stan brakhage

Stan.Brakhage – Persian Series 1-3

| Paul Greer

“1) This hand-painted and elaborately step-printed work begins with a flourish of reds and yellows and purples in palpable fruit-like shapes intersperced by darkness, then becomes lit lightning-like by sharp multiply-colored twigs-of shape, all resolving into shapes of decay. 2) Multiple thrusts and then retractions of oranges, reds, blues, and the flickering, almost black, textural dissolves suggesting an amalgam approaching script. 3) Dark, fast-paced symmetry in mixed weave of tones moving from oranges & yellows to blue-greens, then retreating (dissolves of zooming away) to both rounded and soft-edged shapes shot with black. 4) Elaborate petal-like, stamen-and-stem-like, multicolored flowers rising in white space until the whole field is as if crushed by floral designs in madly-swift mixtures of every conceivable previous (in the PERSIAN SERIES) shape, evolving back to brilliant petals against what was as at beginning of #4. 5) Dark blood red slow shifting tones (often embedded in dark) / (often shot-thru with parallel wave-like lines) composed of all previous shapes AND flowers as if trying, linierally, to evolve a glyph-script.”

— film-makerscoop

 

 
More in #RollFilm:

Stan Brakhage – “Cat’s Cradle” (1959)

Video | | Paul Greer

“Paul Arthur, in his essay for The Criterion Collection, wrote that Cat’s Cradle “does not entirely suppress our recourse to naming but rather floods our typical eye-brain loop with stimuli for which attached language cues are either less than automatic or, in cases of purely sensory appeal, non-existent.” Fred Camper, in another essay for The Criterion Collection, remarked upon the mysteriousness of the four characters’ interactions, but was nevertheless “kept on edge by the very rapid intercutting… the viewer is at once encouraged to come up with his own interpretations and prevented from settling on any one idea.”

see also

“How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye?” – Vine and Me

| Paul Greer

Yes, so I got a bit excited when they released Vine for Android. It suddenly seemed the whole inventing smart phone thing suddenly had an actual purpose for me. I could make animated journal type entries actually on the go, without having to record everything and go back to base to put it together.

A real stroke of genius for me is that you can’t upload previously made movies, you have to go live, so creating animation becomes a superpower of being able to tap the screen with sufficient deftness you only trigger one frame and then some people go to the next level with using external lenses and tripods and things.

Unfortunately my phone is at the menders (dodgy power socket on those Samsung Galaxy Mini’s apparently), but the only thing I am really missing is the Vining.

I began by deleting a lot of early attempts but then came to the conclusion it’s best just to put it all out there, because often there’s a quality that comes out of the Vine you were not expecting, and the imperfection of it is the best thing.

Most of these have sound, and it’s usually relevant.

These next three are taken at various stages of making my way home after the pub.

(The title of this post is a quote from the mighty mighty Stan Brakhage)

“I….Sleeping (being a dream journal and parenthetical explication)”

Quote | | Paul Greer

“I am running down a street.

I am wearing a silvered business suit.

It is not I.

The figure is stopped mid-stride, one arm flung out.

The street vanishes.

——-

The word ‘title’ is flung at me off five white gloved fingers backed by a vague clown face.

——-

Something of dead leaves… a rustling.

——-

a waiting – expectancy.
a sea-scape.
large people with smashed faces bending over.

——-

A paw print – one toe bent in cashew curl… So that it reminds me of a flower petal.

——-

A quarter-turn clockwise of multicolored basket shapes merry-go-rounding – reds, blues, yellows, and more distant blurs of other shades. Dusty-yellowed browns for ground, and a pale blue clouded sky. A very few still silhouettes of people shape.”

——-

Some of Stan Brakhage’s 1975 dreams as remembered upon waking, from “I….Sleeping (being a dream journal and parenthetical explication)”, published 1988 by Island Cinema Resources (via Airform Archives)(via elettra)

Stan Brakhage – Comingled Containers (1996)

Video | | Paul Greer

“Comingled Containers is an experimental short film by Stan Brakhage. “This ‘return to photography’ (after several years of only painting film) was made on the eve of cancer surgery – a kind of ‘last testament,’ if you will… an envisionment of the fleeting complexity of worldly phenomenon.””

“Commingled Containers is often interpreted in light of Brakhage’s health problems at the time, and is considered to represent the director’s own spiritual quest.  Scott MacDonald describes the film as “a talisman that expresses Brakhage’s determination to continue his spiritual quest and to offer viewers something of Light, despite his fear of mortality, for as long as it was given to him to remain in the flow of life.” R. Bruce Elder wrote that Commingled Containers, unlike most of Brakhage’s work, “remains a nearly organic (or biomorphic) abstraction across its entire length.””

Stan Brakhage – Mothlight (1963)

Video | | Paul Greer

Mothlight is a silent “collage film” that incorporates “real world elements.” Brakhage produced the film without the use of a camera, using what he then described as “a whole new film technique.” Brakhage collected moth wings, flower petals, and blades of grass, and pressed them between two strips of 16mm splicing tape. The resulting assemblage was then contact printed at a lab to allow projection in a cinema. The objects chosen were required to be thin and translucent, to permit the passage of light. Brakhage reused the technique to produce his later film, The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981). Mothlight has been described as boasting a “three-part musical structure.”

“Here is a film that I made out of a deep grief. The grief is my business in a way, but the grief was helpful in squeezing the little film out of me, that I said “these crazy moths are flying into the candelight, and burning themselves to death, and that’s what’s happening to me. I don’t have enough money to make these films, and … I’m not feeding my children properly, because of these damn films, you know. And I’m burning up here… What can I do?” I’m feeling the full horror of some kind of immolation, in a way.”

Over the lightbulbs there’s all these dead moth wings, and I … hate that. Such a sadness; there must surely be something to do with that. I tenderly picked them out and start pasting them onto a strip of film, to try to… give them life again, to animate them again, to try to put them into some sort of life through the motion picture machine.”

 

see also: Comingled Containers (1996)