BRAKHAGE

  Hussein

 So, let's start with the boring semantics of the past. Robert Sanders was born on January 14th 1933....wait a minute...you must be asking yourselves who the hell is Robert Sanders? Well, James Brakhage is Robert Sanders and no, this isn't Tyler Durdan Syndrome (Kudos for those who got that). Sanders was adopted three weeks after he was born and renamed James Stanley Brakhage.

After this wonderful transition of names, we will fast forward a few years and go onto his early years of failure. Like all good artists, they suck at one point (dramatizing...I can't speak for all artists, although that would be pretty good if I could). Brakhage dropped out of Dartmouth College to pursue filmmaking but...that didn't turn out so well in the beginning. His first film Interim was completed when he was nineteen and he moved out to San Francisco because the "artistic atmosphere" better suited his style and to attend what was then called The California School of Arts. Once a drop out, always a drop out, right? At least it applies in this case because he didn't finish his schooling there either. What does one do when they can't finish school? Move to the other side of the country, of course! Off to New York he went where he spent a few more years being a failure and living in poverty.

Through the years between 1960 to 1980, Brakhage began to become more and more successful and found a style or two (or couple..he had a few techniques that he was known for). These styles include: handheld camerawork, painting directly onto celluloid, fast cutting, in-camera editing, scratching on film, and the use of multiple exposures. He was also interested in mythology and inspired by the arts, which include music, poetry, and visual phenomena. Brakhage explored themes of birth, mortality, sexuality, and innocence. One film that demonstrated his involvement with his own artistic vision (aka what he saw was beautiful) was Text of Light which only was made up of images of refracted light in a glass ashtray. Talk about a trippy experience.

 
THE WONDER RING

 
(As you can see, someone put music to it, which I thought added a nice tone, but pretend it's not there?) Now as you watch this film...what do you think of? Why is it called The Wonder Ring? Well, we did mention some of his techniques before, right? Unless you're pretty much asleep at this point but how could you with a short snippet of some opera playing through your speakers? In any event, this is clearly done with him going handheld. What does that mean? He's literally holding the camera and filming. Every single shot there is motion. Whether it be him panning, tilting, zooming, the motion of the train shaking, everything is in motion. It pretty much looks like he's just filming a train ride. But...it's more than that. The juxtaposition of the light and the darkness is rather well done, even though the editing is rather uneven. His movie, his style, so no harsh critiques. To each their own, right? Life never stops moving, there is motion in our everyday lives, and that was captured on film. Even the reel itself is moving along. Although, much like the poetry we read in class, these films can't be chopped up into bits and examined in depth. Take it as you see it. A sensory experience, that's all it is. It looked good, he shot it, he cut it together and sent it out into the world.

 
DOG STAR MAN

 
In this one we see Brakhage's other forms of art and expression. Scratching the film, drawing on it, over exposing, under exposing. It's all a bunch of clips thrown together (in what looks like a non organized manner) but like it was mentioned before, it's a sensory experience. How does it make you feel? Anxious? Exhilarated? Sad? Happy? It's different per person and impossible to decipher Brakhage's true emotions behind it. Honestly, you can't even tell if he even LIKED what he created. Not everything an artist creates is a masterpiece.

 
BURIAL PATH

 
This was inspired by his interested in death. Crows seem to be the focal point of this short piece. Out of focus shots. Incredibly zoomed in frames. Sometimes even shots shown for a few frames. His cuts are sporadic. What are we really seeing? Are we seeing anything? Is it important? It has to be important otherwise he wouldn't have shown it. Is that really the case? A lot of questions with very little answers.

 

Robert

 
I love Stan Brakhage and was turned on to his films by a co-worker at some dumb museum that I used to work at. My favorite thing about him is his use of Super 8 film. The color is unreal. As if a child drew really accurate pictures with a fist full of crayons. He rewinds his stock (by hand thru a wind in a Super 8 cartridge) and films over previously exposed film creating two or even more then two images on the frames at once. His early stuff is cool, but he finally gets around to sound later, which really adds an important element to what his films matured to be. Sound is extremely important to set a mood, even if its lack sound.

 
I wanted to talk about THE DANTE QUARTET.

 
I never knew it was based off of a poem. Totally just wiki'd that shit. But I have seen this film a few few years ago, found it just now, wiki'd, read the poem, then watched it again. Here's the poem from Dante's, The Divine Comedy.

"Then comes a moment when suddenly I can't handle the language anymore, like I can't read one more translation of The Divine Comedy, and suddenly I realize it's in my eyes all the time, that I have a vision of Hell, I have even more necessary kind of a way of getting out of Hell, kind of a springboard in my thinking, closing my eyes and thinking what I'm seeing [...] and also purgation, that I can go through the stages of purging the self, of trying to become pure, free of these ghastly visions, and then there is something that's as close to Heaven as I would hope to aspire to, which I call "existence is song." And that all of that was in my eyes all the time, backfiring all these years [...] It's lovely that I can have the language, but I also have a visual corollary of it, but that is a story."

Brakhage painted onto 65mm aka 70mm aka IMAX aka Lawrence of Arabia sized film. He had a lot more control over how he painted his images onto the film print.

 
If you think Stan Brakhage did lots of drugs, check out Harry Smith.

Jan-Kristoff

 Brakhage has also been considered a disciple of Sidney Peterson, an avant-garde filmmaker at the time, famous for producing significant artifacts of the San Francisco Renaissance as films at the California School of Fine Arts. He was also known for making extensive use of anamorphic shooting in his films, a technique of capturing a widescreen picture on standard 35mm film.

This also brings about the importance of respecting the camera’s proclivity towards sharp-focus, precisionist images. This involves an inclination or predisposition on the landscape where it would be depicted in precise, sharply defined, geometrical forms. Looking at a series of films in that aspect, ‘Lovesong’ was described as “a hand-printed visualization of sex in the mind’s eye.”

In this film, it looks like the images were photographed while still wet. They also move slower as there are only two to three images per second, giving us the time to enjoy the abstract shapes and the rotation of the rich colors through the palette.

‘Mothlight’ is like staring at a bright light surrounded by moths. With this instance, Brakhage’s emphasizes in the simplicity in not depicting reality but a reproduction of reality, a concept which is also implied with

‘The Garden of Earthly Delights.’ The beauty of this film also comes in that no camera was used. It was made by pressing objects between two strips of clear mylar film and passing them through an optical printer. The pieces all look similar in a larger scale but there are detailed differences in colors used, patterns of the color’s movements, the way the patterns are layered, the length of the patterns and the intervals, the additional materials and so on.

Elizabeth

EYE MYTH

Continue through this Lens. Stan Brakhage was born Robert Sanders. By the time Brakhage got around to making Eye Myth, he had been a filmmaker for 15 years. A nine second long short, this film features images directly drawn onto 35mm film. Composed of all drawn images, they fly at you so rapidly you can’t make sense of it other than one central image, which is a person. I watched this film 3 times, and by the third I started thinking. 

Prior to making this film Brakhage was diagnosed with a medical condition that caused rapid eye movements. This would explain the structure. When asked to describe this film, Brakhage explained “In the eyes, constantly, the eyes are flaring with little... stories, little forms and shapes, some of which are quite disturbing, like the swastika... The little myth that's made up of bits and pieces of painted things onto a piece of film that’s called an Eye Myth. In other words, it’s not a word myth; myth means mouth, actually... but an Eye Myth is kind of beautifully oxymoronic” 

An Eye Myth. Brakhage views people and places as little bits of information, collected together in little stories and pictures, but are truly just pieces. What he sees is a myth, what he sees is not really there because he understands we aren’t we. We are us. We are what we put in our minds. 

My honest reaction to this film was that its imagery reminded me of an anxiety attack.When one has an anxiety attack, they freak out of no physical reaction. But as soon as someone calms them down or they take a deep breath, one can reassess the situation and find some sort of clarity. But until then, one is extremely emotionally overwhelmed, much like the visuals of this piece. This film towards the end releases some clarity, as we see the image of the man become more clear, and we can see what he’s doing.