The Grandmother

New Year Under an Old Sun

red clouds over Metropolis -
calm night under a dark watch -
blood glow that condemns stars -
and a moist draft that carries the dead of dusk -

- blind hiss of wheels at crossroads
- head-lit melancholy of late travel
- glass beads swelling with each fall
- puddles that wash heels' memories

and ends meet to name their course towards death;
that purported peaceful death, haunting the undead -

like my star-torched dream,
what unholy praise from hallucinated prophets
would this dawn prey on the pages of my fictional beginning?

First Room of Miseducation

Memoirs of Decay

'Memoirs of Decay' is a digital trilogy documenting a journey of 'The Young Black Man as The Artist', through antipodes of a perceived After Life. Told in Three Chapters, the memoirs are re-visitations of past arbitrary sequences shot by The Filmmakers, and it mainly aims to revise purposes of surrealist activities orchestrated by three video artists. As the ancient sages had inferred that life is a journey without a specific destination, the film is an implicit reconstruction of such a thought and philosophy - which through our contemporary interpretation would be surmised, as “The Journey is the Destination".

This collage aims at creating a transition between ‘The World of the Perpetrator and Victims’, by making fluid the unintentional perceptual intentions of the ‘Image Captor’ and the point of view of ‘The Spectator’ when the images are assembled in a new linear narrative.

Through this narrative experiment the film aims at a distinct analysis of human responses, either to the end of calling most to action or the mere dampening of senses as is experienced by most in our narcissistic societies.

The voyeur in any latent observer of the “Image Captured’, having qualified the individual perspective as valid within the overall scope of collective memory, would therefore be left to make those ethical judgements upon their own shoulders – be they about belief in the authenticity of the depictions.

The Video Remix is comprised mainly of Archive Materials from various sources, and these are compiled in relation to the envisaged edit temperament and the resulting surrealistic montages.

A number of symbols are used to heighten the underpinning Oneiric Element in all the films in the trilogy. And these elements are still left to the viewer as witness to unfolding journey of the ‘Young Black Man as an artist’.

The context of the narrative transpires within a sombre mood of alone-ness, which we believe to be the results of the sequence having being shot when the Artist a recluse due to personal psychological reasons.

First Room of Mis-Education

Through a serene space in a time not determined we find a young man walking the slums of a township that could be anywhere in South Africa. The film thus follows our subject in a somnambulist dream where, with a broken telephone in hand he walks towards graves, crowds of the living until a final meeting with his peers with whom we find no similarity or connection. A ritual of intermittent calls paid to an unknown, a waltz among dancing children and a visit to the kraal; all imply a sombre reality of township life a both symbols and objects of reality. Here the line between reality and surreality is blurred, hoping the viewer will rasp the intricate connections between the two spheres.

Life is...

a dream wrapped in one's skin -
stage fright for dying in a scroll I rewrote.

time mistaken,
and looking awkward on my ceiling.

a source,
until dirges are dusted into the sea.

papyrus wings floating about the sun,
a spark screaming from a gutter.

will-frog hopping on my cell's floor,
a stranger among grown-up newborns...

exhausted by friends who passed on to the last laugh.

A study of human behaviour through a somnambulist’s eye

A study of human behaviour through a somnambulist’s eye.

Like figurines of a fashionable making
I sit on the parapet of a window on high.

Looking down, a sight towered by my comprehension,
and through crevices in the sky’s clods –
I see mankind.

Legacies of urban realms –
Artisan memories carved on landscapes.
Debauched skylines of tonight, commuting with the last fragments of a day’s lusts.

Who are these novices in life’s monastery?
Who bred their vulturous beauties and serpentine consorts with manes blown in the derelict winds of suburbia?


But Mind says:

Life goes down this road, and it flows towards weird places and painted avenues where lies can drive you by. Yet
Whistles and mused kisses from below this city’s pride can’t make men of us.

And it is here that dreams scandalised by ghosts bear fruit.
You can bed any wench and still cower from profanity’s smite.
The here-after and silhouettes that seem gorgeous are paling now.
Radio-active sunsets of the Cosmopolis gleam like stars on windscreens.
And I am at ease with pain’s reverie driven by, where others cross and die.

Stan Brakhage

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Brian Frye is a filmmaker, curator and writer living in Washington DC.
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If Maya Deren invented the American avant-garde cinema, Stan Brakhage realized its potential. Unquestionably the most important living avant-garde filmmaker, Brakhage single-handedly transformed the schism separating the avant-garde from classical filmmaking into a chasm. And the ultimate consequences have yet to be resolved; his films appear nearly as radical today as the day he made them.

Brakhage was born in 1933, and made his first film, Interim (1952), at 19. Notably prolific, he has completed several films most years since. To date, his filmography lists over 300 titles, ranging in length from a few seconds to several hours.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, attended high school in Central City, Colorado. He briefly attended Dartmouth College then left for San Francisco, where he enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). He had hoped to study under Sidney Peterson., but unfortunately, Peterson had left the school and the film program was no more, so Brakhage moved on.

Like Deren, Brakhage came to understand film through poetry, and his earliest films do resemble those of Deren and her contemporaries. The early American avant-garde filmmakers tended to borrow liberally from the German Expressionists and Surrealists: mannered acting, symbolism/non sequitur, non-naturalistic lighting and psychosexual themes were common. Still fundamentally story-oriented, these films tend to use a loose, non-linear narrative and dramatic situations to establish metaphorical relationships between images. Deren's films are closest to those of the Surrealists: though she rejects their often cynical nihilism, her films are steeped in portentous Freudian symbolism.

Brakhage's early films are more primal. There is no evidence of the Expressionist-inspired preciousness of the pre-WWII American avant-garde filmmakers, and his invocation of Freudian ideas, while omnipresent, is much blunter than Deren's. For Deren's cerebral idealism, Brakhage substitutes a rawer, psychologized version of reality. Many of Brakhage's films from this period are very good, but they are overshadowed today by the films they begat.

While Brakhage's early films stress psychological themes--the conflict between wish-dream and reality, for example--and retain a strongly dramatic element, they provide frequent glimpses of the formal leap that soon followed.

Despite a rapidly deepening reservoir of ideas, avant-garde film retained a strong connection to the commercial cinema. European avant-garde filmmakers had long made liberal use of photographic effects and trick photography. But nothing they did formally was at all unfamiliar to the commercial cinema, which was quick to pick up on their ideas. But if strange photographic effects are one thing, turning celluloid into a plastic medium was something else altogether.

Brakhage was among the first filmmakers to physically alter the filmstrip itself for metaphorical effect. The most striking example of this technique in his early films occurs in Reflections on Black (1955), which imagines the dream-vision of a blind man as he walks through a city, climbs the stairs of his apartment building and arrives home. Brakhage signals the blindness of his protagonist by physically scratching out his eyes, and splices in bits of film negative to convey the sense of experience the world as a blind man might, not as something seen, but something pictured.

Shortly before making Reflections of Black, Brakhage moved to New York City. That same year, the film critic Parker Tyler introduced Brakhage to Joseph Cornell, who commissioned him to shoot a film of the soon to be dismantled Third Avenue El. Working for the first time without actors or plot, Brakhage began to focus on the expressive qualities of the medium itself. The film which resulted, Wonder Ring (1955), represents Brakhage's first step toward his radical reconception of the cinema. There is no story, no protagonist, no linear narrative other than the train itself, traveling endlessly along its track. It is a perfect expression of the world defined by the train, and a peculiarly apposite metaphor for the bare logic of narrative itself.
Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, and eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.'

With this opening paragraph to his seminal manifesto Metaphors on Vision, Brakhage called into being an entirely new kind of cinema, where none had existed previously. Suddenly, an epistemological question loomed where none had before: What is the nature of the relationship between the moving image and the world, and how might it be represented? Brakhage intended to film not the world itself, but the act of seeing the world. The vast majority of Brakhage's films are entirely silent. When you watch his films, you are asked to look, and look closely. Where his predecessors used metaphor as a means of relating images to one another, Brakhage's films were themselves expressions of a single, great metaphor: visual perception.

These questions were by no means unique to Brakhage--they were in fact the catalyst for modern art--but he was the first to realize their implications for the cinema in a body of truly great works of art. In Anticipation of the Night (1958), one sees Brakhage's first clearly articulated expression of his concept of the vision of the 'untutored eye.' While retaining the barest elements of narrative, in this work Brakhage entirely dispenses with the drama, in order to better capture raw experience. The 'shooting script' for the 40 minute film consists of a list of 16 concepts, rather than specific shots. Where his earlier films approximated dreams, Anticipation of the Night captures the dreamlike quality of raw experience, the world as it happens and is taken in and understood, willy-nilly.

While making Anticipation of the Night, Brakhage married Jane Collum, who was to become his muse, and the primary subject of his films for many years. Easily the best known of these is Window, Water, Baby, Moving (1959), a document of Jane's pregnancy and the birth of their first child. Family, and the rituals of family life, became the predominant themes of Brakhage's films for many years. Birth, sex, and death are the three touchstones of all of his films. In Thigh, Line, Lyre, Triangular (1961), Brakhage again documents the birth of one of his children, and their passage through infancy and childhood is a consistent theme. Several of Brakhage's films focus on sexual relations, not only between a man and wife, but among friends, and the proto-sexual aspects of childhood. In other films he examines the rituals surrounding death and the body which remains after the being has departed. Sirius Remembered (1959), which documents the gradual dissolution of the corpse of the family dog, and The Dead (1960), made in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, prefigure several later films which return to this same theme.



Brakhage's most ambitious projects of the early '60s were Dog Star Man (1961-64) and The Art of Vision (1961-64), essentially one film articulated two different ways. Dog Star Man definitively marks the transition from a lyrical style, centered on individual experience, to a more epic style, with a focus on broad metaphysical themes. Roughly speaking, the film expresses a mythic conception of the struggle and fall of Man. Made in four parts, with a prelude, Dog Star Man incorporates many layers of superimposition and a dense, rapid editing pattern. The Art of Vision consists of exactly the same material as Dog Star Man, but separates the superimposed reels of film in various combinations. As the elements of the film gradually build and cascade into one another, one begins to see the connections between the elements more and more clearly, how and why certain themes are repeated, and the simultaneously epic and analytic quality of the film itself.

Since completing The Art of Vision, Brakhage's films have become consistently more metaphysical. Even his celebrated Pittsburgh trilogy, completed in 1971, which purported to document three city institutions, at its core deals with metaphysical questions of Being. The three films: Eyes, Deus Ex, and The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes, document the police, a hospital and a morgue, respectively. All focus on the mechanics of the body: how it is ordered in life, how it is repaired when broken, and what remains when the person who animates it has perished. The key image of The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes is quite likely the bluntest statement on the human condition ever filmed. In the course of an autopsy, the skin around the scalp is slit with a scalpel, and in preparation for exposing and examining the brain, the face of each cadaver is literally peeled off, like a mask, revealing the raw meat beneath. That image, once seen, will never leave you.

The feature-length The Text of Light (1974) consists entirely of abstracted patterns of light photographed through a thick, deep-green ashtray. Anticipating his non-photographic abstract films of the '80s and '90s, it reduces photography to its ratio ultima, the influence of light on photographic emulsion.

...in photographing this ashtray for instance, I'm sitting for hours to get 30 seconds of film. I'm sitting watching what's happening and clicking a frame, and sitting and watching, and further than that, I had shot several hundred feet and they seemed dead. They didn't reflect at all my excitement and emotion and feeling. They had no anima in them, except for two or three shots where the lens which was on a tripod, pressed against the desk, had jerked. Those were just random, but what gave me the clue. What I began doing was always holding the camera in hand. For hours. Clicking. Waiting. Seeing what the sun did to the scene. As I saw what was happening in the frame to these little particles of light, changing, I would shoot the camera very slightly.

In recent years, Brakhage has focused largely on painting, scratching and drawing directly on the surface of the film strip itself. In eschewing photography altogether he focuses more directly on the bare act of perception. These films recall the paintings of abstract expressionists like Pollock, Klein, Motherwell and Rothko, and pack the same visceral punch. If you've ever stood in front of a great Rothko, and felt yourself falling in, the experience of watching the best of Brakhage's hand-painted films is very similar.

I now no longer photograph, but rather paint upon clear strips of film – essentially freeing myself from the dilemmas of re-presentation. I aspire to a visual music, a 'music' for the eyes (as my films are entirely without sound-tracks these days). Just as a composer can be said to work primarily with 'musical ideas,' I can be said to work with the ideas intrinsic to film, which is the only medium capable of making paradigmatic 'closure' apropos Primal Sight. A composer most usually creates parallels to the surroundings of the inner ear--the primary thoughts of sounds. I, similarly, now work with the electric synapses of thought to achieve overall cathexis paradigms separate from but 'at one' with the inner lights, the Light, at source, of being human.

Stan Brakhage died of cancer on March 8, 2003, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City is in the process of preserving all of his films. His last finished film, Stan's Window, is a photographed self-portrait. Brakhage left behind the beginning of another film, The Chinese Series, composed of 35mm black leader he had scratched with his fingernails. The film was to end wherever he stopped scratching.


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© Brian Frye, Spetember 2002

Aryan Kaganof