and western music because they are the actual roots of rock and roll. The same rule appplies to all art which seeks to be genuine.

If one is unable to get to the source of something, be it cultural, scientific or philosophical then it is unlikely that one will be able to innovate within that form. In matters of culture, work that lacks an essential substance is dishonest and insincere and therefore not art.

In the almost 400 films that he made between 1952 and 2003 Stan Brakhage attempted to create cinematic metaphors for consciousness and perception. Inspired by Ezra Pound's edict for artists to 'make it new,' Brakhage fashioned new forms of cinema. Dispensing with narrative, Brakhage sought instead to create new ways of thinking appropriate to the language of cinema. He sought to create a cinematic style through which humans may share their deepest thought processes. The result is a challenging body of intense emotional work ranging from documentary to mythology, home movies, structural films, collage films, right through to abstract visual musicals.

Brakhage attempted to expand cinematic experience from mere description, often through visual metaphor, to incorporate the subjective dimension of dreams, imaginings, visions and intuitions. His aesthetic envisioned the dialectic between subjectivity and objectivity in an unusual combination of documentary and romantic impulses.

As humanist documentaries Brakhage's films are a record of his visionary experiences. The flow of images in a Brakhagian film represents the flow of images in consciousness. Brakhage's films are representations of moving visual thinking.

The romanticist aspect of Brakhage's cinema is manifested in his desire to undo the levelling effects of socialization; to recover the profound personal vision of one's childhood. The romantically driven artist attempts to recover that which society would undo. To be true to oneself, one must be true to one's personal vision.

Vision, for Brakhage, is a product of the whole body. Our experience of seeing is a complete physiological act, the result of a nervous reaction to light impulses entering our eyes then passing down the optic nerve to create mental representations which, in turn, trigger a range of associations, memories and related reactions.

Brakhage believed that both a movie camera and film stock can be manipulated to faithfully render inner visions. His concept of sight included the flashing patterns the eye registers when rubbed, association, memory, fantasy and dreams. He employed many techniques to realize this concept of vision ? rapid, hand-held camera movement, the use of specially prepared lenses and by directly working on the film's surface - painting, scratching, cooking and growing moulds on film. Brakhage employed filters, distorting lenses and camera movement to create a two dimensional cinematic space. This space often came to mark the convergence of romanticism and abstract expressionism in cinema.

As action painters pitch themselves into tumultous situations to make works which emphasize the moment of creation, so Brakhage emphasized the ecstatic experience od self as a means of integrating one's personal identity. In so doing Brakhage hoped to incarnate vision ? to realise visions as an act of the total body. This visionary aspect became so overriding for Brakhage that for most of his career he made silent films.

As assessment of the progression of Brakhage's style reveals his difficulty in reconciling a naturalistic, subjective cinema with formalist abstraction. In his early filmsd, THIGH LINE LYRE TRIANGULAR (1961), DOG STAR MAN (1961-64), MOTHLIGHT (1963), SONG 21 (1966) through to THE WOLD SHADOW (1972), Brakhage attempted a synthesis of subjective and objective viewpoints by alternating between gestural and documentary style representations. It is as if Brakhage, true to his American romanticist roots, had trouble relinquishing the photographic image. All of the above films leave an almost indelible trace of Brakhage's struggle toward the complete interiority of later films such as THE DANTE QUARTET and RAGE NET.

Brakhage's first films conformed to the then dominant practice of American avant-garde cinema - ?he psychodramatic or trance film. Such films usually depict an islated protagonist in an psychically charged land or city scape populated by objects of symbolic significance. The protagonist appears troubled and frustrated in a love quest or seeks meaningful interaction with the world.

Even in Brakhage's early films the camera movement functions as an extreme articulation of his emtional response to the event being depicted. As his aesthetic developed Brakhage began to dispense with actors and dramatic situations. His quest for a truly subjective cinema demanded that the protagonist be not in front of but behind the camera.

Two black and white films from 1957, DAYBREAK and WHITEYE, demonstrate Brakhage's early attempt to push the psychodrama towards lyricism. In both of these films Brakhage strove to stay as true as possible to the moment of photography completing them with very little editing, afterthought, or restructuring.

DAYBREAK is an atmospheric, moody film in which we see a young woman wake up and prepare to go out into the world to commit suicide. When reaching the place of her intended death, however, she observes and is observed by a young man. This causes her to realize that there may yet be a chance of love for her.

The use of actors in DAYBREAK as well as the almost melodramatic ending suggest an affinity with narrative cinema, an affinity which Brakhage resists with his individualistic, hand-held camera, disjuncyive editing and strident, non-synchronous soundtrack.

After seeing Marie Menken's simple, personal films in New York during the 1950s, Brakhage began to direct his cinema away from psychodrama toward a poetic vision of cinema.

A winter landscape, in the film WHITEYE, becomes a vehicle for a lyrical rendering of frustrated love. The opening shot of WHITEYE is a pan along a window frame. Rather than the surrogate protagonist we identify with in DAYBREAK here we are given to understand that, in looking through the window, we are seeing through the filmmaker's eyes. This subjective viewpoint is reinforced as the camera continues its exploration to reveal a lit candle on the windowsill. The vertical candle with the flame above could represent the letter i, the I of the self, the I that sees through the eye. It is like a little cinematic sentence about knowledge that comes from seeing (i=eye=I). That the candle stands as it does before a window intersected by the windowframe further represents the filmmaker's divided state of mind as he attempts to write a love letter.

The lyrical aspect of Brakhage's cinema came to the fore in 1960s. His SONGS series, shot on 8mm film, also marked Brakhage's increased attention to composing his films in camera, as an immediate response to external events, rather than objectively structuring his film on an editing bench sometime after the immediate experience of filming.

Altogether, Brakhage created twentynine SONGS between 1964 and 1969. The SONGS series in incredibly diverse, ranging from the four minute long domestic potrait of his first wife Jane ? SONG 1 ? through to the symphonic 100 minute long study of war ? SONG XXIII: 23rd Psalm Branch.

SONGS 21 and 22 are direct, expressionistic films. In SONG 21 an underlying image struggles to make itself seen through overlying paints and crystals which Brakhage applied to the film's surface. Where the overlay is thickest it could represent Brakhage going inside the flowers he has filmed and looking back out at the world, from the flowers' point of view. His reworking of the photographic image also indicates the subjective overlay of a vision clouded by memory and emotion. How we all see the same thing differently, depending on the differeing experiences and perceptions that we carry through this world. It was important to Brakhage that we recognize such difference so that each of us may fully enter into life.

SONG 22 is a film that was completely made in the camera that reiterates the themes of SONG 21 ? the desire experience an adventure in perception which is capable of liberating one's personal vision.

Some years later, whilst walking in the woods, Brakhage had a vision of an unacountable anthropomorphic shadow amongst the trees. This vision caused Brakhage to compose THE WOLD SHADOW (1972) a cinematic homage to the God of the forest. Brakhage returned to the woods and placed a piece of glass on an easel between the camera and the trees that he planned to film. After composing the shot, Brakhage would take a single photographic frame, paint on the glass, shoot the glass again and so on. There being 24 frames in a single second of projected film, it took Brakhage a full day to shoot the shimmering two and a half minute long WOLD SHADOW.

I see THE WOLD SHADOW as Brakhage staging a subjective intervention in nature and his insistence of an individual's direct experience of and active realtionship with nature. (Which should also be taken to mean human nature as well as the nature of film itself).

Instead of attempting to create meaning through montage, metaphor and dynamic rhythm ? the usual hallmarks of Brakhagian cinema, THE WOLD SHADOW is unusal in that it veers quite close to 'structural' filmmaking ? a form of avant-garde cinema that Brakhage was rather ambivalent about. The fixed camera viewpoint concentrating on a single scene reminds us of earlier films, such as Jack Chambers' CIRCLE (1967-68), Michael Snow's WAVELENGTH (1967) and Andy Warhol's EMPIRE. But THE WOLD SHADOW would stand, for Brakhage, as much in argument with his fellow filmmakers as tribute.

THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS (1981) is a collage film composed entirely of mountain zone vegetation and, as such, presents a fascinating play on notions of realism and representation. In this case natural flora ? real leaves, twigs, flowers and soil have been laid directly onto unexposed film which was later exposed without the usual intermediaries of camera and lens. It was made to become a moving photogram. Looking at THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS we directly perceive bits and pieces of real life projected onto a cinema screen. But moving through the projection gate at 24 frames a second these real life objects become abstracted. The realism of nature becomes transformed by the reality of mechanical reproduction. Brakhage sheds a new light on nature, nature in the nature of cinema.

THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS also suggests the struggle within a nature that can only survive and perpetuate life by constantly consuming itself. The film begins and ends with negative imprints of flora over which a positive image track is superimposed as illustration of nature's double- edged sword. It leads us to think about the realtionship between decay and creativity ? how creativity follows a period of ingestion and growth.

Stan Brakhage continued to make films through the 1980s and 1990s, adding to the incredible diversity of his creative output, venturing into abstract expressionism, returning to psychodrama, the landscape and sound. His films open up for us a whole new way (or maybe the recover an old way) of looking at ourselves, our world and cinema.

Based on an article originally published in THE BIG PICTURE, Auckland 1997.