New Films by Stan Brakhage
His work is not easy to like. Most of his films are silent: Brakhage argues that the viewer will be better attuned to the rhythms of the imagery without a sound track. In recent years, most of his films have been abstract. And the elements that have given some abstract films, such as Norman McLaren’s, a degree of popular appeal are absent. Brakhage’s shapes are hard to limn; the imagery goes by very quickly; there’s no obvious “compositional logic”; the rhythms are unpredictable; there’s little repetition. Most important, his films represent ongoing struggles for both maker and viewer. Adrift in a sea of color and light, the viewer is forced to navigate a groundless, boundless wilderness that may at first seem to consist of the raw meat of seeing–one of the films on this program is titled The Lion and the Zebra Make God’s Raw Jewels.
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Brakhage is not being ornery: these absences evolved from the ethos underlying his first book. But at times that ethos has been misunderstood: his assertion that assigning names to things limits our ability to see them has often been mistaken as claiming that his films incorporate a way of seeing akin to an infant’s–yet a few paragraphs later he acknowledges the impossibility of returning to childhood, “not even in imagination.” And his films of the 60s and early 70s were dense with metaphoric associations and suggestions of narrative. Indeed, these somewhat representational films are usually characterized by a tension between the multiple associations of their recognizable objects, associations carefully shaped through editing, and an approach that emphasizes graphic and textural qualities or pure light. Most of Brakhage’s films before 1974–the year he made his first long abstract work, The Text of Light–can be said to have an identical underlying “plot”: the people and objects in the world represent light and energy bound up in specific material forms, and the filmmaker’s task is to capture the auras of light that might suggest their original divine spark–a gnostic view that also recalls the current scientific version of the origins of the universe.
The best avant-garde films often oppose both mainstream cultural values and what’s expected in cinema. And a few Brakhage films began as responses to mainstream culture: 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.” He also felt, however, that “God made these creatures and they do this,” and he tried to envision their torn flesh in the film as “raw jewels.”
Persian Series is the latest of several series inspired by the origins of written language that Brakhage has made over the last two decades; among the others are Arabics, Egyptians, and Babylonians. Persian Series 1-5 is on view here, but a sixth in the series is also completed. “I’m working with the unnamable shapes that arise from human thinking, and how then those take shape as glyphs or script like the alphabet and numbers and symbols and pictures. They’re imaginary series, but it’s a thoughtful imagination, not just anything goes.” For Persians he studied reproductions of Persian miniature paintings, their decorative borders, and the culture’s calligraphy. And certainly the lush color schemes of Persian miniatures are reflected in these densely layered films. At one point in the second, a series of zooms in suddenly becomes a massive zoom out, creating the effect of a precipitous balloon ascent from the landscapelike shapes we’ve been seeing. Yet the “aerial” view that materializes is not fundamentally different from the “closer” images: on any scale, the imagery remains a skein of interconnected organic shapes worthy of nature’s fractals.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Persian Series; …(ellipses).
