THE FILMS
By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volumes One and Two is more than a Blu-ray set. It’s a national treasure. It’s something to watch once a year for the rest of one’s life. It’s certainly the home video release of the decade.
I first encountered Stan Brakhage, a force in experimental filmmaking for nearly 50 years, while a freshman in college. I wasn’t a film buff, yet. I was just a teenager taking an “Intro to Film” class for an easy grade.
One day, the professor sat us down and unspooled a documentary of open heart surgery that was so out of focus and filled with light leaks – as if the filmmaker had repeatedly opened the film magazine while shooting – that the film consisted solely of splotches of red (blood) and green (surgical gowns).
The professor proudly declared, “That was by Brakhage. We’ll talk tomorrow. Class dismissed.” I remember students stomping out like they’d been insulted. I couldn’t move.
The next morning I realized why the professor had been so brief. He wanted us to sleep on it. I awoke feeling like my brain had been removed, rewired, and plugged back in again. Brakhage aimed to create a cinema that forced his viewers to re-learn not only the ways of watching movies, but the very act of seeing with one’s own eyes.
I consider all 56 films on the set to be brilliant. Hell, I’ll just come out and admit that he’s my favorite filmmaker of all time and I cherish everything he made. I’ll single out a few though.
One could say that to be married to Brakhage made one, by default, part of his art. He was a man who didn’t discern any difference between his work, his art, and his life.
Because of this, many of his films are like imaginatively filmed home movies. Wedlock House: An Intercourse (1959) transformed a honeymoon into a shadowy nightmare of uncertainty and lovemaking. The birth of a child became Window Water Baby Moving (1959), a film of home birthing like no other. His first wife Jane was nothing if not a trooper.
His magnum opus is Dog Star Man (1961-64). It begins slowly, taking over a minute to emerge from darkness to gradually fill the screen with explosions of imagery, some recognizable like solar flares and a man climbing a mountain carrying an axe, some indistinguishable. The film is an epic poem seen through a kaleidoscope.
23rd Psalm Branch (1967) is one of the angriest screams in the face of war’s horrors ever committed to celluloid. Made on 8mm film, this complex living, breathing, and shuddering cry from hell is the most riveting thing I’ve ever seen in the dark. (And make sure you watch all of these films in a very dark room. I tried watching them with the evening sun streaming in through the window and it rendered virtually all of the subtle imagery invisible.)
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