Residency is a four-part weekly journal entry brought to you by one of our favorite artists every month.

This week, Woodsman explores the work of experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage.

This is a Portal: Three — Metaphors on Vision

Introduction

We were introduced to the work of Stan Brakhage as film students in Colorado, where he made his home and taught for many years. There’s something about his approach to film-making that has inspired this band on many different levels. Maybe part of it has to do with the certain relationship a person develops with the landscape and the ability to communicate with one’s surroundings. Or maybe it lies strictly within approach and working from inside out rather than vice-versa. We’ve picked some films from Brakhage’s early years along with excerpts from an interview conducted in 1963, just prior to the release of Brakhage’s venerable “Mothlight” to help illustrate this relationship.

-Woodsman

Preludes

The hand painting was always in direct relationship to the particular kind of “closed eye vision” that comes only in dreams. The commonest type of “closed-eye vision” is what we get when we close our eyes in daylight and what the moving of shapes and forms through the red pattern of the eyelid. Since PRELUDE was based on a dream vision, as I remember it, it had to include “closed-eye vision.” Painting was the closest approximation to it; so I painted, throwing down patterns and controlling them in various ways. Shapes emerge out of that kind of eye-nerve action and reaction. The next step, once I had one whole strip of film was to start with the second, the superimposition strip. One can have three, four or more strips the full length of the film and superimpose one image on another wherever one wants. I took the strip that was largely determined by change and surrealistic operations and began editing a second strip to it. From this point on, everything that I laid down was hyper-conscious. I would go back and change shots to alter the form in strip number one as the need would arise in the developing from number two. Strip two always developed out of what was on strip one to structure it and to transform it into something that would be comparable to what could be remembered when one awoke in the morning. On one hand there was that incomprehensible mass of material arising out of surrealistic and chance operation concerns which I called the “chaos” roll; on the other hand there was the “structured” roll which represented the dream transformed and made accessible for conscious memory in the morning.

I see patterns moving that are the same patterns that I see when I close my eyes; and can also see the same kind of scene that I see when my eyes are open. At an extremely intensive moment I can see from the inside out and the outside in.

Dog Star Man

I kept saying “I think it’s going to be something like a Noh Drama in slow-motion.” I didn’t know why I said Noh Drama because I had never been concerned with it. I hadn’t really studied any form of the Noh Drama except what came to my by way of Ezra Pound. That was the literal structural sense that I was inspired by for the total form of PART 1. And yet I had to get the mind disengaged. I had to engage my mind in some area that would leave the rest of me free for the extension of love; and my trick for doing it was to question whether I could make the form grow stronger through change operations than through a conscious decision.

Mothlight

I would say I grew very quickly as a film artist once I got rid of drama as prime source of inspiration. I began to feel that all history, all life, all that I would have as material with which to work, would have to come from inside of me out rather than as some form imposed from the outside in. I had the concept of everything radiating out of me, and that the more personal or egocentric I would become, the deeper I would reach and the more I could touch those universal concerns which would involve all men. Now the films are being struck off, not in the gesture, but in the very real action moving out. Where I take action strongest and most immediately is the reaching through the power of all that love toward my wife and (she towards me) and somewhere where those actions meet and cross, and bring forth children and films and inspire concerns with plants and rocks and all sights seen, a new center composed of action, is made.

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