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Intertext in Stan Brakhage's 23Rd Psalm Branch

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Intertext in Stan Brakhage's 23Rd Psalm Branch rd SEQ CHAPTER \h \r 1 Intertext in Stan Brakhage’s 23 Psalm Branch Between 1964 and 1969, Brakhage devoted a considerable portion of his energies to a series of 8 mm films. By titling these works “Songs,” Brakhage highlighted their relation to Pound’s Cantos, to the canti that make up Dante Alighieri’s Commedia, to the biblical Psalms and (at least regarding the particular work that is the subject of this essay) to the Canticle (or Song) of Mary. Most of these 8 mm. films were titled only by number, Song 1, Song 2, etc; but to the twenty-third canto in this series, Brakhage gave a special title, 23rd Psalm Branch. The similarities most films in this series have to his 16 mm. works, as well as to their poetic and musical models, are clear. rd By contrast, 23 Psalm Branch relies somewhat less on corporeal effects. Partly that is because it is largely a found-footage film that incorporates newsreel, documentaries or feature film footage. In addition to the footage Brakhage shot for the film, the film draws on many sources of imagery whose cinematographic styles seem, in comparison with Brakhage’s expressive camera handling, quite staid. The film departed from Brakhage’s usual forms and characteristic devices in other ways as well. In the work he did between 1952 and 1957, Brakhage had come identify authenticity with a form of Emersonian self-reliance that once could fairly call “individuality,” and he associated, in a most extraordinary manner, individuality with a unique way of seeing. The many devices Brakhage invented in those years, and in the years shortly following, were all in the service of discovering, and conveying, his own unique manner of seeing. rd But 23 Psalm Branch is a crisis work, a work made in the grip of an emotional and spiritual crisis that impelled the filmmaker to break with his most cherished beliefs and to find the means, even means he would ordinarily have repudiated, to convey the depth of his anguish and despair. Among Brakhage’s beliefs, none is more commonly cited than his belief in language’s reductive effects. The young artist famously declared, near the beginning of Metaphors on Vision, “I suggest that there is a pursuit of knowledge foreign to language and founded upon visual communication, demanding a development of the optical mind and dependent upon perception in the original and deepest sense of the word.” To discover the nature of thinking prior to its being shaped by words was Brakhage’s project for more than four decades. However, in a significant departure from his usual practice, Stan Brakhage gave words an important role in 23rd Psalm Branch. Brakhage was an erudite artist, and the intertextual allusions articulated through these textual incorporations are rich and wide-ranging. Because the film’s emotional meaning becomes clearer when the significance of these allusions are apprehended, I propose to examine three of the texts that appear in 23rd Psalm Branch and their intertext— however, I omit consideration of an allusion of Louis Zukofsky’s “A,” because the implication of that text requires itself an extended commentary, which I offer elsewhere. The first of these texts appears some time after Brakhage has established the range of visual forms that constitute the film’s principal materials: domestic images; images of the Colorado landscape; war images, including images presenting the disaster of war; and over-painting. It consists of words scratched into black leaders: “‘Take back Beethoven’s 9th, then,’ he said.” (The text is presented twice within the span of a couple of minutes.) Presumably the remark offers a caustic reference to the joyous choral conclusion of Beethoven’s final symphony—any hope that all humans will become siblings of one another (“Alle Menschen werden Brüder”) in an ecstasy of joy must have seemed vain in face of the carnage that was then taking place in Vietnam. When matters come to that, art seems pointless, and an artist whose hopes are dashed can do little more than take back his or her works in an act of defiance. Those conjectures are certainly true. Nonetheless the intertextual allusion Brakhage makes through this incorporation suggests much more than just that. Moreover, the allusion is so much more precise than these remarks have implied: the incorporated text alludes to a passage from Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus. Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde (Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend); the “he” in the expression is Adrian Leverkühn himself. When he makes that comment, Leverkühn is at war with himself; so, one suggestion Brakhage makes by introducing this allusion is that he is at war with himself. There is yet more to the allusion. Mann’s Dr. Faustus is a novel written by an aging artist, in moral despair over his country’s complacent embrace of Nazism. It depicts Fascism as the tragic consequence of the creative process that overreaches itself because it is not bound to the Good, but is driven by the solitary artist’s mad ambition. The novel unrelentingly details the rise and fall of Adrian Leverkühn (“Leverkühn” could be translated as living audaciously), a gifted musician (modeled, as Mann admitted, on modernist composer Arnold Schönberg). Mann’s novel presents a portrait of a genius obsessed with achievement, narrated by the obsessed man’s friend Serenus Zeitblom (“Serene Flowering of the Age”). The action of the novel takes place in the years 1943–45, as Germany faces ruin. Leverkühn copes with the sense of imminent collapse by vying for the secret that will bring him renown (and so prosperity, and as well as a glory that might outlast the collapse to come). Leverkühn sells his soul to the devil for a generation of renown as the greatest living composer. Prior to meeting the his Mephistopheles figure (in Palestine, Italy, in 1912), Adrian Leverkühn had become absorbed in Pythagorean doctrines of musical harmony, counterpoint and polyphony taught to him by Wendell Kretzschmar, a German-American lecturer and musicologist. Music, as Pythagoras (and Kretzschmar) taught, is a key to metaphysics, and it links human’s sensory constitution to the order of the cosmos. In this way, it raises consciousness above the transient and fastens it to the eternally enduring order of being: a central purpose of Thomas Mann’s novel is the expose the Fascistic potential inherent in human’s desire for order and for glory. But Brakhage’s aesthetics are based on ideas about the total integration of all elements of an artistic work and about harmonious form, and doubtless Mann’s novel caused him considerable consternation. Mann understood the fascistic implications of this aesthetic (that is so closed to Brakhage’s). Leverkühn associated himself with many hard, but clever, people. Their names tell us about their characters: Sextus Kridwiss (Bankrupt knowledge), an art- expert; Chaim Breisacher (Pulp-musher), a “ racial and intellectual type of reckless development and fascinating ugliness”; Dr. Egon Unruhe (Dr. Unrest), a palaeo- zoologist; Georg Vogler (prattler), a literary historian; Dr. Holzschuher (Dr. Clogs), a Dürer scholar (Albrecht Dürer was a favorite of the Nazis); and the saturnine poet Daniel zur Höhe (Daniel on High). The goal of this group was to cast down the idols of the older generation (as the National Socialists maintained that the crisis of the time required them to do away with the values and practices that had developed in the recent past—or the various avant-gardes of the twentieth century strived to do away with Papa’s art and Papa’s Kino). The “torturingly clever” discussions at Kridwiss’s table-rond declared the need to renounce bourgeois softness and to prepare for an age of pre-medieval harshness. So, as Kridwiss’s colleague, Leverkühn came to repudiate values of love and human warmth and, as the Nazis had, to embrace irrationalist nihilism. Leverkühn wrote to Zeitblom that collectivism is the true antithesis of Bourgeois culture (to which Zeitblom offered the rejoinder that aestheticism is the herald of barbarism). Leverkühn formed his pact with the devil after having contracted venereal disease while visiting a brothel, and his frantic activity and hateful associations began to affect his health: after striking his fateful bargain, he started to experience retching, headaches and migraines. (Brakhage, too, was often afflicted with illness.) Despite the toll his work had on his heath, he continued to produce new, and finer, music, preparing the way for his great work Apocalypsis cum figuris. The novel has Apocalypse being performed in Frankfurt in 1926, under Otto Klemperer. Zeitblom describes the work as filled with longing without hope, with hellish laughter transposed and transfigured even into the searing tones of spheres and angels. As Adrian Leverkühn begins to plan the second oratorio, The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus, in 1928, his sister’s child, Nepomuk, was sent to live with him. This beautiful boy, who called himself “Echo,” was beloved by all. As the work of gigantic dimensions developed in Adrian’s mind, the child fell ill and died, and Adrian, despairing, believed that he had killed him by gazing at him with love (contrary to his contract with the devil. It is then that Adrian Leverkühn issues the declaration that Brakhage quotes in rd 23 Psalm Branch: just a few days before his breakdown, after the cruel death of his beloved nephew, Leverkühn opposes his own last work to Beethoven, whom he casts as a the radical composer of enlightenment: “What human beings have fought for and stormed citadels for, what the ecstatics exultantly announced—that is not to be.
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