| Like many artists who are under-appreciated while they walk this earth, avant-garde experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage has found a much wider audience since his death.
After the American-born filmmaker succumbed to cancer earlier this year in Victoria, B.C., his work has been featured in a variety of retrospective programs, including one that has seven of his nearly 400 films finally making their way to Calgary. The program – which also includes a screening of Brakhage, a documentary about the artist’s life and times – draws on works from throughout Brakhage’s 50-year career. It is a genuine treat for local cinephiles who may not have seen his work onscreen, and also for those seeking films that look beyond traditional narrative forms to suggest a new way of seeing.
From director Jim Shedden’s documentary Brakhage, we learn that his subject was regarded as an iconoclast, a filmmaker who was staunchly independent – in the sense that he directed, shot and edited most of his films – and who was thoroughly dissatisfied with most filmmaking conventions. In fact, the documentary leaves the impression that, aside from the sheer beauty of many of Brakhage’s films, his greatest contribution to the world of cinema may have been his insistence that film is a first-person reflection on the world inhabited by the filmmaker.
This idea that film can be a wholly personal exploration of one’s experiences is a sentiment shared by many film diarists, and watching Brakhage’s films – or at least the few on display here and those excerpted in the documentary – it is possible to see this as a major contribution insofar as the world Brakhage inhabits is also the viewer’s world. Clearly, since many of them were produced without sound accompaniment, Brakhage’s films are meant to provoke silent contemplation, the kind of introspection that is anathema to the vast majority of filmmakers (independent, studio or otherwise) working today.
That’s a laudable aim, but while I appreciate Brakhage’s esthetics intellectually, I find it difficult to relate deeply to the majority of the films in this program. Perhaps this is a shortcoming with respect to my receptivity to this type of work, but, for me, few of these films achieve the same emotional resonance as, for example, those by Brakhage’s avant-garde contemporary Maya Deren (Ritual in Transfigured Time) or others by essay filmmaker Chris Marker (La Jetée, Sans soleil).
Of course, that’s not to say that this program doesn’t hold its charms. It’s worth seeing, not least because challenging programming of this nature should be encouraged in this city.
The program opens with Reflections on Black (1955), which is both a study of co-dependent relationships and a parody of film noir, one of the dominant cinematic styles of the time. While its sense of humour and shadowy cinematography deconstruct noir tropes, the film nevertheless has a portentousness, which, I suppose, is somewhat forgivable considering how early it comes in Brakhage’s career. It seems to allude to a depth that seemingly cannot be plumbed – not unlike a pool of oil, as its title suggests, that reflects everything despite its shallowness.
A much more assured directorial presence is felt in Mothlight (1963), a gorgeous collage film that incorporates transparent natural ephemera in its images. Like seeing the sun shine through a moth’s wing for four minutes straight, this is one of the esthetic highlights of the program.
That’s followed by Murder Psalm (1980), the most satisfying film in the collection and also the creepiest. Consisting largely of manipulated footage of what appears to be the Vietnam War, this meditation on death in the form of institutionalized murder has a social value not evident in the other works in this program. Much of the footage looks pixilated, as though it was shot by Brakhage directly off the TV screen, and the resultant media commentary speaks volumes about the complicity of the viewer in televised carnage both then and now.
Later in life, Brakhage seemed to delve even more deeply into abstract expressionism with the camera – and often without a camera. He painted directly on film to create explosions of colour like those seen in The Dante Quartet (1987), and, later still, just scratched on already exposed 35mm film as a form of "whittling," as he says in the documentary Brakhage.
Whatever your own response to these indubitably unique works, it’s clear that Brakhage was a highly regarded filmmaker with rare talents. Film critic Fred Camper’s Web site (www.fredcamper.com/Film/BrakhageL.html)is a great place to start if you’re looking for more information on the work of this experimental maverick. |
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