If you don't know the name, you can learn a lot about Brakhage here. I won't recap his story too much, since I'd basically just be parroting what I've read from others who know much more about him than I do. By way of quick summary though, Brakhage introduced a lot of abstract expressionist elements into his filmmaking and established a reputation as one of the most prolific and relentless explorers of the interplay between light, lens, film and the human eye. He also radically expanded the limits of how film could be edited and what it could show, and what makes him even more remarkable, at this point in my study of his work, is just how far ahead of their time his fast cuts, scrambled sequencing and non-linear mash-ups appear when watched alongside other filmmakers, even the greatest of innovators, from that era. That doesn't mean his films are necessarily enjoyable or entertaining; I appreciate the boldness of his vision but generally only watch these discs in limited doses or put his later, more purely colorful stuff on in the background as video wallpaper. Some of his works are harrowing, densely impenetrable or induce feelings of discomfort. Sitting down to view Brakhage for an extended period requires me to be in a certain mood, one of disciplined intentionality and even determination to avoid letting my attention wander. To be honest, sometimes I even have to repress the nagging, irritating query-to-self, "what the hell am I watching this for anyway?" But I find once I wrestle through that, my dedication finds its reward.
Brakhage is easy to mock, not at all difficult to dismiss if one feels so inclined - and I'll also add that much of the writing about his films that I've read over the past couple years is the kind of stuff that tarnishes the reputation of "serious" film writers as overblown, verbose, self-aggrandizing wordspinners who can trot out a robust vocabulary but not really communicate all that much that sticks with the reader. My intention is to just watch each film a few times, enough to let the images sink in, become comfortably familiar and generate something to say. The last thing I want to do is try to convince you that Brakhage is more brilliant, important or relevant than your own unmediated assessment of his work would lead you to believe.
Given my penchant for watching these Criterion titles in the order they were made, thereby tracking the career developments of various artists behind or in front of the camera as well as the introduction of new styles and technologies into cinematic art, this plan of attack makes the most sense to me as a way of grappling with the enigmatic flow of visual stimuli that Brakhage produced over the course of several decades toiling on the front lines of the avant-garde. How else am I to make adequately digest and hopefully make some kind of sense of this tip of the celluloid iceberg that Brakhage left behind after he parted ways with this world - a corpus of some 400 films ranging in length from nine seconds to over four hours? I suppose I could just pick a point in my timeline and say "OK, time to check By Brakhage off my list, here's my summary of three Blu-ray discs worth of massively imaginative, occasionally pretentious but often beguiling experimentalism." But that wouldn't quite do. So here I am, planning to wrap up my blogging for each year up through 2003 with a recap of whatever works of Stan Brakhage happened to produce during that particular anno Dei. And, where possible/practical, I'll include representative clips from YouTube to show you what my feeble words are trying to grapple with.
Cat's Cradle
Years before either Kurt Vonnegut or Harry Chapin appropriated the phrase for their own famous works (a novel and a song, respectively), Stan Brakhage wove his own Cat's Cradle. The short film makes for a fine introduction to Brakhage's work. It's autobiographical in that he and his wife Jane appear in it, along with a pair of friends, another couple of creative bohemian types that Stan and Jane hung out with in those days. It also has an early morning feel to it, with everyone appearing kind of groggy, disheveled and in the process of getting their day underway. Dark silhouettes of what appear to be gesticulating fingers, or maybe just hands rubbing together, open the film with an incantatory flourish. The brooding Stan is having a smoke, Jane and her female friend, adorned in an odd little white apron over her slacks, are washing dishes, maybe preparing some food or pouring drinks and the other guy, the one with the little beatnik goatee, seems to be shaking off the cobwebs from the night before. A black cat meanders around, looking as felines do like they know a lot more than they can or would even bother to say, if they could. Streaky white light streams in from low angles, especially in the opening shots of this six-minute film, washing across the red-saturated hues of bed sheets, bare feet, floral print wall paper and some vaguely sinister looking illustration of a spider.
The excitement and creativity comes not so much from the scene captured on screen, but the editing, a rapid whirlwind of slices and splices that certainly don't pack the kind of novelty now that they once did, but still put the viewer on edge, throwing up flashes of white that provide contrast from the otherwise murky red-black hues. The fourth minute is my favorite part of the film, if you're interested. Whoop! what's that? Clothes are slipping off, in soft focus, body parts and hair not on heads flash past in soft focus. This erotically suggestive reveal happens very quickly early, barely registering, especially on first view, before returning a bit more extensively and clearly at the end, with the barest hint of some sort of caressing movement registering as the last flickering embers of illumination disappear into blackness and the hand-scratched credits slither across the screen.
The excitement and creativity comes not so much from the scene captured on screen, but the editing, a rapid whirlwind of slices and splices that certainly don't pack the kind of novelty now that they once did, but still put the viewer on edge, throwing up flashes of white that provide contrast from the otherwise murky red-black hues. The fourth minute is my favorite part of the film, if you're interested. Whoop! what's that? Clothes are slipping off, in soft focus, body parts and hair not on heads flash past in soft focus. This erotically suggestive reveal happens very quickly early, barely registering, especially on first view, before returning a bit more extensively and clearly at the end, with the barest hint of some sort of caressing movement registering as the last flickering embers of illumination disappear into blackness and the hand-scratched credits slither across the screen.
Wedlock House: An Intercourse
Building on the hints of sexuality filtered in through subtle imagery in Cat's Cradle, Brakhage now drops any pretense of restraint with Wedlock House: An Intercourse. The first images we see are of a naked woman laying on a bed, being mounted by a man (again, it's Stan and Jane), with the only concession to late-50s notions of propriety consisting of printing the film in negative, somehow rendering the nudity less "pornographic" perhaps? Filmed in the early months of their marriage, I can understand the impulse a young artist might have to capture such sweet intimate moments, though this is far from being a straight-up homemade sex-movie. (I have no doubt that somewhere in Brakhage's personal archives such footage exists, probably in abundance...) This scene serves as a framework and punctuation for the interior portion of the film, an experiment in light and shadow that casts a ghostly pall over the filmed encounter of a now-clothed young husband and wife. They sip their coffee, draw on their cigarettes, stare languidly just out of line with the camera lens, as if they see something lurking over our shoulder. Kind of a spooky effect, especially the way the candle light (and some other incandescent form of illumination) swings and swerves, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in counterpoint to the similarly undulating camera. Is there a message here? Perhaps it's the idea that even in the middle of mundane conversation and shared silence with each other, as the young couple grapples with the reality of a shared life commitment they entered into voluntarily but failed to fully comprehend, the sexual undercurrent, that yearning for return and release, is a reliable constant.
Window Water Baby Moving
(Fair warning: before you click on this video, just be sure you're in a place where people around you won't freak out over the sight of a naked woman giving birth to a child.)
Window Water Baby Moving
(Fair warning: before you click on this video, just be sure you're in a place where people around you won't freak out over the sight of a naked woman giving birth to a child.)
With all the sex going on in these movies, especially in that 1950s pre-Pill era, it's practically inevitable that a baby's going to come along sooner rather than later, and that's exactly where Stan and Jane wound up. Of course, the young man with a camera had big ideas about capturing the awe-inducing experience of child-birth on film, and of course he went about it in his characteristically innovative way, capturing the splendors, shapes and textures of his wife's pregnant body in the days leading up to the delivery (at home, not in the hospital, due to objections from the medical staff of having a husband equipped with movie camera on the scene as they went about their business.) Window Water Baby Moving is one of Brakhage's most widely viewed and justly famous works, simply on account of his willingness to show things that most people at the time strongly believed should not be shown on film. The fact that this reel existed made it an obvious choice in the decade or two that followed for natural childbirth advocates, Lamaze coaches and others to show prospective parents just what to expect when it came time for baby to be born. This was especially valuable for men planning to be present at the birth, as the stereotype of the husband pacing nervously in the waiting room puffing on cigarettes while the wife was in the Maternity Ward being attended to by the professionals became less the norm and more of an archaic cliché.
For all its practical value as a teaching tool (obscured only slightly by Brakhage's artistic quirks, which even to a non-cinephile makes the film more effective and evocative than if he'd taken a straight documentary approach), Window Water Baby Moving remains a very intense movie-watching experience. And that's despite the fact that there's no sound (though your mind's ear fills it in quite effectively when you see Jane gnashing her teeth in pain and Stan gasping in wide-eyed astonishment at the spectacle he just witnessed), images of childbirth are presumably familiar to all of us and we're not nearly as sheltered from the kind of explicit display that shocked the film's original audience, almost leading to the destruction of the footage when it was seized by Kodak's film lab upon exposure. Brakhage had to provide a note from his wife's doctor to prove to the authorities that he wasn't a pornographer; otherwise, Window Water Baby Moving would have been aborted before delivery, never seeing the light of day.
Next: Eyes Without a Face
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