Stan Brakhage

FROM: O’Pray, M. ‘Avant-Garde Film Forms, Themes and Passions’ (2003) Wallflower Press (Page 59 - 63)

Having been initially influenced by the trance films of Anger, Deren and Peterson, and then by the modernist poetry of the Black Mountain group, Stan Brakhage’s experiments eventually led him to produce “ a form of lyrical film-making.” Along with Robert Creely, Charles Olsen, John Cage and other abstract expressionist painters, Brakhage, according to O’Pray, “shared in the forging of an American visual art style through the impact of European modernism on post-war America.”

O’Pray argues that Deren’s intense aversion to “abstract graphic cinema” was not shared by Brakhage who embraced both abstraction and the idea of “the film as material” making him “ the first truly modernist American film-maker.’’ Nature greatly influenced Brakhage’s work and, as with other American modernists, he combines the “American Romanicism of personal struggle against nature with a modernist self-reflexivity.”

O’Pray claims that,

“Brakhage’s art is a celebration of an intense subjectivity of surrealism in which the camera became an intuitive instrument of expression of the body and eye. Central to his aesthetic is the idea of the ‘untutored eye’ by which he meant a kind of innocence in relation to nature and the world, allowing a return to a vision untrammelled by ideological, cultural, even conceptual baggage (see James 1989: 36-49; Keller 1986: 179-229)”

Brakhage did not merely shoot whatever happened to appear in front of him, however,

according to O’Pray,

“…the accidental, the intuitive and spontaneous played an enormous role in his practice and film-making process. Brakhage has been a prolific film-maker, constantly developing and exploring film forms and materials.”

Brakhage shot his films mainly using 16mm film, however he also used Standard 8 films and in recent times, painted directly onto 35mm film and used IMAX formats.

Brakhage’s work differed from the

“controlled graphic tradition of Lye, Richter, Ruttmann et al” and was more in line with both the “spontaneous brush-mark work of the post-war American Abstract expressionist painters and Marie Menken’s early diary films, in which colour, shape and movement are used to depict ordinary objects and events.”

Brakhage stated that he “grew very quickly as a film artist once I got rid of drama as prime source of inspiration.”(quoted in Sitney 1979:147)

Anticipation of the Night (1958) (Pages 61-63)

Brakhage broke away from the psychodrama, marked by his film Anticipation of the Night (1958) which heralded the introduction of the lyric film.

Anticipation of the Night (1958)

O’Pray argues that Anticipation of the Night (1958) was viewed as being “Brakhage’s moment of self-discovery” and, “the founding of his own aesthetic” (James 1989: 41-2). His book Metaphors on Vision reinforced this idea of a new beginning. According to Sitney, Anticipation of the Night, marks a departure from film drama in favour of “lyric film.”

“ For him, the film’s ‘greatest achievement … is the distillation of an intense and complex interior crisis into an orchestration of sights and associations which cohere in a new formal rhetoric of camera movement and montage’ (1974: 143-4).”

Having been influenced by Marie Menken’s short film poems, Brakhage was the innovator of a type of film form. Other influences included the Black Mountain poets, the Romantic movement , abstract expressionist painting and the poetry of Pound, Olsen and the avant-garde writer, Gertrude Stein. The images and construction of Anticipation of the Night is characterised by a feeling of spontaneity and “hand held ‘action.’ ” O’Pray argues that,

“ The movement and editing suggests a direct response of the artist to the world and an expression of his emotional response to it.”

O’Pray describes Anticipation of the Night, as using fast, dense, repetitive editing patterns, “rapid camera rhythms,” the focus and aperture highlighting

“detail and light as expressive means and in its intense sense of the camera as forging the style and not simply capturing a compositional ‘look.’ ’’

Brakhage’s main aim, according to O’Pray, was “to capture the ‘innocent’ eye of Wordsworthian childhood.”

Anticipation of the Night is dominated with darkness, occasionally interspersed with light and colour and the film harks back to the abstract work of Man Ray, Leger and Menken: Brakhage’s faiground lights at night echo those in Man Ray’s Return to Reason; the shifting repetitions echo those of Leger’s Ballet Mechanique; the film’s “intrinsic lyricism” and “expressiveness”, O’Pray claims, has been influenced by Menken’s delicate film poems.”

Complex movements in a variety of areas is evident in this film - camera movement, rapid editing and repetitions and “movement within the frame which is the result of the camera movement itself.”

Brakhage’s films often highlight a distinction between “what seems to be the case” and “what is the case.” The impression in Anticipation of the Night is that “the world is carrying past the static camera” rather than the opposite which is what we know to be the case.

O’Pray states that for Sitney, the lyrical film sees the film-maker as “the first person protagonist of the film” with the images being what he sees and we appreciate “how he is reacting to his vision.” This is both a stylistic device and, more importantly, an expressive device, with Brakhage attempting to establish a relationship between “the camera and the filmic image” mirroring the relationship between the artist, his brush (or other marking instrument) and the image produced.

Anticipation of the Night, in Sitney’s view, “ is about suicide and its context” and therefore echoes the psychodramas produced by Deren and Anger. However, it differs in that it does not create

“a fictional/mythical narrative or mise-en-scene for such an action but seems more of a universal nature - a man and a series of images of a general kind - children on a merry-go-round, night skies, undergrowth, a baby on a lawn, trees, the moon and sun and so forth.”

This film does not have a psychodramatic story or drama and there is only a loose connection between the man’s walking shadow at the start and the shadow of his hanging body. O’Pray says,

“For Brakhage, the film is metaphorical: ‘all of childhood was just an anticipation of the night of adulthood.’ (quoted in Fees 1992:90)”

Brakhage rejected this metaphor shortly after producing this film, as he focussed his attention on ‘‘visionary cinema’’ which is void of drama, mythology or symbols.

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FROM: artform.comm (Accessed 19/2/20)

Brakhage’s book, Metaphors on Vision was a compilation of essays which were originally published in an issue of Film Culture (1963). In the opening interview with P. Adams Sitney, Brakhage rejects the suicide finale of his film Anticipation of the Night (1958) as it adheres to the “dramatic conventions” that he subsequently wished to reject in favour his quest to discover “filmic realization for the adventure of vision itself.”

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FROM: brooklynrail.org (accessed 19/2/20)

In an article in The Brooklyn Rail (Oct 2017), Sadie Rebecca Starnes argues that Brakhage was one of the greatest kino-poets, a filmmaker who “pushed his art beyond the apparent, behind the eyelid and the shutter, and on into the “Impossibility of it all.” Starnes states that Metaphors on Vision (1958) reminds us Brakhage’s “seminal innovations,” highlighting his meter which she claims “set the very rhythm of American experimental film for future filmmakers.”

According to Starnes, the prose which opens Metaphors is “the most quoted in film scholarship” and clearly reveals Brakhage’s central motivating force as a filmmaker:

“ 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. How many colours are there in fields of grass to the crawling baby unaware of “Green?” How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations of heat waves can the eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable graduations of colour. Imagine a world before the “beginning was the word.” ”

Brakhage was, in Starne’s opinion, devoted to phenomenological vision which had been influenced by the poet, Robert Duncan who in an essay entitled “Poetry Before Language” desired to “describe Poetry as it was before words, or signs, before beauty, or eternity, or meaning were.”

In Starnes’ view, the poetry of Charles Olsen and Duncan influenced that of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, which in turn had an impact upon Brakhage. Thus she states that “Brakhage is rooted in “the milieu of American poetry rather in discussions of cinema in the fifties.”

{ this has echos of Dada which adhered not only to art as a painterly medium, but also drew on a plethora of different types of artistic expression such as poetry, dance, mime etc}

Brakhage made over three hundred and fifty, mostly silent films in both 8mm and 16mm, in which Strane’s maintains, “he sought to render the immediacy of synthetic sight by “cinematic poems.” ” His films included Cat’s Cradle (1959); DogMan Star (1961-64); Text of Lights(1974).

According to Stranes, Brakhage was impressed by Pound’s unfinished work of modernist poetry entitled The Cantos (1917-1969) and “employed similarly “ideogrammatic” montages to capture the abstract essence of hyper-subjective experience.”

“ By his innovative rapid montage, Brakhage was able to mimic the eye’s flittering movements, the capricious nature of one’s thoughts and dreams. His restless rhythm of looking, best demonstrated in the deluge of images that comprise Anticipation of the Night(1958), is meant to train and then liberate the viewer’s “untutored eye.”

(Inspiration for my film based on Sadie Rebecca Starnes’ article )

“ 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. How many colours are there in fields of grass to the crawling baby unaware of “Green?” How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations of heat waves can the eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable graduations of colour. Imagine a world before the “beginning was the word.”

This is one of the most famous quotations in filmmaking. Brakhage himself reads it in a short documentary film focussing on his art and inspiration. My idea is to have his voice (if it is legally possible) reading each line which has been written on a revolving record. This is then followed by a plethora of fast-cut images on the subject. For example:

“ Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective,”

Image of an eye —> camera zooms into the eye followed by images of perspective drawings/paintings etc. A moving image of a revolving record also is adorned with the these words. The spoken words repeats and echoes throughout.

“an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic,’’

Image of an eye —> camera zooms into the eye followed by images of suggesting

“compositional logic”.

eg. A page of rules for painting: the rule of thirds etc, a canvas divided according to artist rules, the effect of a light source creating shadows, a pile of books on art theory etc. A moving image of a revolving record also is adorned with the these words. The spoken words repeat and echo throughout.

“an eye which does not respond to the name of everything”

Image of an eye —> camera zooms into the eye followed by images of printed words with an accompanying picture, a child’s words and pictures book. A moving image of a revolving record also is adorned with the these words. The spoken words repeat and echo throughout.

“but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception.”

Random images without any printed words. A giraffe, Belfast City Hall, a clock etc. A moving image of a revolving record also is adorned with the these words. The spoken words repeat and echo throughout.

“ How many colours are there in fields of grass to the crawling baby unaware of “Green?” ”

Image of a crawling baby, green, grassy fields, green paint tubes etc. Bokeh question marks. A moving image of a revolving record also is adorned with the these words. The spoken words repeat and echo throughout.

“How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye?”

Images of rainbows, prisms, iridescent drops of oil floating on puddles, colouring pencils, paints, eyes, billowing rainbow colours created by my ink, oil, milk, soap experiments, eyes etc A moving image of a revolving record also is adorned with the these words. The spoken words repeat and echo throughout.

“How aware of variations of heat waves can the eye be?”

Images of deserts, fires, popcorn popping, eyes, bokeh question marks. A moving image of a revolving record also is adorned with the these words. The spoken words repeat and echo throughout.

“Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable graduations of colour.”

Stock image of a rocket launch into space, cutting to images of my ink, milk, oil and soap experiments giving the impression of outer space and billowing explosions of colour. A moving image of a revolving record also is adorned with the these words. The spoken words repeat and echo throughout.

“Imagine a world before the “beginning was the word.” ”

Image of The Bible opened at Genesis, “ In the beginning, God created the Heavens and earth.” An ink, milk, soap, oil experimental image of planets in outer space. A moving image of a revolving record also is adorned with these words. The spoken words repeat and echo throughout.

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Stan Brakhage | The Untutored Eye

Stan Brakhage | The Untutored Eye. (2017). Alpha-Alpaca-Pack. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3rSP3-iWvs&feature=youtu.be. [Accessed: 24 Feb 2020].

In a youtube video written and narrated by Elliott Nunn, entitled ‘Stan Brakhage I The Untutored Eye’ published on 25 July 2017, Brakhage himself says,

“… my work has largely been preoccupied with birth, sex, death and the search for God.”

Film critic, Linda Williams, claims that,

“Sometimes it seems that a Brakhage film goes by so fast that you really don’t have time to react to it.”

Nunn argues that while other artists were experimenting with such areas as cinematography, character, narrative and sound, Stan Brakhage was more concerned with “the film itself - celluloid” which he considered to be

“more than a simple stepping stone in the process of creating and screening a film, but a medium to be explored in Itself.”

Brakhage described a variety of ways he experimented with celluloid - baking it in the oven, ironing it, photographing iron filings reacting to magnets and vibrations and powders, “photographing brine shrimp herded into a small space to get the meat quivering sense of it” and painting it.

Nunn says that Brakhage’s films

“function not only as streams of consciousness but carefully edited snippets of his interior thoughts, a process he termed as “moving visual thinking.”

Brakhage states that science has not yet invented a machine that is able to,

“ tap into people’s actual thinking process and then project whatever they are thinking as a vision and put it up on a screen.”

He explains that is attempting to do achieve the latter by laboriously painting on celluloid.

Typically, Brakahage’s films, according to Nunn, are void of character, narrative or sound and the only element that artist wishes the viewer to experience outside the frame is the “whirring of the film projector.’’ Brakhage pours scorn upon trying to watch Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) on video, claiming that it dulls the excitement of the edit saying that, “video looks like a pudding that is virtually uncuttable.”

Nunn claims that, as with other experimental filmmakers, there was “a very clear theoretical philosophy” behind Brakage’s works and, illustrating this point Brakhage reads the following which, according to Starnes (2017), is “the most quoted in film scholarship” and clearly reveals Brakhage’s central motivating force as a filmmaker.

“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.”

The latter was what Brakhage regarded as being the “untutored eye” which Nunn says was “the core concept behind all of his films.”

Brakhage continues to read his famous quote,

“How many colours are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of …“green”? …. How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable graduations of colour. Imagine a world before “the beginning was the word.”

Nunn argues that “this idea was not unique to Brakahge and illustrates the point by referring to two paintings, the first being Vemeer’s Girl With A Pearl Earring (1665) and the second being a replica of this painting by a child. He considers why most viewers would regard the original as being the one which better portrays “ the intricacies of human expession” and therefore is “a better work of art.” Nunn attempts to justify this stance by turning to the English writer and philosopher, Aldous Huxley who, under the influence of the psychoactive drug, Mescaline, wrote in The Doors of Perception (1954)

“Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood when the sensum is not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept.”

Nunn then turns his attention to John Ruskin who, in his book “The Elements of Drawing” (1857) wrote,

“The whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye, that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such without unconsciousness of what they signify as a blind man would see them if he were suddenly gifted with sight.”

Nunn claims that,

“Vemeer evidently understood and practised these concepts: Ruskin’s innocence of the eye, Huxley’s perceptual innocence of childhood and finally Brakhage’s untutored eye, painting shapes, shades and values without consciousness of what they signified.”

Nunn suggests that Vemeer

“processed the raw visual information that his eyes were gathering and transformed that into his art, instead of building up from a series of generic assumptions about what a person looks like.”

Nunn argues that the child artist, on the other hand, has painted their own perception of reality, rather than what is actually there. The art historian, Ernst Gombrich said,

“ Whenever we receive a visual impression, we react by docketing it, filing it, grouping it in one way or another, even if the impression is only that of an inkblot or a fingerprint. It is the business of the living organism to organise for wherever there is life, there is not only hope, as the proverb says, but also fears, guesses and expectations which sort and model the incoming messages, testing and transforming and testing again. The innocent eye is a myth.”

Nunn argues that for Brakhage,

“this filing, grouping and categorisation meant a form of simplification - a low resolution version of the true idea. But the untutored eye wasn’t a purely positive experience, it simply reflected a pre-cognitive state of vision. As such, Brakhage’s works not only drew attention to the flaws and limits of the celluloid film frame, but to ‘entoptic phenomena’ or the physical flaws of the eye … “floaters”… reflections of blood vessels in your eye and …“phosphenes” the explosions of colour you get when rubbing your eyes.”

Nunn suggests that

“the untutored eye intentionally ignores these flaws … because they serve no purpose to vision. In the same way that film may be riddled with dust, scratches and bumps, so too does the untutored eye have its flaws. But for Brakhage they were an unalienable part of the experience. Stan Brakhage rejected all forms of dichotomy and categorisation … he found any type of categorisation a form of restriction and simplification and rejected it on all levels.”

Nunn continues saying,

“ His films can be seen to categorically reject categorisation, with nearly every element sitting in a form of filmic purgatory. In the world of the untutored eye, definition cannot exist because there is no separation, no boundaries to define. It is the pre-linguistiuc utopia of the Tabula Rasa, - the “world before the beginning was the word.”, the blank slate in which there is no conscious filter.”

Nunn concludes arguing that,

“Gombrich is right in that the innocent eye is a myth and we cannot ever regain this state, but Brakhage’s works allows us to revisit it, if not just for a moment.”