‘All that is, is Light.’

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

(To return to your place in the text, simply click on the endnote number)
[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.)

Stan Brakhage bibliography

A selection of English-language references on Stan Brakhage, published between the late 1970s and 2002.

For earlier material, including biographical information, film synopses, and writings about and by Brakhage, consult the bibliography by Barrett and Brabner (see list).

The many newspaper obituaries and tributes to Brakhage which have appeared on the internet are comprehensively collected on Fred Camper’s excellent web site. The site also covers online writings on Brakhage and his films, writings by Brakhage, and interviews with him.

While most documents listed are journal articles, books and Ph.D. theses are also included.

Arthur, Paul. “The God of Day Had Gone Down Upon Him.” Film Comment 36, no. 3 (May-June) (2000) : 72.
——. “Qualities of Light: Stan Brakhage and the Continuing Pursuit.” Film Comment 31, no. 5 (1995) : 68-76.
——. “Structural Film: Revisions, New Versions, and the Artifact.” Millennium Film Journal 2, no. Spring-Summer (1978) : 5-13.
——. “Structural Film: Revisions, New Versions, and the Artifact. Part Two.” Millennium Film Journal 4/5, no. Summer-Fall (1979) : 122-34.
Barr, W. R. “Brakhage: Artistic Development in Two Childbirth Films.” Film Quarterly 3, no. Spring (1976) : 30-34.
Barrett, Gerald R., and Wendy Brabner. Stan Brakhage: A Guide to References and Resources. Boston: G.K.Hall, 1983.
Brakhage, S. Brakhage Scrapbook: Collected Writings, 1964-1980. Edited by Robert A. Haller. New Paltz, N.Y.: Documentext, 1982.
——. Essential Brakhage: Selected Writings on Filmmaking. Edited by Bruce R. Mcpherson. Kingston, N.Y.: McPherson, 2001.
——. “Geometric Versus Meat-Ineffable.” Chicago Review 47, no. 4 (2001) : 47-51.
——. “Introductory Essay Beginning with ‘There Are Many Living Poets Who Inspire My Work…’” Chicago Review 47, no. 4 (2001) : 38-41.
——. “Stan Brakhage at Millenium.” Millennium Film Journal 16/17/18, no. Fall/Winter (1986/87) : 297-307.
Brakhage, Stan, and P. Adams Sitney. Metaphors on Vision. 2nd ed. [United States: s.n.], 1976.
Camhi, G. “Notes on Brakhage’s ’23rd Psalm Branch.'” Film Culture 67/68/69 (1979) : 97-129.
Camper, Fred. “Brakhage’s Contradictions.” Chicago Review 47, no. 4 (2001) : 69-96.
——. “Film: The Front Line.” Millennium Film Journal 14/15, no. Fall/Winter (1984/85) : 48-56.
——. “Sexual Meditation 1: Motel, a Film by Stan Brakhage.” Film Culture 53/54/55, no. Spring (1972) : 101-104.
Christie, Ian. “The Rules of the Game.” Sight and Sound ns12, no. 9, Sept (2002) : 24-27.
Cohen, P. “Brakhage’s Sincerity III.” Millennium Film Journal 4/5, no. Summer-Fall (1979) : 153-156.
Cohen, P. “Brakhages I, II, and III.” Millennium Film Journal 7/8/9, no. Fall-Winter (1980/81) : 234-237.
Davenport, Guy. “Brakhage’s Songs (First Printed in Film Culture 40, 1966) .” Chicago Review 47, no. 4 (2001) : 157-163.
Davis, Susan Shibe. “Creative Composing: The Verbal Art of Rita Dove, the Visual Art of Stephen Davis and the Filmic Art of Stanley Brakhage.” PH.D. thesis, Arizona State University, 1994.
Dorsky, Nathaniel. “Stan Brakhage: Four Silent Nights.” Chicago Review 47, no. 4 (2001) : 192.
Elder, Bruce. The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998.
Field, S. “Creation.” Monthly Film Bulletin 626, no. Mar (1986) : 93-94.
——. “In the American Vein.” Monthly Film Bulletin 625, no. Feb (1986) : 60-62.
——. “Scenes from under Childhood: Section 1.” Monthly Film Bulletin 626, no. Mar (1986) : 94.
Friedberg, Anne. “Misconception = the ‘Division of Labor’ in the Childbirth Film.” Millennium Film Journal 5, no. Summer/Fall (1979) : 64-70.
Ganguly, Suranjan. “Stan Brakhage – the 60th Birthday Interview.” Film Culture 78, no. Summer (1994) : 18-38.
Ganguly, Suranjan, and Stan Brakhage. “All That Is Light – Brakhage at 60 (an Interview with Experimental Film-Maker Stan Brakhage) .” Sight & Sound 3, no. 10 (1993) : 20-23.
Goslawski, Barbara. “Experimental.” Take One 22, no. Winter (1999) : 47.
Grauer, V. A. “Brakhage and the Theory of Montage.” Millennium Film Journal 32/33, no. Fall (1998) : 105-129.
Harvey, Dennis. “Brakhage.” Variety 12, no. Feb 8 (1999) : 80.
Higgens, Gary, Rodrigo Garcia Lopes, and Thomas Connick. “Grisled Roots: An Interview with Stan Brakhage.” Millennium Film Journal 26, no. Fall (1992) : 56-66.
James, David E. “The Film-Maker as Romantic Poet: Brakhage and Olson.” Film Quarterly 3, no. Spring (1982) : 35-42.
Jenkins, Bruce, and Noël Carroll. “‘Text of Light’.” Film Culture 67/68/69 (1979) : 135-138.
Jones, E. “Locating Truth in Film, 1940-1980.” Post Script 1, no. Fall (1986) : 53-65.
Joyard, Olivier, Patrice Blouin, and Olivier Assayas. “New York Underground.” Cahiers du Cinéma 558, no. June (2001) : 66-77.
Keller, Marjorie. “Murder Psalm.” Film Quarterly 3, no. Spring (1984) : 49-57.
——. The Untutored Eye: Childhood in the Films of Cocteau, Cornell, and Brakhage. Rutherford: NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986.
——. “The Theme of Childhood in the Films of Jean Cocteau, Joseph Cornell, and Stan Brakhage (France, United States) .” Ph.D. thesis, New York University, 1982.
Kelly, Robert. “Notes on Brakhage.”  Chicago Review 47, no. 4 (2001) : 164-170.
Levoff, D. H. “Brakhage’s the Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes.” Film Culture 56/57, no. Spring (1973) : 73-81.
McClure, Michael, and Steve Anker. “Realm Buster: Stan Brakhage.” Chicago Review 47, no. 4 (2001) : 171-180.
Michelson, Annette. “Where Is Your Rupture? Mass Culture and the Gesamtkunstwerk.” October, no. 56 (1991) : 42-63.
Nesthus, Marie. “A Crucible of Document: The Sequence Films of Stan Brakhage, 1968-1984.” Ph.D. thesis, New York University, 1999.
——. “The “Document” Correspondence of Stan Brakhage.” Chicago Review 47, no. 4 (2001) : 133-16.
——. “The Influence of Olivier Messiaen on the Visual Art of Stan Brakhage in ‘Scenes from under Childhood’, Part One.” Film Culture 63/64 (1977) : 39-50.
O’Pray, Michael. “Dog Star Man.” Monthly Film Bulletin 595, no. Aug (1983) : 203.
——. “Sincerity Reels 1, 2, 3.” Monthly Film Bulletin 625, no. Feb (1986) : 63.
Prevallet, Kristin. “Angels in the Apparatus.” Chicago Review 47, no. 4 (2001) : 187-91.
Pruitt, John. “Stan Brakhage and the Long Reach of Maya Deren’s Poetics of Film.” Chicago Review 47, no. 4 (2001) : 116-132.
Rayns, Tony. “Desistfilm.” Monthly Film Bulletin 494, no. Mar (1975) : 69.
Rees, A. L. “Hell Spit Flexion.” Monthly Film Bulletin 609, no. Oct (1984) : 322.
——. “Murder Psalm.” Monthly Film Bulletin 625, no. Feb (1986) : 63.
——. “Tortured Dust.” Monthly Film Bulletin 626, no. Mar (1986) : 86-87.
——. “Unconscious London Strata.” Monthly Film Bulletin 626, no. Mar (1986) : 94-95.
Reeves, Jennifer. “Argument for the Immediate Sensuous: Notes on Stately Mansions Did Decree and Coupling.” Chicago Review 47, no. 4 (2001) : 193-198.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes.” Monthly Film Bulletin 625, no. Feb (1986) : 62.
Sharrett, Christopher. “Any Fool Can See for Himself: Notes on Brakhage’s Scrapbook.” Millennium Film Journal 14/15, no. Fall/Winter (1984/85) : 23-27.
——. “Brakhage’s Dreamscape.” Millennium Film Journal 6, no. Spring (1980) : 43-49.
Simmons, Kenith Levicoff. “Old Maids and the Domination of the Sea: Robert Duncan, Stan Brakhage and Robert Kelly on the Self in Context.” Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin – Madison, 1978.
Sitney, P. Adams. “Autobiography in Avant-Garde Film.” Millennium Film Journal 1, no. Winter (1977/78) : 60-105.
——. “Circles of Confusion.” Millennium Film Journal 14/15, no. Fall/Winter (1984/85) : 7-13.
——. Film Culture Reader. New York, NY: Cooper Square Press, 2000.
——. “Tales of the Tribes.” Chicago Review 47, no. 4 (2001) : 97-115.
Steinhoff, Erik. “Introductory Essay Beginning with ‘over the Past Fifty Years Stan Brakhage Has Forcefully Expanded the Boundaries of Film…’” Chicago Review 47, no. 4 (2001) : 5-8.
——. “Stan Brakhage: Correspondences.” Chicago Review 47, no. 4 (2001) : 11-37.
Taylor, G. T. “‘The Cognitive Instrument in the Service of Revolutionary Change’: Sergei Eisenstein, Annette Michelson, and the Avant-Garde’s Scholarly Aspiration.” Cinema Journal 4, no. Summer (1992) : 42-59.
Tuchman, Mitch. “The Mekas Bros. Brakhage & Baillie Traveling Circus.” Film Comment 2, no. Mar-Apr (1978) : 9-18.
Walker, Jesse. “Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man Show.” Reason 32, no. 9 (2001) : 62.
Wees, William C. “Words and Images in Stan Brakhage’s 23rd Psalm Branch.” Cinema Journal 2, no. Winter (1988) : 40-49.
Weiss, Allen S. “An Eye for an I: On the Art of Fascination.” SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism, no. 51 (1986) : 87-95.