Tribute and Benefit for Stan Brakhage (1933-2003)
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Brakhage’s ambivalence about existence can be seen in his early film dramas, in which agonized individuals strain against imagined prisons; it can be seen in his first major work, Anticipation of the Night (1958), a testament to the failure of imaginative seeing, ending in the protagonist’s suicide; it can be seen in the cosmic deconstruction that concludes the four-hour The Art of Vision (1965); it can be seen in what is perhaps his greatest achievement, the “Arabics,” a series of 19 abstract films that are both glorious examples of light in motion and unsettling documents of seeing so “abnormal” that the viewer feels almost disoriented. And it can be seen in his five final completed works, being shown at the Film Center May 20 in a benefit to assist his family with the costs of his final illness. Four of the five are Chicago premieres (the 2001 Jesus Trilogy and Coda is not), and this is only their fourth public showing anywhere. (The two works left unfinished at his death are being completed by former students and will soon be released.)
These films are as sensuously spectacular as his previous works, beautiful accretions of color. Contrasts heighten the impact of each instant: Brakhage makes a sharply textured red pierce a fuzzier blue within a composition, in superimposition, or in editing–only one of a thousand dynamic clashes that intensify our seeing, as if scouring out the vision. These contrasts give the spectator an active role–each film is an “adventure in perception,” as Brakhage put it. His speculation about the prelinguistic seeing of children is just one example of a more general interest in alternatives to functional vision, the kind we need in order to walk across a room without bumping into things. Still in search of alternatives, these films are if anything more extreme than Brakhage’s earlier work: no single look or rhythm dominates.
The emphasis on unpredictability prevents the film from having a readily graspable structure. Instead it lives and breathes in its instants, as the viewer reinvents seeing at each moment of its unspooling. Brakhage seeks not spectacular pictures–certainly not to the extent he did in some earlier work–but constant change, making one question the very nature of existence. Pushing his films almost to the point of chaos and denying the viewer images from the world we know, he creates the sense of teetering on a brink, of consciousness suspended over a void by the slenderest of threads.
Best known as an advocate of individual vision in film, Brakhage by the middle of his career was starting to shift his definition of self away from “personality” and toward a more expansive sort of consciousness. At the end of Max, the yellow red flares that result from exposing a roll of film to daylight intrude on the image, quickly obliterating it. It’s as if the filmmaker were using the cinematic process to say good-bye to us–and to all the things of this world.
