A few months ago, experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage went to New York from his Colorado home to present seven programs of new and recent films, six of them at the Museum of Modern Art, which has offered retrospectives of his work since 1970. Brakhage hasn’t been invited to Chicago in 20 years, even though he taught at the School of the Art Institute in the 70s, and his films are shown here infrequently. Despite our pretensions, Chicago is still a cultural backwater: the problem is a paucity of the diverse organizations, large and small, that make New York’s scene so comprehensive. On Friday Chicago Filmmakers is showing a program of new Brakhage films, but the majority of his recent work has never been seen here.
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The Jesus Trilogy and Coda is driven by tensions between movement and stillness, depth and flatness. Many images are visible just long enough to seem stills but also contribute to the film’s rhythmic flow, as patterns transform or collide with others. Skeins of lines and splashes of color create depth effects that suddenly yield to flatness. These oppositions, perceived as irresolvable paradoxes, prevent the imagery from becoming decorative or static, locating it as much in the viewer’s mind as on the screen.
In the last of the four, “Christ on the Cross,” Brakhage’s multiple lines unexpectedly converge into a vertical pattern, then a horizontal one, several times. Soon there are fleeting glimpses of a cross, standing as a kind of essence behind all the patterns we’ve seen–a moment that will doubtless disturb those who admire Brakhage’s efforts to free cinema’s imaginative potential yet refuse to accept his films’ spiritual, even devotional aspects. The Jesus Trilogy and Coda recalled for me the huge, spectacular Tintoretto Crucifixion in the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice: a glowing Christ in the top center is a surprisingly tentative presence, powerful only by contrast to the chaos around and below him.
The sea appears in almost infinite variety in The God of Day: light and dark, in and out of focus, from just above and from afar, even in underwater shots that suggest the mind’s eye journeying beneath the surface. But it’s always seen from the shore, from the perspective of a less than omnipotent observer of time’s passing. Many images show the waves crashing and receding at once while others concentrate on the gentle back-and-forth motion of small waves, often made more visible by bobbing plants on the water’s surface. As in John Keats’s ode “To Autumn,” the acceptance of natural processes can be seen as an acceptance of death; here the repeated movements of the sea convey a feeling of inevitability, even of resignation.
