'All that is, is Light.'

Arthur Cantrill

This statement above by the 9th century philosopher Johannes Scotus Erigena was central to the practice of Stan Brakhage, who died in March 2003 of cancer, aged 70, after 52 years of crafting an art of light in more than 300 films.

At the discussion session after the premiere of his film The Text of Light at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh in 1974, he paraphrased the later English 'Light Philosopher' Robert Grosseteste: 'all that sense can comprehend, is Light: because it partakes of that which it is. To comprehend dark, or a shape, it must withdraw from its own nature – it must withdraw or turn against its own electrical illuminating nature in order to comprehend a shape.' ^[1]

The Text of Light had no solid shapes, or darkness, it was 80 minutes of the essential texture and energy of light in slow evolution: spellbinding, and reminiscent of the films of James Davis, to whom Brakhage dedicated his film. On viewing this work one remembers Len Lye's idea that 'art lies in the genes': that our positive response to a piece of art comes from something deep within, to do with our genetic makeup. Len Lye was one of Brakhage's heroes, in particular he admired Lye's black and white hand-etched film, Free Radicals.

At the reception after the Carnegie Institute screening, Stan quizzed our autistic son, Ivor, on the ways his understanding of colour compensated for a lack of verbal communication, an echo of Brakhage's famous question in his manifesto, Metaphors on Vision: 'How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of "Green"? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye?' ^[2] .

And again, from Metaphors on Vision: 'Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of colour.' In many of his films he came close to achieving this world. The image is often structured to evoke song or dance, and has no need for sound accompaniment, imbued, as it is, with what he called 'a silent sound sense'. His 1959 Sirius Remembered is a case in point. He re-members the corpse of the family dog, lying out in the woods, through various seasons, with repeated patterns of hand-held camera movements and superimpositions in which the animal finally appears to lift itself from the ground to join the camera in a dance of life. ^[3] In hand-holding the camera he fully exploited his bodily movement – the tremble of life – as a painter might in wielding a brush, the gestures contributing to a recognisable personal style.

Brakhage's camera movement often mirrors the saccadic movements the human eye performs when quickly relocating from one point of interest to another. However as our brain 'edits out' the intervening swishes, while our so-called 'persistence of vision' ensures that the brain holds an image momentarily and joins it to the following one, we don't actually see these saccadic movements. Even so, perhaps Brakhage's use of them evokes a response to some inner knowledge of their existence. In any case, such a film requires constant moment-by-moment attention from the viewer – missing a fraction of a second can be a significant loss. Brakhage always recommended seeing a film at least 25 times to become thoroughly familiar with it.

His oeuvre had astonishing scope, from his early 'psycho-dramas' such as Way to Shadow Garden (1955), through his 'mythopoeic' Dog Star Man and the four and a half hour The Art of Vision (the printing rolls of Dog Star Man) in the 1960s; then the films made with his family and animals in and around his home in the Colorado mountains, such as Animals of Eden and After (1970); followed by the Pittsburgh trilogy on the 'bogeymen' of our times, as he called them: police, doctors, the autopsy dissectors (Eyes, Deus Ex and The Act of Seeing with One's own Eyes, 1970-1971), and back to primary concerns with light in films such as The Riddle of Lumen and The Shores of Phos, both 1972, this concern continuing through with more recent work.

In 1995 a program of some of his hand-crafted and optically printed work was shown at a film congress at the Louvre Auditorium: La couleur au cinéma. ^[4] It began with his classic Mothlight (1963) – 'What a moth may see from birth to death if black were white and white were black' and its companion piece Garden of Earthly Delights (1981), both made by contact-printing insect and/or plant forms onto 16mm stock. Three particularly memorable hand-painted films in the program were Night Music (1986), painted on the 70mm IMAX format, and replete with scintillating detail; Black Ice (1994) – jet blackness penetrated by crystalline shards of colour, and Chartres Series (1994), rich, textured luminosity. It's thought that the aniline dyes he used on the hand-painted films contributed to his cancer. It's not the first time he suffered physically for his art: he damaged his back leaning over a table shooting The Text of Light all summer, and had to use a walking stick for some time after.

Fortunately for Australians, The Dante Quartet, Brakhage's 1986 film hand-painted on large format stock, is in the National Library of Australia film collection, together with twenty other earlier titles of his, but there are no recent works.

One pragmatic reason why he worked mainly with hand-etched and painted films in recent years was that they took longer to make, and this enabled him to keep constantly working, even though film production costs were increasing. His films were mainly self-funded – 'the kiss of death' was how he once described grants for film art. His income from film rentals and sales was augmented by teaching at the University of Colorado and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Stan Brakhage was a prominent figure in the international avant-garde, and his name was often the only one raised when mainstream critics and theorists referred to experimental film. This engendered remarkably little resentment within the filmmaking community, perhaps because of his generosity in support of other filmmakers (he once organised a grant for James Davis, who refused it), and filmmakers in turn have looked to him as being emblematic of the devoted artist spending a lifetime working in the field. At the 1974 premiere of The Text of Light the audience included important film artists such as Hollis Frampton, and Brakhage made a plea to them: 'Please be merciful and resist any temptation to be jealous of me that this film was chosen to be here, [...] the beauty of this country is that Americans have a little more graciousness in this respect. If it were France at the turn of the century I'd be on everybody's shit list at the moment.'

As did James Davis, Brakhage spent his last days, bedridden, working on a film – in Brakhage's case, scratching with his fingernails on moistened 35mm black film for a project he called 'The Chinese Series'.

He always hoped that his films could be acquired for personal collections, and in the 1970s was selling 8mm prints of his work (Jim Bridges, Melbourne filmmaker, bought two of Brakhage's Songs). He has flirted with distributing on video. When we met him in 1989 at an experimental film congress in Toronto, he said 'Never again!', because of the degradation in quality, although since then he has allowed some hand-painted work to be distributed as videotape. For anyone devoted to photo-chemical film imagery, video is a quite different medium which imposes its own characteristics ('jelly-like', Brakhage once said) on a film that is transferred to it. However, just before his death he had been collaborating on a 243-minute DVD collection of his films, apparently convinced that the image quality was there, despite the compression that can cause frames to be missed on this format. Maybe he has selected films which can survive the transfer. In any case, this is his way of ensuring that some of his work is more widely disseminated, difficult for a vulnerable medium 'constructed from cobwebs', as he liked to say.

Endnotes

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^[1] 'Stan Brakhage – The Text of Light', Cantrills Filmnotes 21/22, (April 1975): 32-53 -- a transcription of the introduction and the question and answer session after the premiere. Grosseteste's work from which Brakhage was quoting is 'On Light or the Ingression of Forms'.

^[2] Stan Brakhage, 'Metaphors on Vision', Film Culture 30, (Fall 1963), unpaginated.

^[3] See 'New American Cinema in the National Library of Australia Film Collection', Cantrills Filmnotes 3, (May 1971): 5-8.

^[4] See my account of this event in Cantrills Filmnotes 79/80, (November 1995): 62-66. At this Congress James Davis' 1959 Impulses was one of the high points. (A 1950 Davis film, Reflections [No. 11] was once in the State Film Centre of Victoria [now Australian Centre for the Moving Image] collection in Melbourne, but no longer appears in their catalogue.)

Created on: Friday, 27 June 2003 | Last Updated: Monday, 30 June 2003