Texts of Light: A Four-Part Series on the Films of Stan Brakhage (Part 3 & 4)

ABOUT STAN BRAKHAGE

“Just as a composer can be said to work primarily with ‘musical ideas,’ I can be said to work with the ideas intrinsic to film, which is the only medium capable of making paradigmatic ‘closure’ apropos Primal Sight. A composer most usually creates parallels to the surroundings of the inner ear – the primary thoughts of sounds. I, similarly, now work with the electric synapses of thought to achieve overall cathexis paradigms separate from but ‘at one’ with the inner lights, the Light, at source, of being human.” – Stan Brakhage


Stan Brakhage (1988). Courtesy of Marilyn Brakhage

The towering figure of film art, Stan Brakhage (1933 – 2003) created over 350 films in a career spanning almost half a century. His influence reached far beyond experimental filmmaking, profoundly affecting all modes of moving-image production. He pushed existing editing techniques, painting and scratching directly on film stock, and freed the 16mm camera from the tripod embracing a new order of cinematic motion and vocabulary akin to abstract expressionist painting and free-form poetry. Brakhage theorized that social conditioning involved the gradual constriction of vision and the development of visual taboos such as sex, birth, sickness, aging and death – what he called 'the very stuff of life’. In response, his camera sought to register previously forbidden dimensions of real experience and his films demonstrate an uncompromising and highly personal artistic vision uniquely concerned with the experiences of daily life. Correspondingly, his overwhelming importance to the field of alternative cinema is further exemplified by the lasting impression of his dedication as a lecturer and film scholar – Brakhage continually travelled across North America and Europe to present his films despite his worsening physical condition. Passionately, articulately and polemically Brakhage served as a much-needed ambassador for experimental cinema and confirmation of the immanent potential of the cinematic form.

ABOUT MARILYN BRAKHAGE

Marilyn Brakhage is a graduate of the Motion Picture Studies and Art History departments of Ryerson and York Universities in Toronto. She has worked as a film distributor, programmer, freelance writer and home educator, and is currently managing the estate of her late husband, filmmaker and theoretician, Stan Brakhage. She currently lives in Victoria, British Columbia.


Stately Mansions Did Decree (1999). Courtesy of the Estate of Stan Brakhage and Fred Camper

PART 3: Thought Process and Visual Music (1991 – 1997)

Thursday, May 3rd at 7:30pm
Total Running Time: 72 min.
Screening Format: 16mm


...Preludes 2 (1995). Courtesy of the Estate of Stan Brakhage and Fred Camper

Agnus Dei Kinder Synapse (16mm, colour, silent, 4 min., 1991) 

“To the child mind, the transformative sacrificial power of ‘O, Lamb of God’ is a daily manifestation – not as an adult shift-of-interest, but rather as ritual magic in which a toy train (‘-of-thought,’ an adult might say) becomes medium of shifts-of-scene, soforth, wherein an elephantine shape transforms to a more ‘real’ (i.e. less metaphorical) train, in sacrifice of transformative elephant, so on-&-on.” – Stan Brakhage

The “b” Series (16mm, colour, silent, 12:30 min., 1995)

“This film is a series of five little hand-painted and elaborately step-printed sections which are individually titled but so inter-related I've decided they should always be shown in this order together, but each such a distinction of the essentially un-nameable subject matter they variously facet that they should retain the character of individual pieces within their shared context... a context I've attempted to represent by a small ‘b’ for my name Brakhage." – Stan Brakhage

Self Song & Death Song (16mm, colour, silent, 4:30 min., 1997)
“[Brakhage’s] passion for work may be what felled him. In 1996, when he was diagnosed with bladder cancer, his doctors believed it was caused by the dyes with which he had been handpainting films for years. He photographed Self Song & Death Song in the midst of chemotherapy.” – P. Adams Sitney

Commingled Containers (16mm, colour, silent, 3 min., 1996)
“Commingled Containers in particular is a memorable confirmation of a crucial, if difficult to discuss, dimension of Brakhage’s work: his commitment to using film as a means of representing his own spiritual quest and of capturing evocations of the spirit in the world around him” – Scott MacDonald

...Preludes 1 – 6 (16mm, colour, silent, 11:30 min., 1995)
...Preludes 7 – 12 (16mm, colour, silent, 16:30 min., 1995)
...Preludes 13 – 18 (16mm, colour, silent, 10 min., 1996)
...Preludes 19 – 24 (16mm, colour, silent, 10 min., 1996)
"[This] is what I call "plein-aire abstract" inasmuch as I am, while making the film, observing specific surroundings (primarily Vancouver Island, mostly in the city of Victoria) but am painting the reactions of my internal optic system affected by external scenes, only occasionally (and obliquely) identifiable. The ocean, the trees, the varieties of cityscape and landscape assert themselves as "pictures" (there is even a mirror image of a neon bar sign which persists for a few frames twice) but the images are essentially a wash and tangle of nervous feedback, sometimes influenced by, say, the colors of inlet waters, sometimes the wave movements, but more ordinarily by the cellular shifts and shapes of the optic system receiving exterior imagery." – Stan Brakhage (déscription de ...Preludes 7)

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PART 4: Late Hand-painted films — Elements / Seasons (1993 – 2002)

Saturday, May 5th at 9:00pm
Total Running Time: 56 min.
Screening Format: 16mm


Autumnal (1993). Courtesy of the Estate of Stan Brakhage and Fred Camper

Autumnal (16mm, colour, silent, 5 min., 1993)
“This is a film composed of two elements: (1) simple hand-painted frames and brief strips of hand-painting, and (2) strips of blank colors, which appear as overall hues or color tones filtering light itself rather than any pictured scenes. These two elements are interposed in editing so as to suggest the seasonal changes of tree-leaf (from greens to golds, reds and browns) and the sky (from varieties of warm-to-cold blues).” – Stan Brakhage

Earthen Aerie (16mm, colour, silent, 3 min., 1995)
“This hand-painted, step-printed film begins with several seconds of blank white (interrupted by red and brief electric yellow) and then proceeds to multiply flecked earth and rock shapes and root-like forms which seem to suck horizontally inward and upward midst phosphorescent greens and blues increasingly flecked with light-yellows giving way to tree-top branch likenesses taking oblique shape against a phosphor sky.” – Canyon Cinema

Spring Cycle (16mm, colour, silent, 11 min., 1995)
“Suddenly it is as if tubular phosphoressences (mostly purple, blue and green) are undulating in a dark field. Flashes of white and rhythmic blanks of pastel colors punctuate these transformations which soon become plant-like – beseeming stalks of marsh grass under water, interrupted by whirling garish crystal flowers. Several times, in these passages, the film goes to these blanks of pastel tones. Finally the film ends on a series of these blank tones shifting among blues and blue-greens exploding into white.” – Stan Brakhage

Shockingly Hot (16mm, colour, silent, 4 min., 1997)
“This little hand-painted film was over-a-year in the making, and absolutely dependent upon a quality of ‘broad-stroke’ in the painting which I think only children really capable of achieving, at least insofar as such stroke can approximate flame. These strokes/flames had, then, to be chopped back to the frame, in order to exist meaningfully on film. They had to be so timed as to epitomize the relentless of fire, so toned that fiery ice would be included in the aesthetic.” – Stan Brakhage

Cloud Chamber (16mm, colour, silent, 4 min., 1999)
“This hand-painted step-printed film begins in a field of white light slightly bespeckled with ephemeral glazes of flecks of silver which gradually give way to pale suggestions of pastel colours. These take shape occasionally and flicker the forthcoming bits of solid coloured and multiply formed abstract images, a few brief sequences-of-such interspersed with the cloud-suggestive passages as at beginning, which eventually end the film.” – Stan Brakhage

The Lion and the Zebra Make God’s Raw Jewels (16mm, colour, silent, 8:30 min., 1999)
“... the impetus behind The Lion and the Zebra Make God's Raw Jewels, Brakhage told me, was his unhappiness with how very often, when he sat down to dinner, his two young boys wanted to watch ‘those horrible animals-eating-animals programs on the Discovery channel,’ in which ‘the British narrator's voice says it doesn't really hurt them as you watch them get eaten alive.’ ... On a ‘plot’ level, Brakhage seems to depict nature's cycles, the way that fragments of plants and flesh become new plants and new flesh.” – Fred Camper

Stately Mansions Did Decree (16mm, colour, silent, 5:30 min., 1999)
“This hand-painted, elaborately step-printed film begins with what appears to be torn fragments of thick parchment erupting upward, out of which emerges a series of landscapes, gardens, exteriors of mansions, castles and the like, then (as yellow predominates ever vegetable greens, sherwood greens and deep floral reds, blood reds) interior corridors and room, as if lit by chandeliers and candelabras – all of which eventually bursts into flames, explosions, which somewhat “echo” visually the beginning of film.” – Stan Brakhage

Seasons... (16mm, colour, silent, 15 min., 2002)
Co-made with Phil Solomon
“Seasons… is inspired by the colours and textures found in the woodcuts of Hokusai and Hiroshige, and the playful sense of forms dancing in space from the film works of Robert Breer and Len Lye.” – Phil Solomon