Stan Brakhage: Four Silent Nights

Abstract

Although American avant-gardist Stan Brakhage has achieved a level of expression comparable with more known contemplative filmmakers such as Ozu or Antonioni, he has remained a marginal figure. Great ness sometimes takes longer than artistic fashion will allow. By the time that Brakhage, who has been making films since 1952, began to make his most deeply felt and profoundly elegant visual work, he had virtu ally lost his audience. During the last fourteen years, interspersed among a variety of ventures into sound filmmaking, Brakhage has produced a body of silent work of fragile beauty that directly address our need for an intimate, tender, and prayerful cinema. This work, which we bring together on four nights during July, leaves behind the director's previous concerns with myth and family and centers on an upstream area of poetic exploration closest to the pinpoint of mind where light, spirit, and body come upon one an other. Cinema so rarely touches upon this "original place" that the viewer's only difficulty might be in trying to "read" these films?to conceptualize them into a literary film language?and therefore miss the joy of their direct and passionate play upon our metabolism. Seeing them is the key; the door of their revelation is the door through which we remember dreams.