Theory Module Essay
MA Art and Media Practice – Theory Module
Module Leader: Paula Roush
Title: Subjective Vision and Existential ‘Coming Into Being’ in the films of Stan Brakhage
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 of perception (Brakhage 1963: 211).
In this much-quoted passage from his aesthetic statement on vision and the possibilities of the cinematic medium, ‘Metaphors on Vision’, Brakhage exposes the principal viewpoint which will come to underlie the totality of his oeuvre: that we are burdened by a Western visual tradition (laws of perspective and composition) which prevents us from attaining a more primary and immediate level of visual perception, ungoverned by concerns of aestheticism or realism. In a segment of the essay titled ‘The Camera Eye – My Eye’ Brakhage introduces the idea of a subjective eye (‘my eye’), ‘capable of any imagining (the only reality)’ (1963: 214) and which works together with, or against, the ‘camera-eye (the limitation, the original liar)’ (1963: 214). Thus, through a sort of provocative game of inversion, the notion of ‘inner vision’ becomes the value for ‘the real’, and the pursuit of its realization, or filmic translation, becomes the endless quest at the centre of Brakhage’s work.
Comparing and contrasting two of Brakhage’s films from his ‘handheld period’ (Window Water Baby Moving [1959] and The Stars Are Beautiful) with a number of films from his later ‘hand-painted period’, this essay shall analyse relations between the enquiry into processes of subjective vision and perception and the exploration of cosmic/existential themes in Brakhage’s work.
Window Water Baby Moving is the earliest of the films discussed in this essay and is highly representative of a particular period in Brakhage’s work after his first marriage in 1958, when he began to make lyrical autobiographic-poetical (or mythopoeic) films which often centred on the relationships within his family-unit (between him, his wife and children) by using a handheld 16mm camera. On a basic narrative level, Window Water… documents the birth of his first child in 1959, but on a formal level it is one of Brakhage’s most complex films. ‘For the most part, [Brakhage’s] lyrical films exist outside sequential time in a realm of simultaneity or of disconnected time spans of isolated events’ (Sitney 2002: 169). Such is not the case of Window Water… which functions on several time-levels by juxtaposing different events in the chronology of the birth in a rhythmical way through montage.
The film opens with a long sequence, organized into a multitude of shots (Brakhage favours fast-paced editing in opposition to long takes) of his very pregnant wife bathing in a tub, by a large window. As close-ups alternate between her relaxed face and the play of light and droplets of water on her belly and thighs, the spectator is made aware of a sort of division in Brakhage himself: on the one side his involvement in the scene is enforced by the frequent presence of his hands within the frame (caressing the belly), while on the other side he retains a sort of ‘artistic distance’ which allows him to perform a range of visual experiments, all leading to a reduction of the elements of the scene towards complete abstraction (light shining through and being reflected off the skin and water, the abstract shapes of interstices between body-parts).
Between these shots are other ones of his wife, still pregnant, lying naked on a bed, the camera exploring her body and revealing the same possibilities for abstraction as in the tub-sequence. Cutting back and forth between these two spaces, the bath and the bed, Brakhage begins to insert more and more shots of a third kind: these are almost medicalized close-ups of her vagina at the moment of giving birth, which grow more and more insistent (frequent and close) as the baby’s head begins to show. At the climatic moment of the film, a fast succession of alternating edits of her screaming face and dilated vagina is interspersed with former shots of her relaxed face in the bathtub and the interplay of both their hands on her belly. The basic opposition between ‘nothing’ and ‘something’ finds its expression in the constant alternation between the moment just before birth and that of birth itself; an opposition which is further supported through shots of the newborn and close-up shots of the mother’s belly, emerging like a large, organic island out of the bathwater.
No longer was the frame simply what captured reality in front of the camera but rather it became an arena for forms, like the marks made on a canvas. (…) [Brakhage] came to shed the armory of narratives, myths and bizarre tropes of Surrealism and chose the highly-exposed strategy of finding forms for [his] own experiences in which the latter remained recognizably subjective (O’Pray 2003: 59).
Retrospectively, Brakhage’s engagement with film in a lyrical-abstract way can be said to have prefigured the radicalism of his later hand-painted films. Due to its telescoping treatment of time, Window Water… captures the moment of birth, establishing it as an existential absolute (first there is nothing, then there is something). The image of Brakhage’s own ecstatic face just after the moment of birth – his wife found the composure to take the camera from him to film him (Sitney 2002: 169) – and the extremely chaotic first images of the baby itself, signifying both the father’s excitement and the newborn’s traumatic encounter with the external world, are obvious marks of Brakhage’s subjective involvement in the scene. But it is only in conjunction with the distanciation (Verfremdung) he operates when deconstructing his wife’s body into abstract shapes, like ‘marks made on a canvas’, that this subjective way of making films gives rise to
a form in which the filmmaker could compress his thoughts and feelings while recording his direct confrontation with intense experiences of birth, death, sexuality and the terror of nature (Sitney 2002: 168).
Where Window Water… is silent and relies on the power and rhythm of the image-track to achieve its full effect, The Stars Are Beautiful makes extensive use of the soundtrack, both through sound recorded directly and a voice-over reading by Brakhage himself of short mystical-poetical statements. As with Window Water… the starting point of the film is autobiographical: once again Brakhage is filming his own family in their home and the spoken text comes from a verbal family-game in which he would write down answers to the question ‘Tell me what is in the sky?’ which he would then discuss with his first wife (Camper 2003: 16). However, where Window Water… focuses on a single event which is very symbolic and easy to grasp, The Stars Are Beautiful offers a much clearer framework, the workings of which we shall analyze.
One of the first shots of the film is of a large, white circle which occupies most of the frame over a dark background. Off-screen, Brakhage speaks the first of the series of cosmic definitions he will offer in the course of the film: ‘There’s a wall there, a great dark wall with holes in it. And behind that wall is an enormous fire of white flames’. His voice stands in contrast to the directly recorded indistinct sounds of his children and wife clipping the wings of a chicken in the opening scene. Throughout the film, the realm of the real (the children, the room they are in, the animals, etc) will be presented to us as though through a veil, their voices indistinct, their figures often only partially within the frame and blurred. Brakhage’s voice, on the other hand, seems to be speaking directly into our ear, into our unconscious – it is the voice of the filmmaker as narrator, showing us the real and making sense of it for us. ‘No, this is not the moon, another planet, seen in a dark night-sky’, he is saying. ‘What you believe to be the sky is in fact a wall, and in that wall there are holes through which the light of a great fire behind the wall becomes visible. This is the reality of your moon and stars’.
Since the very dawn of time, voices have presented images, made order of the things of the world, brought things to life and named them. The very first image-presenter is the mother; before the child learns any written signs, her voice articulates things in a human and linear temporality. In every master of ceremonies and storyteller as well as every movie voiceover, an aspect of this original function remains (Chion 1999: 49).
As in most of Brakhage’s lyrical films, the overall thematic of The Stars Are Beautiful is of a Romantic coming to terms with the forces of the universe or ‘the terror of nature’. But from the outset it also displays an archaic dimension by drawing on ancestral beliefs and themes: many of the definitions he gives seem to reference the ancient mythologies of Native cultures throughout the world, which are often also characterized by oral culture. At a later stage of the film, Brakhage says: ‘This one’s fairly traditional: the sun is the ejaculation of the penis in the vagina of the universe. The stars are the sperm searching for the eggs of moons.’ As suggested by Michel Chion’s reflection on the voice-over in his book The Voice in the Cinema (1999), even in conventional narrative cinema the use of voice-over narration refers us back to a primary, ancestral relation between a telling voice and the things of the real. Thus, the very choice of the voice-over as filmic device in Brakhage’s film helps to further establish this archaic dimension.
(…) the distinctiveness of the brushmarks signals the presence of the painter [and functions as] an expressive device in that it suggests a different relationship in the case of painting between the artist, the brush (or whatever marking instrument including the artist’s own hands and fingers) and the marks on the surface. For Brakhage the painting model is important, for he is attempting to establish a similar relationship between the artist, the camera and the filmic image (O’Pray 2003: 62-63).
In most of Brakhage’s films this relationship is often shown trough the presence of both voluntary and involuntary ‘glitches’ (over- or underexposure, ‘deliberately spitting on the lens or wrecking its focal intention’ (Brakhage 1963: 215) etc) and the liberated movement of the handheld camera – the filmic equivalent to the ‘gesture’ in Abstract Expressionism, which captures the creative energy of the painter in a series of brushstrokes (or similar) and lends the painting its dynamics. In The Stars Are Beautiful the presence of the filmmaker is further signified by the use of the voice-over and its interplay with the events of the image-track:
A point of synchronization, or synch point, is a salient moment of an audiovisual sequence during which a sound event and a visual event meet in synchrony (…). A point of synchronization can stage the meeting of elements of quite differing natures. For example a visual cut can be coordinated with a word or group of words specially emphasized by the voice-over commentary (Chion 1994: 58-59).
In opposition to Window Water… which retains a rather regular cyclic repetitive structure throughout (once the elements are in place and the subject-matter of the film is clear there are no great surprises anymore) and in which all development seems concentrated towards the climatic moment of birth itself, The Stars Are Beautiful is rhythmically more complex because as it unfolds it incorporates more and more apparently unrelated elements into its structure. These elements are held together by two factors: the regular intervals at which they appear (almost as regular as the rotation of a film-projector) and the voice-over which refers more or less openly to them. Some visual elements of the film, such as the domestic scenes or the repeated close-ups of an insect, will never be referred to – here the soundtrack stands in an almost contrapuntal relation to the images which lends the film its mysterious quality: what does the clipping of a chicken’s wings have to do with stars? But there are frequent moments when the content of the voice-over and the image stand in an illustrational relation to each other, such as when Brakhage says: ‘God, taking pity on those who stop smoking, made the universe to look like so many cigarettes’, at which point the black frame lights up with small red luminous dots, ‘burning, the clouds to look like smoke, the sun to remind them of the striking of a match’, here the entire screen turns red, then orange, ‘and the moon in the shape of a filter-tip’.
Thus, depending on whether the sound/image relationship is contrapuntal or illustrative, the spectator of The Stars Are Beautiful may in fact experience two sets of images at once: those of the image-track, and those evoked by Brakhage’s strong metaphors in the spectator’s inner eye. Even though Brakhage is mostly a visual filmmaker who has made little use of the possibilities of the soundtrack in his oeuvre, with The Stars Are Beautiful he proves that verbally evoked images, spoken over a dark screen or in combination with visual images, ultimately present another possible expression of internal vision, on a par with what ‘the mind’s eye sees in visual memory and in dreams (he calls them brain-movies)’ (Sitney 2002: 168).
As we have seen, both Window Water… and The Stars Are Beautiful deal with some of the great cosmic and existential questionings of human existence while seeking to develop a new way of seeing and representing the real on a formal level. The rest of this essay shall now investigate the transposition of both these thematic and formal focal points to Brakhage’s films of the hand-painted period, spanning the 1980s and 1990s. All of Brakhage’s hand-painted films are centred around the notions of subjectivity and inner vision (‘closed-eye vision’) but for the sake of convenience, they can be divided into two categories: first there are those films which still reference something within the realm of the real, either because they also contain filmed footage which has been painted over, or because they are visual representations of something existent, such as Stellar (1993) which is strongly reminiscent of scientific recordings of outer-space, such as photographs of nebulae. The second category comprises films such as Nightmusic (1986), Rage-Net (1988) or Lovesong (2001) which are completely abstract with no other referent than the artist’s subjectivity.
As to the permanency of the present or any established reality, consider in this light and through most individual eyes that without either illumination or photographic lens, any ideal animal might claw the black off a strip of film or walk ink-footed across transparent celluloid and produce an effect of projection identical to a photographed image. As to color, the earliest color films were entirely hand painted a frame at a time. The ‘absolute realism’ of the motion picture image is a human invention (Brakhage 1963: 217).
Brakhage writes this two decades before producing his entirely hand-painted films (he had always been experimenting with painting or scratching the film-surface), announcing the future development of his work. Even though Brakhage detests the idea of realism in the traditional Western sense of the term, he does not completely give up that of figuration, even in his most radical period of hand-painted films (retaining nothing but pure colour and motion). This is the case of Stellar, a two-minute twenty-seconds explosion of colour: starting with a number of stills which look like telescopic photographs of nebulae alternating between blue/greens and red/yellows (most of the painted films are variations organized around this fundamental opposition of primary colour groups), the film becomes faster and faster, attracting the viewer into a whirlwind of colour, darkness and stars (white circles etched into the reel).
Some twenty years later, it offers, in a sense, an answer or a reworking of The Stars Are Beautiful: where the latter functioned as a mystical ode to the mystery and beauty of the universe without ever showing a single star (except for the image of the full moon, if it truly was a shot of the moon), Stellar shows us the beauty of the stars as we have never seen them, as we can only dream them before our inner eye. In 1963, Brakhage was writing: ‘The ‘absolute realism’ of the motion picture is unrealized, therefore potential, magic’ (221). If ‘absolute realism’ be the visual expression of an inner vision, then, exactly thirty years after this statement, it seems Brakhage has achieved this ideal.
But what of this other strand of films within Brakhage’s hand-painted period, those which have no referent in the real? Are they also successful translations of internal or closed-eye vision? Certainly, but is that all? Watching one of Brakhage’s last works, the ten-minute piece Love Song (2001), one cannot help but be overcome by an uncanny feeling: if Jackson Pollock had had movement, this is, without the slightest doubt, what his work would have looked like. As sprinkles of black paint quickly move across large shapes of saturated, glistening colour in an endless circle of repetition between darker (more black, larger blobs) and lighter (less black, more subtle hues in the pinks, purples and oranges) phases, and colder (blue/greens) and warmer (yellow/reds) moments, one is inevitably reminded of the 1951 Hans Namuth film Jackson Pollock of the painter in action: bent over the camera which is tilted against the bright blue sky, Pollock sprinkles the camera itself with liberal amounts of black paint, which creates a web-like pattern on the objective. Only of course that it is not the objective itself (much too small), but a large glass-plate under which the camera is positioned. The effect however is the same: Pollock once wrote ‘When I am in [italics mine] my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing’ (Emmerling 2003: 65), and this is the very place where Namuth’s film puts us – we are in the painting, the camera is the painting, consequently, we are in the camera. In a similar way, through the act of scratching and painting on the material of film itself, Brakhage’s work attains metafilmic dimensions, not only because the film-paintings make us enter them through their physicality, but precisely because they makes us aware of the fact of the film-reels and the fact of projection just as we are watching the film.
There is however a further element underlying Brakhage’s work which seems to go beyond self-reflexivity in art and opens onto the scientific domain of the cognitive sciences and onto that branch of philosophy termed ‘philosophy of mind’: it is the almost mystical (or cosmic) idea that there is a world of inner occurrences within each of us (something like an ‘inverted universe’ – which might explain why Brakhage’s painted worksresemble scientific recordings of outer space), which is strictly subjective and cannot fully be explained. After all, what is it exactly inside of us that experiences pain when we are in pain and of what precise nature are the colours, which we see in front of our inner eye, when our eyes are closed and we imagine colours? This is the great existential question behind each of Brakhage’s films.
Bibliography:
Battcock, Gregory (ed.) (1967) The New American Cinema – A Critical Anthology New York: E. P. Dutton
Brakhage, Stan (1963) ‘The Camera Eye – My Eye’ from Metaphors on Vision (1963) in Battcock, Gregory (ed.) (1967) The New American Cinema – A Critical Anthology New York: E. P. Dutton
Camper, Fred (2003) By Brakhage – An Anthology DVD Booklet The Criterion Collection
Chion, Michel (1994) Audio-Vision New York: Columbia University Press
Chion, Michel (1999) The Voice in the Cinema New York: Columbia University Press
Emmerling, Leonhard (2003) Pollock Köln: Taschen
Lynton, Norbert (1989) The Story of Modern Art Second Edition Oxford: Phaidon
O’Pray, Michael (2003) Avant-Garde Film – Forms, Themes and Passions London: Wallflower
Sitney, P. Adams (2002) Visionary Film – The American Avant-Garde 1943 – 2000 Third Edition Oxford: Oxford University Press
Filmography:
Love Song S. Brakhage (2001) US
Nightmusic S. Brakhage (1986) US
Rage Net S. Brakhage (1988) US
The Stars Are Beautiful S. Brakhage (1974) US
Stellar S. Brakhage (1993) US
Window Water Baby Moving S. Brakhage (1959) US
Word Count: 3255 Words
Module Leader: Paula Roush
Title: Subjective Vision and Existential ‘Coming Into Being’ in the films of Stan Brakhage
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 of perception (Brakhage 1963: 211).
In this much-quoted passage from his aesthetic statement on vision and the possibilities of the cinematic medium, ‘Metaphors on Vision’, Brakhage exposes the principal viewpoint which will come to underlie the totality of his oeuvre: that we are burdened by a Western visual tradition (laws of perspective and composition) which prevents us from attaining a more primary and immediate level of visual perception, ungoverned by concerns of aestheticism or realism. In a segment of the essay titled ‘The Camera Eye – My Eye’ Brakhage introduces the idea of a subjective eye (‘my eye’), ‘capable of any imagining (the only reality)’ (1963: 214) and which works together with, or against, the ‘camera-eye (the limitation, the original liar)’ (1963: 214). Thus, through a sort of provocative game of inversion, the notion of ‘inner vision’ becomes the value for ‘the real’, and the pursuit of its realization, or filmic translation, becomes the endless quest at the centre of Brakhage’s work.
Comparing and contrasting two of Brakhage’s films from his ‘handheld period’ (Window Water Baby Moving [1959] and The Stars Are Beautiful) with a number of films from his later ‘hand-painted period’, this essay shall analyse relations between the enquiry into processes of subjective vision and perception and the exploration of cosmic/existential themes in Brakhage’s work.
Window Water Baby Moving is the earliest of the films discussed in this essay and is highly representative of a particular period in Brakhage’s work after his first marriage in 1958, when he began to make lyrical autobiographic-poetical (or mythopoeic) films which often centred on the relationships within his family-unit (between him, his wife and children) by using a handheld 16mm camera. On a basic narrative level, Window Water… documents the birth of his first child in 1959, but on a formal level it is one of Brakhage’s most complex films. ‘For the most part, [Brakhage’s] lyrical films exist outside sequential time in a realm of simultaneity or of disconnected time spans of isolated events’ (Sitney 2002: 169). Such is not the case of Window Water… which functions on several time-levels by juxtaposing different events in the chronology of the birth in a rhythmical way through montage.
The film opens with a long sequence, organized into a multitude of shots (Brakhage favours fast-paced editing in opposition to long takes) of his very pregnant wife bathing in a tub, by a large window. As close-ups alternate between her relaxed face and the play of light and droplets of water on her belly and thighs, the spectator is made aware of a sort of division in Brakhage himself: on the one side his involvement in the scene is enforced by the frequent presence of his hands within the frame (caressing the belly), while on the other side he retains a sort of ‘artistic distance’ which allows him to perform a range of visual experiments, all leading to a reduction of the elements of the scene towards complete abstraction (light shining through and being reflected off the skin and water, the abstract shapes of interstices between body-parts).
Between these shots are other ones of his wife, still pregnant, lying naked on a bed, the camera exploring her body and revealing the same possibilities for abstraction as in the tub-sequence. Cutting back and forth between these two spaces, the bath and the bed, Brakhage begins to insert more and more shots of a third kind: these are almost medicalized close-ups of her vagina at the moment of giving birth, which grow more and more insistent (frequent and close) as the baby’s head begins to show. At the climatic moment of the film, a fast succession of alternating edits of her screaming face and dilated vagina is interspersed with former shots of her relaxed face in the bathtub and the interplay of both their hands on her belly. The basic opposition between ‘nothing’ and ‘something’ finds its expression in the constant alternation between the moment just before birth and that of birth itself; an opposition which is further supported through shots of the newborn and close-up shots of the mother’s belly, emerging like a large, organic island out of the bathwater.
No longer was the frame simply what captured reality in front of the camera but rather it became an arena for forms, like the marks made on a canvas. (…) [Brakhage] came to shed the armory of narratives, myths and bizarre tropes of Surrealism and chose the highly-exposed strategy of finding forms for [his] own experiences in which the latter remained recognizably subjective (O’Pray 2003: 59).
Retrospectively, Brakhage’s engagement with film in a lyrical-abstract way can be said to have prefigured the radicalism of his later hand-painted films. Due to its telescoping treatment of time, Window Water… captures the moment of birth, establishing it as an existential absolute (first there is nothing, then there is something). The image of Brakhage’s own ecstatic face just after the moment of birth – his wife found the composure to take the camera from him to film him (Sitney 2002: 169) – and the extremely chaotic first images of the baby itself, signifying both the father’s excitement and the newborn’s traumatic encounter with the external world, are obvious marks of Brakhage’s subjective involvement in the scene. But it is only in conjunction with the distanciation (Verfremdung) he operates when deconstructing his wife’s body into abstract shapes, like ‘marks made on a canvas’, that this subjective way of making films gives rise to
a form in which the filmmaker could compress his thoughts and feelings while recording his direct confrontation with intense experiences of birth, death, sexuality and the terror of nature (Sitney 2002: 168).
Where Window Water… is silent and relies on the power and rhythm of the image-track to achieve its full effect, The Stars Are Beautiful makes extensive use of the soundtrack, both through sound recorded directly and a voice-over reading by Brakhage himself of short mystical-poetical statements. As with Window Water… the starting point of the film is autobiographical: once again Brakhage is filming his own family in their home and the spoken text comes from a verbal family-game in which he would write down answers to the question ‘Tell me what is in the sky?’ which he would then discuss with his first wife (Camper 2003: 16). However, where Window Water… focuses on a single event which is very symbolic and easy to grasp, The Stars Are Beautiful offers a much clearer framework, the workings of which we shall analyze.
One of the first shots of the film is of a large, white circle which occupies most of the frame over a dark background. Off-screen, Brakhage speaks the first of the series of cosmic definitions he will offer in the course of the film: ‘There’s a wall there, a great dark wall with holes in it. And behind that wall is an enormous fire of white flames’. His voice stands in contrast to the directly recorded indistinct sounds of his children and wife clipping the wings of a chicken in the opening scene. Throughout the film, the realm of the real (the children, the room they are in, the animals, etc) will be presented to us as though through a veil, their voices indistinct, their figures often only partially within the frame and blurred. Brakhage’s voice, on the other hand, seems to be speaking directly into our ear, into our unconscious – it is the voice of the filmmaker as narrator, showing us the real and making sense of it for us. ‘No, this is not the moon, another planet, seen in a dark night-sky’, he is saying. ‘What you believe to be the sky is in fact a wall, and in that wall there are holes through which the light of a great fire behind the wall becomes visible. This is the reality of your moon and stars’.
Since the very dawn of time, voices have presented images, made order of the things of the world, brought things to life and named them. The very first image-presenter is the mother; before the child learns any written signs, her voice articulates things in a human and linear temporality. In every master of ceremonies and storyteller as well as every movie voiceover, an aspect of this original function remains (Chion 1999: 49).
As in most of Brakhage’s lyrical films, the overall thematic of The Stars Are Beautiful is of a Romantic coming to terms with the forces of the universe or ‘the terror of nature’. But from the outset it also displays an archaic dimension by drawing on ancestral beliefs and themes: many of the definitions he gives seem to reference the ancient mythologies of Native cultures throughout the world, which are often also characterized by oral culture. At a later stage of the film, Brakhage says: ‘This one’s fairly traditional: the sun is the ejaculation of the penis in the vagina of the universe. The stars are the sperm searching for the eggs of moons.’ As suggested by Michel Chion’s reflection on the voice-over in his book The Voice in the Cinema (1999), even in conventional narrative cinema the use of voice-over narration refers us back to a primary, ancestral relation between a telling voice and the things of the real. Thus, the very choice of the voice-over as filmic device in Brakhage’s film helps to further establish this archaic dimension.
(…) the distinctiveness of the brushmarks signals the presence of the painter [and functions as] an expressive device in that it suggests a different relationship in the case of painting between the artist, the brush (or whatever marking instrument including the artist’s own hands and fingers) and the marks on the surface. For Brakhage the painting model is important, for he is attempting to establish a similar relationship between the artist, the camera and the filmic image (O’Pray 2003: 62-63).
In most of Brakhage’s films this relationship is often shown trough the presence of both voluntary and involuntary ‘glitches’ (over- or underexposure, ‘deliberately spitting on the lens or wrecking its focal intention’ (Brakhage 1963: 215) etc) and the liberated movement of the handheld camera – the filmic equivalent to the ‘gesture’ in Abstract Expressionism, which captures the creative energy of the painter in a series of brushstrokes (or similar) and lends the painting its dynamics. In The Stars Are Beautiful the presence of the filmmaker is further signified by the use of the voice-over and its interplay with the events of the image-track:
A point of synchronization, or synch point, is a salient moment of an audiovisual sequence during which a sound event and a visual event meet in synchrony (…). A point of synchronization can stage the meeting of elements of quite differing natures. For example a visual cut can be coordinated with a word or group of words specially emphasized by the voice-over commentary (Chion 1994: 58-59).
In opposition to Window Water… which retains a rather regular cyclic repetitive structure throughout (once the elements are in place and the subject-matter of the film is clear there are no great surprises anymore) and in which all development seems concentrated towards the climatic moment of birth itself, The Stars Are Beautiful is rhythmically more complex because as it unfolds it incorporates more and more apparently unrelated elements into its structure. These elements are held together by two factors: the regular intervals at which they appear (almost as regular as the rotation of a film-projector) and the voice-over which refers more or less openly to them. Some visual elements of the film, such as the domestic scenes or the repeated close-ups of an insect, will never be referred to – here the soundtrack stands in an almost contrapuntal relation to the images which lends the film its mysterious quality: what does the clipping of a chicken’s wings have to do with stars? But there are frequent moments when the content of the voice-over and the image stand in an illustrational relation to each other, such as when Brakhage says: ‘God, taking pity on those who stop smoking, made the universe to look like so many cigarettes’, at which point the black frame lights up with small red luminous dots, ‘burning, the clouds to look like smoke, the sun to remind them of the striking of a match’, here the entire screen turns red, then orange, ‘and the moon in the shape of a filter-tip’.
Thus, depending on whether the sound/image relationship is contrapuntal or illustrative, the spectator of The Stars Are Beautiful may in fact experience two sets of images at once: those of the image-track, and those evoked by Brakhage’s strong metaphors in the spectator’s inner eye. Even though Brakhage is mostly a visual filmmaker who has made little use of the possibilities of the soundtrack in his oeuvre, with The Stars Are Beautiful he proves that verbally evoked images, spoken over a dark screen or in combination with visual images, ultimately present another possible expression of internal vision, on a par with what ‘the mind’s eye sees in visual memory and in dreams (he calls them brain-movies)’ (Sitney 2002: 168).
As we have seen, both Window Water… and The Stars Are Beautiful deal with some of the great cosmic and existential questionings of human existence while seeking to develop a new way of seeing and representing the real on a formal level. The rest of this essay shall now investigate the transposition of both these thematic and formal focal points to Brakhage’s films of the hand-painted period, spanning the 1980s and 1990s. All of Brakhage’s hand-painted films are centred around the notions of subjectivity and inner vision (‘closed-eye vision’) but for the sake of convenience, they can be divided into two categories: first there are those films which still reference something within the realm of the real, either because they also contain filmed footage which has been painted over, or because they are visual representations of something existent, such as Stellar (1993) which is strongly reminiscent of scientific recordings of outer-space, such as photographs of nebulae. The second category comprises films such as Nightmusic (1986), Rage-Net (1988) or Lovesong (2001) which are completely abstract with no other referent than the artist’s subjectivity.
As to the permanency of the present or any established reality, consider in this light and through most individual eyes that without either illumination or photographic lens, any ideal animal might claw the black off a strip of film or walk ink-footed across transparent celluloid and produce an effect of projection identical to a photographed image. As to color, the earliest color films were entirely hand painted a frame at a time. The ‘absolute realism’ of the motion picture image is a human invention (Brakhage 1963: 217).
Brakhage writes this two decades before producing his entirely hand-painted films (he had always been experimenting with painting or scratching the film-surface), announcing the future development of his work. Even though Brakhage detests the idea of realism in the traditional Western sense of the term, he does not completely give up that of figuration, even in his most radical period of hand-painted films (retaining nothing but pure colour and motion). This is the case of Stellar, a two-minute twenty-seconds explosion of colour: starting with a number of stills which look like telescopic photographs of nebulae alternating between blue/greens and red/yellows (most of the painted films are variations organized around this fundamental opposition of primary colour groups), the film becomes faster and faster, attracting the viewer into a whirlwind of colour, darkness and stars (white circles etched into the reel).
Some twenty years later, it offers, in a sense, an answer or a reworking of The Stars Are Beautiful: where the latter functioned as a mystical ode to the mystery and beauty of the universe without ever showing a single star (except for the image of the full moon, if it truly was a shot of the moon), Stellar shows us the beauty of the stars as we have never seen them, as we can only dream them before our inner eye. In 1963, Brakhage was writing: ‘The ‘absolute realism’ of the motion picture is unrealized, therefore potential, magic’ (221). If ‘absolute realism’ be the visual expression of an inner vision, then, exactly thirty years after this statement, it seems Brakhage has achieved this ideal.
But what of this other strand of films within Brakhage’s hand-painted period, those which have no referent in the real? Are they also successful translations of internal or closed-eye vision? Certainly, but is that all? Watching one of Brakhage’s last works, the ten-minute piece Love Song (2001), one cannot help but be overcome by an uncanny feeling: if Jackson Pollock had had movement, this is, without the slightest doubt, what his work would have looked like. As sprinkles of black paint quickly move across large shapes of saturated, glistening colour in an endless circle of repetition between darker (more black, larger blobs) and lighter (less black, more subtle hues in the pinks, purples and oranges) phases, and colder (blue/greens) and warmer (yellow/reds) moments, one is inevitably reminded of the 1951 Hans Namuth film Jackson Pollock of the painter in action: bent over the camera which is tilted against the bright blue sky, Pollock sprinkles the camera itself with liberal amounts of black paint, which creates a web-like pattern on the objective. Only of course that it is not the objective itself (much too small), but a large glass-plate under which the camera is positioned. The effect however is the same: Pollock once wrote ‘When I am in [italics mine] my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing’ (Emmerling 2003: 65), and this is the very place where Namuth’s film puts us – we are in the painting, the camera is the painting, consequently, we are in the camera. In a similar way, through the act of scratching and painting on the material of film itself, Brakhage’s work attains metafilmic dimensions, not only because the film-paintings make us enter them through their physicality, but precisely because they makes us aware of the fact of the film-reels and the fact of projection just as we are watching the film.
There is however a further element underlying Brakhage’s work which seems to go beyond self-reflexivity in art and opens onto the scientific domain of the cognitive sciences and onto that branch of philosophy termed ‘philosophy of mind’: it is the almost mystical (or cosmic) idea that there is a world of inner occurrences within each of us (something like an ‘inverted universe’ – which might explain why Brakhage’s painted worksresemble scientific recordings of outer space), which is strictly subjective and cannot fully be explained. After all, what is it exactly inside of us that experiences pain when we are in pain and of what precise nature are the colours, which we see in front of our inner eye, when our eyes are closed and we imagine colours? This is the great existential question behind each of Brakhage’s films.
Bibliography:
Battcock, Gregory (ed.) (1967) The New American Cinema – A Critical Anthology New York: E. P. Dutton
Brakhage, Stan (1963) ‘The Camera Eye – My Eye’ from Metaphors on Vision (1963) in Battcock, Gregory (ed.) (1967) The New American Cinema – A Critical Anthology New York: E. P. Dutton
Camper, Fred (2003) By Brakhage – An Anthology DVD Booklet The Criterion Collection
Chion, Michel (1994) Audio-Vision New York: Columbia University Press
Chion, Michel (1999) The Voice in the Cinema New York: Columbia University Press
Emmerling, Leonhard (2003) Pollock Köln: Taschen
Lynton, Norbert (1989) The Story of Modern Art Second Edition Oxford: Phaidon
O’Pray, Michael (2003) Avant-Garde Film – Forms, Themes and Passions London: Wallflower
Sitney, P. Adams (2002) Visionary Film – The American Avant-Garde 1943 – 2000 Third Edition Oxford: Oxford University Press
Filmography:
Love Song S. Brakhage (2001) US
Nightmusic S. Brakhage (1986) US
Rage Net S. Brakhage (1988) US
The Stars Are Beautiful S. Brakhage (1974) US
Stellar S. Brakhage (1993) US
Window Water Baby Moving S. Brakhage (1959) US
Word Count: 3255 Words
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