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Serious Mothlight
For Stan Brakhage (1933-2003)

Nicole Brenez & Adrian Martin

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Like Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea (1970), Stan Brakhage addressed

himself directly to the sun and the stars. He lived, worked, thought within the
essentialness of myth or the muthos – within poetry as the restorer of truth’s
foundations. But what is truth for Brakhage? It is a more exact, more expansive
relationship to the phenomenal world. For him, the resemblance characteristic of
conventional cinematic recording was only a tiny strip on the whole spectrum of
exactness. His work as a filmmaker consisted of exploring, inventing and revealing
other frequencies of possible imagery. From simple abstraction to the visual
critique of familiar imagery, Brakhage enlarged the frame of cinematic figurativity
like no other artist has ever done.

1. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Film: The Front Line 1983 (Denver: Arden Press, 1983), pp.
24-25.
Just as a certain tradition (the John Cage tradition) of contemporary
experimental music invites and then demands an ongoing sophistication of one’s
capacity to hear structures, relations, the dancing, shifting formations of sonic
material, Brakhage’s films propose a tutoring of the eye, a rapturous attentiveness
to the tiniest visual fluctuations and effects. There is doubtless a spiritual
dimension intended as part of these exercises for the soul: Jonas Mekas ranks
Brakhage’s influence with that of ‘some religious leaders’ in his effort to change
people’s ‘sensibilities and certain feelings and emotions’. (1)

Adding to the thick, experiential mystery of these long-developed

offerings is a somewhat cryptic, Symbolist aspect. Brakhage often limited his
verbal explanation of the films to citations of lines or stanzas from poems by
writers including Charles Olson and Ronald Johnson. As in the writing of Kris
Hemensley, Frank Lovece or Louis Zukofsky, the visual text we ultimately see on
screen is a dense, camouflaged, teasing, highly elaborated play of allusions and
responses to, echoes and transformations of, this invisible source material which
the filmmaker keeps close to his heart and to the vibrations of his caméra-stylo.
2. Experimenta programme note (Melbourne), 1990.
Brakhage made epics, series, and also very small works, such as Blossom
– Gift/Favor (1993). Perhaps only forty-five seconds in length, this is an
exquisite flowering (Brakhage’s word) of carefully layered colours and shapes. It
works with blocks of re-photographed textures and materials, and the swift, eye-
defying mobility of these blocks frame by frame, in the manner of his Dante Quartet
series (1987). Again absolutely impossible to describe in its dense materiality and
fleeting affect, it recalls to mind Marcus Bergner’s remark about certain ultra-
short ‘pieces of intense poetic and imaginative force’ in experimental film that
bring home ‘the significance of brief gestures in a world where mass media has
already imposed its rules of concision and constriction’. (2)

3. Cf. Stan Brakhage, Brakhage Scrapbook: Collected Writings 1964-1980 (New Paltz:
Documentext, 1982), pp. 69-77.

Brakhage was a poet of his medium, an artisan attentive to the plastic

possibilities offered by cinema as a tool. He produced brilliant texts on editing,
on Super 8 as the supreme form of cinema, on the different properties of celluloid.
And who else could have come up with an ode to sprocket holes? (3) One of his
remarks opens up his aesthetic horizon: Brakhage found the infinity symbol printed
on camera lenses ridiculous. Infinity, for him, was not some kind of quantitative
asymptote, a straining towards an endlessly deferred, far-away point whose vertigo
we are spared by mathematics. Brakhage’s infinity designates the ever-close sum of
sensory experiences offered here and now by any phenomena whatsoever – even the
most modest, like the flight of a moth in the night (Mothlight, 1963).

4. Brakhage, p. 19.
This is the infinity of our ‘optical adventures’. The cinema’s vocation
is not to record appearances, but to deploy the powers of analogy. Analogy with
what? Not the world as more or less tamed by our intellect, but the world as
apprehended by the totality of our psychic apparatus, beginning from the most
obscure and mysterious zones: perception, sensation, apperception, intuition,
imagination, dream. In 1964 he wrote: ‘An artist MUST act on dream instruction (day
AND night dream structures conditioning all his being) for continuance of his art’.
(4) The only infinite is desire; in this realm Brakhage illuminated – in words but
above all in images – what he called the ‘optical unconscious’.

Few articles on a Brakhage film – at least in Anglo-Saxon culture –

fail to be an account of the difficulty inherent in writing about the object at
hand. His is truly an oeuvre which (to borrow a phrase from Raymond Bellour)
‘pushes language into check’. Attempts by fans to evoke what they actually see on
the screen quickly turn into breathless inventories of objects – trees, flowers,
shade, light, a bird, a balloon – before stopping dead altogether and issuing a
pronouncement on the sheer beauty of the film. At this point avant-garde film
criticism resembles a cheap TV commercial: words cannot possibly describe this
amazing movie – just go see it! Yet, insofar as all celebratory film talk indeed
boils down to such an injunction, mute and helpless before the monumental visuality
of this medium, these are exactly the words I would use in recommending a work such
as A Child's Garden and the Serious Sea (1991). Brakhage made seriously beautiful
films.

5. J. Hoberman, ‘A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea’, Village Voice (9 February
1993), p. 53. Reprinted (slightly modified) in Hoberman, The Magic Hour: Film at
Fin de Siècle (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), p. 244.
On an early ‘90s episode of the TV program The Extraordinary, a UFO
expert was wheeled on to explain away the strange shapes registered by the camera
from the night sky on a reel of domestic video tape. ‘The camera was pushed so far
beyond its capacity,’ he cheerfully explained, ‘that it ended up filming its own
optics.’ This account is not a bad description of some of the things that appear to
be going on in Brakhage's films. Jim Hoberman noted the presence of ‘a lifetime of
polished techniques – prisms, diffusion lenses, sudden camera movements, percussive
shifts in exposure, oversaturated colours, tricks of scale’. (5) As he first
adumbrated in his 1963 book Metaphors of Vision, Brakhage is engaged in his own
kind of guerrilla war against all the constraints of ‘Renaissance vision’ that have
become institutionalised in the very design of cameras and lenses, not to mention
the more elaborate defenses of conservative mise en scène, and his vigorous
assaults are directed in the cause of freeing up seeing and confounding all the old
subject/object, perceiver/perceived distinctions.

The optical unconscious is not a matter of irrationality or decorative

psychedelia. Brakhage’s ambition was closest to the global project announced by
Sergei Eisenstein: to place images within the workings of thought, in the foldings
and unfoldings of its strata, its volumetrics, its complexity. In the course of
this psychic investigation, both filmmakers – Eisenstein in Ivan the Terrible
(1946), Brakhage in his frescoes Dog Star Man (1961-4) and Scenes From Under
Childhood (1967-70) – sought to ‘plunge into the maternal womb’, revisited as the
sensory source of affects. But, whereas Eisenstein worked primarily on syntactical
and symbolic levels, Brakhage worked on a plastic level, without the slightest
trace of narrativity (beyond his earliest psychodrama films). Colour, textures,
kinetics, optical and sometimes sonic rhythms (he’d studied with Edgar Varèse and
John Cage) deploy their own descriptive powers, to the point where cinema, in a
truly sublime gesture, breaches all our spiritual limits and shows itself capable
of arousing sensations, visions and hitherto unknown thoughts. Anyone who hasn’t
seen the feature length A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea, a dazzling visual
poem on landscape, knows as little about the grandeur and beauty that cinema is
capable of as a music buff who ignores the existence of Bach.

Brakhage was, for at least twenty-five years, an immensely

controversial, divisive figure in experimental film culture. In his last decade
this storm well and truly subsided, but we should not forget the terms of this
fraught engagement. Seen as the insidiously powerful godhead of a Romantic
tradition in the American avant-garde going back to the ‘40s, Brakhage's films and
his authorial aura were targeted, post-‘60s, by successive waves of the radical
avant-garde (structuralist, leftist, feminist, punk). For his part, Brakhage was
happy to return the provocation (‘I have no intention of treating anyone as a
colleague,’ he once declared).

6. Peter Wollen, ‘Letters’, Framework no. 18 (1982), p. 58; cf. also ‘The Two
Avant-Gardes’ in Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies (London: Verso,
1982), pp. 92-104; and ‘The Avant-Gardes: Europe and America’, Framework no. 14
(Spring 1981), pp. 9-10.

7. Rosenbaum, Film: the Front Line 1983, p. 47; Fred Camper, ‘Film: The Front
Line’, Millennium no. 14/15 (Fall-Winter 1984/5), p. 52.
When in mid-‘70s Britain Peter Wollen wrote a manifesto marking a
polemical separation between the ‘two avant-gardes’, he had in mind a rearguard
American branch led by Brakhage (and championed by such critics as P. Adams
Sitney), and a progressive European tradition held high by Straub & Huillet,
Godard, Makavejev. (In a memorably heated exchange of the early '80s, Wollen wrote:
‘However reluctantly, I'm ready to grant Brakhage his place in history. When will
Sitney do the same for Godard?’) (6) In his book Film: The Front Line, Jonathan
Rosenbaum launched a more direct ideological attack against Brakhage's unholy
influence, his ‘reactionary political stance’, and the ‘familial, patriarchal, and
phallocratic side of his work’. (To which Fred Camper, long-time critical supporter
of Brakhage, asked: ‘Are all three of those qualities supposed to be bad, or only
the last two, or only one?’) (7)

8. Rosenbaum, Film: The Front Line, p. 122.

For Rosenbaum at that time (he has since been kinder to the artist’s
achievement), Brakhage's films grandly epitomised a ‘metaphysical conceit
underlying the whole American avant-garde Romantic tradition … which reduces the
universe to a list of male possessions: This is my wife, my child, my gun, my dog,
my camera, my house, my car, my summer vacation, my life’. Where Rosenbaum
attributes the tendency of Brakhage's work to stand ‘outside all history and
ideology’ to this ‘unproblematical embrace of The Essential Verities’, (8) Wollen
locates the problem more within a certain in-grown purism which he describes as
ontological – an obsession with 'film as film' reduced to the tiniest particles of
light, grain and flicker, which works to shut out any attention to the materialist
referents of social representation.

Abstraction is a scary, slippery thing, especially to rational,

theoretical minds of a particular persuasion. Above all other cinematic strategies
that foreground the action of form, it is abstraction which really ‘pushes language
into check’. Yet so much of the discourse that goes on in independent film culture
grasps for clear, nameable, detachable referents – and values those films,
filmmakers and film movements (‘political cinema’, ‘queer cinema’, ‘the essay-
film’, just to name a few) which put such referents firmly in the dominant position
over any 'decadent' concern with form in its intricate, intractable materiality.

9. Cf. Constance Penley, ‘The Avant-Garde and its Imaginary’, Camera Obscura no. 2
(Fall 1977), pp. 3-33, for a classic statement of this position in relation to
avant-garde cinema in general.

For sceptics writing at different times between the late ‘60s and the
‘90s, the reflex distaste for Brakhage's work had a psychoanalytically informed
aspect. Apparently Stan the Man was not only sexist and purist, but his films –
especially in their silence, numinosity and abstraction – are locked up solely in
the realm of the Imaginary. (9) And it was taken for granted that there was no
passage into or out of the Symbolic in his films: no language, no inscription, no
psychic contradiction, no scar of the social, no drama of identity. But many of
Brakhage’s films are, in fact, in constant processual movement between the poles of
abstraction and representation. While Brakhage has always been impelled to evoke a
state of bliss resembling innocence – ‘Eden before Adam got around to naming the
animals’, in Dwight MacDonald’s phrase – his films also dramatise, in their way,
the violent passage from this utopian Imaginary realm to a more fearsome Symbolic
one. (It’s possible to sense here his affinity with Terrence Malick, whose films he
greatly admired, alongside Tarkovsky and Scorsese.) One of his films is even called
The Animals of Eden and After (1970), evoking an unexpected link between this
intuitive artist whom some thought ‘un-theoretical’ and the perverse conceptualist
Alain Robbe-Grillet whose project Eden and After began that same year.

10. Brakhage, pp. 104-6.

In the course of his exploration of visual frequencies, Brakhage
engaged with other aesthetic conceptions. He devoted seminars and magnificent texts
to other filmmakers, collected in two volumes, Film Biographies (1977) and Film at
Wit’s End ([1989] on Maya Deren, Bruce Conner, Ken Jacobs). And he also encountered
shared images, clichés, oppressive or unbearable images. This major dimension of
his work is the least known. 23rd Psalm Branch (1966-7) for example, a meditation
on the nature of war shot at the start of 1966, arose from Brakhage’s discovery of
images of the Vietnam War broadcast on television, images he described as
‘hypnagogic’ (10): this is the film on guilt and anguish that Kathy (Lili Taylor)
in Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction (1995) would make if she was a filmmaker and not a
doctoral student in philosophy.

11. Brakhage, p. 193.

In 1971, in his great ‘Foucauldian’ trilogy shot in Pittsburgh, Eyes,
Deus Ex and The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, he filmed the three institutions
of bodily control: the police, the hospital and the morgue. It’s not a polemical
project, but a matter of producing what he called ‘documents’: to show for once how
a human being can gaze directly, with their own eyes, upon the sites where our
crucial experiences – of illness, crime, death, law – are framed, regulated and
symbolised. To deal with these dominant motifs of modern iconography – the cop, the
corpse, the sick patient – Brakhage resorts to an organic mode of filming: organic
because indexed not on beliefs but on the physiological pulses of his heart and
eyes. ‘This eye is a jelly, and it’s quivering continually, with our heartbeat,
with our walking, with our breathing, with anything that happens, any movement we
make. And what I did was to make an articulate dance with that possibility, with
this lens.’ (11)
 This trilogy, so simple and modest, suddenly established the human
standard in relation to which all other treatments of the same images – however
brilliant, violent or judicious they may be, however close to our avowed
convictions and intellectual constructions – suddenly appear anecdotal and
uselessly complicated.

Over and above all possible cultural contexts, the matter of the
singular beauty of Brakhage’s work remains fiercely insistent. I do not hope to be
able to meet this beauty head-on in writing, so I will record another TV memory
that resonates with my fragmented experience of his career. At a major ‘90s
exhibition of paintings by Auguste Renoir (‘Renoir’s Women’) a line-up of British
art historians held forth on his art and its cultural context.

12. Scott McQuire ‘Melbourne Film Festival’, Photofile no. 36 (August 1992) p.40
One of these experts claimed that Renoir was involved in projecting
images of women that would help outfit real women for the capitalist age of
voracious feminine consumption. Another affirmed that his idyllic, pastoral images
were fantasies complicit with the development of a ‘touristic gaze’ crucial to a
burgeoning world economy. There was probably some interesting truth in these
remarks. But how inadequate the words seemed, as they trailed over the top of the
paintings themselves, so light and rich, so moving and intriguing. And how bankrupt
the critical attitude which regards all carefully formed artistic expressions – the
‘complex translation of the seen and the felt to a series of visual marks on a flat
surface’ (12) – as the mere epiphenomena of a social, historical system. Serious
beauty surely demands more of us than this.

13. Brakhage, p. 190.

There was a precise origin for Brakhage’s political project: the regret
that, to film the first man on the moon, NASA had sent astronauts but not an
artist. (13) To film the moon, the sun, a war or the sea, to film light, sensation,
the unconscious and everything for which there are no words – to film all this, it
would be better in effect not to send a proud possessor but a wild, uncontrollable
artist, one with universal aspirations. We’d have to send someone like William
Blake. Or Friedrich Schiller. Or Stan Brakhage.

to Rouge Press page © Nicole Brenez, Adrian Martin and Rouge June 2003.
Cannot be reprinted without permission of the authors and editors of Rouge.
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