Tuesday: Stan Brakhage

Stan Brakhage, 1980-1990 • Murder Psalm is mainly comprised of found footage, in particular an educational film about an epileptic. As Brakhage moves her through a variety of settings, violence and horror seem to erupt from all sides. The transformative power of light is here abandoned, exiled by the terrible illusions and half-truths of mass culture. Its opposite, City Streaming, transforms Toronto into a dwelling place of illumination itself. Brakhage 'sings' the city as fields of brilliance whose only meaning is their own existence, and which could not exist anywhere else. Also in the program: Unconscious London Strata; The Loom. 16mm

Stan Brakhage (1980-1983) • As R. Bruce Elder notes, in these two series "what we see on the screen is radically discontinuous with the world beyond the frame...though perhaps not with the world that primordial awareness discloses." The Arabics (numbers 0, 1, and 10 through 15 will be shown) reveal a purifying and delicate perfection of Brakhage's near-Vertovian attention to the fact and the document at the expense of subjectivity. The Egyptian Series expands on the theme with Brakhage scratching marks on his film in imitation of hieroglyphs, turning his into a moving embodiment of the disconnect between word and image, thought and perception. 16mm

Stan Brakhage, 1984 • Tortured Dust gradually and fragmentedly reveals a complicated family rife with disappointments, miscommunications, absences, and self-absorption. Quotidian moments are rendered as incomprehensible and impossibly intricate and Brakhage as irreparably sheared from his relations and responsibilities, a perpetual observer unable to meaningfully participate in the lives of his children and wife. Throughout, the dense montage and inescapable physicality of the objects, both living and inanimate, combine to create an unflinching visual symphony of tragic power. 16mm

Stan Brakhage, 1981-1996 • Naughts presents visions of 'invisible energies' in an unsuspecting and indifferent universe. Earthen Aerie reveals an unphotographable wonder hidden within the apparent plainness of mere ground. As a pair, Night Music and Rage Net explore the sorrow and fury of personal failure through twisting, ephemeral shapes and broken shards of color disrupting patterns of darkness. The Dante Quartet transforms the Comedy into a torturous, redemptive, glorious, and ultimately tragic confluence of flowing fields of color invaded by cracked tentacles of menacing mystery. Also in the program: Nodes; Glaze of Cathexis; Untitled (For Marilyn); and sixteen more shorts. 16mm

Stan Brakhage, 1987-89 • Brakhage viewed the tragedy of Faust as the crucial legend of modern Western society, the story of a man's irrevocable estrangement from God. In a stunning departure, this four-part film includes synchronized sound, dialogue, and even characters. The sections follow Faust, a single parent living in his father's house who desperately wants to be already old. In a conclusion both somber and exhilarating, Faust's soul -- that which about him is uniquely his -- is lost, only to reveal in its absence a newfound connection to the matrix of existence. Having lost himself, he has found instead everything. 16mm

Stan Brakhage, 1995 - 1998 • Drawing from the Norse myth of a sacred tree that bears nine worlds, Yggdrasill: Whose Roots Are Stars in the Human Mind represents the unfolding of the thought process via photographed and painted images that, in their sensuous approximations of electricity and organic life, joyously affirm the link between eternity and human intelligence. The hand-painted Preludes series depicts the interplay of texture, shape, and tone in Brakhage’s attempts to explore the influence of his surroundings on his perceptions and compose “pure visual music”. Also in the program: the hand-painted Beautiful Funerals. 16mm

Stan Brakhage, 1995 - 2000 • Following A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea, the second and third installments in Brakhage’s “Vancouver Island Quartet” continue to explore the coastal environs of his wife’s childhood home in the northern Pacific region, forging a poetic, emotionally charged biography of Marilyn Brakhage in two successive stages of her life. While Mammals of Victoria evokes the transformations of adolescence through rhythmic images of the sea’s changing light and movement, agitated waters and scattered objects in The God of Day Had Gone Down Upon Him convey the uncertainty of Marilyn’s “mid-age crisis”. 16mm