Stan Brakhage, 1971. Photo: Mike Chikiris. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives

Stan Brakhage, 1971. Photo: Mike Chikiris. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228704774115744 by guest on 02 October 2021 Stan Brakhage (1933–2003) ANNETTE MICHELSON Yeats says of Blake that “he spoke of things for whose speaking he could find no models in the world he knew,” and that in the beginning of important things—in the beginning of love, in the beginning of the day, in the beginning of any work—there is a moment when we understand more perfectly than we understand again until all is finished. [Blake] cried again and again that everything that lives is holy, and that nothing is unholy except things that do not live—lethar- gies, and cruelties, and timidities, and that denial of imagination which is the root that grew from in old times. Passions, because most living, are most holy . and man shall enter eternity borne upon their wings. He was a man crying out for a mythology, and trying to make one because he could not find one at hand. Stan Brakhage’s realization of that mythopoeic project, which P. Adams Sitney, in his pathbreaking studies of American independent production, identified early on as central to his work, required nothing less than a radical revision of the conditions of cinematic representation and the rejection, in practice, of its codes. This, as I have argued both in these pages and elsewhere, entailed both a redefinition of the space of cinematic representation (the shift, grosso modo, from a haptic mode to the optical) and the institution, through speed and fluidity of editing, of a new temporality: that of a continuous present in which spectatorial memory and anticipation were modified or eliminated. In this and in the rhythms of bodily movement traced by the handheld camera we recognize the legacy of modernism—that of Stein, Pollock, and Pound. The suppression of the establishing shot entailed the use of extreme close- up and a hyperbolization of editing. And Brakhage made his work out of the elements of domesticity, creating from his modest Colorado home, in Paul Klee’s phrase, “the meeting of a thousand spaces,” shaping, largely, from daily life with his wife and children, the work of more than four decades. In his violent assault OCTOBER 108, Spring 2004, pp. 112–15. © 2004 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228704774115744 by guest on 02 October 2021 114 OCTOBER upon the cinematic apparatus he pursues the development of his central metaphor: Here, somewhere, we have an eye capable of any imagining. And then we have the camera eye, its lens ground to achieve nineteenth-century Western compositional perspective . bending the light and limiting the frame of the image just so, its standard camera and projector speed for recording movement geared to the feeling of the ideal slow Viennese waltz, and even its tripod head, being the neck it swings on, balled with bearings to permit it that Les Sylphyides motion (ideal to the contemplative romantic) and virtually restricted to horizontal and vertical movements (pillars and horizon lines), a diagonal requiring a major adjustment, its lenses coated or provided with filters, its light meters balanced and its color film manufactured, to produce that picture postcard effect (salon painting) exemplified by those oh-so blue skies and peachy skins. And Brakhage recommends—for a necessary and violent assault on this system—spitting on the lens, hand-holding the camera, and using the “filters of the world”: fog, downpours, unbalanced lights, glass not designed for camera or using glass against specifications, shooting an hour after sunrise or an hour before, when film labs will guarantee nothing. Scenes from Under Childhood (1967–70) marks one limit (although by no means a terminal point) of an enterprise that we must now understand in terms somewhat different from those generally invoked. It has been claimed that Brakhage, in his espousal of a silent cinema, did not engage with the Symbolic. The truth, however, lies elsewhere, must be differently thought. Rather he sustained within a super- abundant and varied production, a long and solitary adventure: the intensive evocation of that phase of the constitution of the human subject which precedes access to language. He has himself suggested, if only by implication or extension, the Kleinian aspect of a scenario that, especially in Scenes, offers “a visualization of the inner world of beginnings, the infant, the baby, the child—a shattering of the ‘myths of childhood’ through revelation of the extremes of violent terror and over- whelming joy of that world darkened to most adults by their sentimental remembrance of it . a ‘tone poem for the eye.’” He was the strongest and central force within a movement that was continu- ously required to explicate, theorize, and even justify its work, to make it plain. Metaphors on Vision takes its place with that small group of fundamental theoreti- cal texts by filmmakers, those of Eisenstein, Epstein, Deren, Frampton, and Godard. Brakhage’s critique of the cinematic apparatus is extended, in Metaphors, to the optics and chemistry of its manufacture, and it will be several years before Godard, fresh from the experience of May 1968, undertakes a parallel critique within, of course, a very different framework: that of a developing adherence to a Marxist view of the nineteenth-century collusion of capital and technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228704774115744 by guest on 02 October 2021 Stan Brakhage (1933–2003) 115 Brakhage, ca. 1965. Photo: Briggs Dyer. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives. American truly independent film production in the latter years of the 1960s offered two films of epic proportions whose form and impact seemed irreconcilable within the movement: Brakhage’s Art of Vision (1965) and Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (1966). We count ourselves fortunate, indeed, in the possession of these two works of deeply antithetical structural modes, for they have served to define the terms of a developing debate. We are fortunate as well in the preservation of Brakhage’s vast archive, in which correspondence and recorded lectures testify to the generosity, both intellectual and moral, of this preeminent artist of the twentieth century. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228704774115744 by guest on 02 October 2021.

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