If you search Google on the terms “birth sex death god,” you get 363,000 hits (as of my latest attempt) and adding the unlikely term “Brakhage” to that list returns a still whopping 1,030. Stan Brakhage made 373 films during his life, most very short, all very experimental, and one can certainly describe his body of work as an attempt to understand these stages of life – we’re born, we have sex, we have children, we die – and the spiritual aspects they all share.
One of my most powerful formative experiences during a college film studies course came while viewing Brakhage’s Deus Ex. It is entirely without sound (as are all of the films I’ll be discussing here) and is almost purely abstract in its visual qualities. It documents a patient’s open heart surgery and deals head on with the theme of mortality that repeats in endless variations throughout Brakhage’s work. What blew me away so profoundly back in 1981, though, was how the film was made. The lens was detached from the body and Brakhage balanced and juggled the two halves of the camera in opposite hands. The result is a jittery, fluid sort of movie full of light flares dashing across the screen at all angles. The film is also never in focus and instead becomes a blurry light painting of reds (blood) and greens (surgical gowns). The sheer beauty of Deus Ex floored me and filled me with the sense that anything is possible with this thing called cinema.
Since that day, I’ve had chances to take in Brakhage’s work in bits and pieces scattered far and wide, but nothing very satisfying until the Criterion Collection released By Brakhage: An Anthology a few years ago. I was probably the first person on the planet to order a copy (or at least I would be proud to hold that honor) and finally I had a wealth of the man’s work at my fingertips. I’ve watched everything on both DVDs in the set more times than I can remember. I even converted my youngest daughter – starting at age seven – into a Brakhage fan. For several years, she’d come to me and say, “Daddy, can we watch those pretty movies that you just sit and stare at?” (Lately, she’s let Brakhage go in favor of Miyazaki, but still gave me a smile today when she saw me revisiting one of our old favorites.)
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