Stan Brakhage at Harvard

Although film is still trying to extricate itself from other art, I share an excitement with my contemporaries that we are at the dawn of film being born as something completely different in the world. --Stan Brakhage, 1973

AS COUNTER cutting-edges of creative forces defining film essence, Stan Brakhage and Jean-Luc Godard have catalyzed complementary film movements. While Godard has brought to bear the history of abstract intellection in vivisecting the codes and conventions of bourgeois narrative film-making, Stan Brakhage has trans substantiated the history of abstract expressionism in creating an answer to the basic question "What is cinema?" Although academic film communities have identified with the analytical "specular text" -- the examining, form-destroying discourses -- of Godard and sentimentally embraced the "naive texts" of nostalgic cultural mythology, for example formula movies of unrestricted genres, Brakhage and the New American Film Movement he leads have been unappreciated by the academic eyes of verbal bigotry.

A pioneer among the American "film-as-art"-ists, Brakhage's goal is to make films which will maintain lasting value and sustain an infinite number of screenings. As such his medium is hardly the mass-age: Joyce and Picasso imply Brakhage far more directly than do Warner Bros. or Warhol. In fact, Brakhage's relationship to the tidal wave of free-form image-ination films is strikingly similar to Picasso's to cubism.

Subtly sophisticating the transmission of sensual information over the past two decades, Stan Brakhage has projected an inner vision (what you do see when you turn out the lights, when you close your eyes, when you change sight-thought relationships) through, and worn his heart on, his films. Consequently, any audience wishing to enter the kingdom of Brakhage must become as little children, must not wrongly expect "entertainment" but meet each image, sequence, film on its own terms. It must concentrate on learning to see how one sees -- how one comes to understand the worlds of fantasy and observation.

POUND is dead. Picasso is dead. Brakhage is alive and healthy in Hunt Hall tonight. He will show films made within the past two years including The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes, The Riddle of Lumen, The Myth of Phos, and his Sexual Meditation series. An involving, often brilliant conversationalist, Brakhage successfully bridges the experiential gap between his films and their audiences when he verbalizes those personal meanings hiding between the layers of abstraction.

The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes, shot in a morgue in Pittsburgh, poses a stunning alternative to Hollywood Pavlovian manipulation of audience emotion. Rather than suddenly swell the the musical theme under tragic characters, Brakhage, throughout a thirty-five minute personal interaction with autopsies, permits each viewer of the film to directly confront his own emotions, examine them, understand them. The Myth of Phos continues Brakhage's list of statements about the elements of the film process: light, darkness, projection, grain density, focus, and shadow movement. The Sexual Meditation series also extends established Brakhage pursuits: the tension of suggestion and recognition, the psychological association of abstract image flow and film-consciousness (flares, exposure, stocks, emulsions, and color).

Like ephemeral puffs of exhaust, current commercial movies are exhaled by a sidetracked Hollywood locomotive caught in the cartoon loop of capitalist consumption. When we can gain sufficient distance to see ourselves in the Hollywood mirror, we may hopefully give due recognition to other filmic trains of thought which reflect light on the nature of film as perception, and cultural utterance. Brakhage, as a metaphor for the exploding, embryonic, experimental film ghetto of insight, is an opportunity for those interested in the potential and future for film to discover a most human vehicle of introduction.