#184: BRAKHAGE, Stan: By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volume One (1954-2001)

BRAKHAGE, Stan (United States)

By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volume One [1954-2001]

Spine #184
DVD

Working completely outside the mainstream, Stan Brakhage made nearly four hundred films over the past half-century. Challenging all taboos in his exploration of "birth, sex, death, and the search for God," Brakhage turned his camera on lovemaking, childbirth, and even actual autopsy. Many of his most famous films pursue the nature of vision itself and transcend the act of filming. Treating each frame as a miniature canvas, Brakhage pioneered the art of making images directly on film itself — starting with clear leader or exposed film, then scratching, drawing, and painting on it by hand. Brakhage sometimes produced only a quarter-second of film a day, but over the years, his visionary style of image making has influenced everything from cartoons and television commercials to MTV music videos and major motion pictures. Criterion is proud to present twenty-six masterworks by Stan Brakhage for the first time on DVD.

243 minutes
Color/Black & White

Monaural/Silent

Criterion Release 2003

Director

Stan Brakhage was 21-63 when he directed the films that make up Anthology, Volume One.

Other Brakhage films in the Collection:

#517: Anthology, Volume Two

The Films

Desistfilm (1954)

Wedlock House: An Intercourse  (1959)

Dog Star Man  (1961-64)

The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes  (1971)

Cat’s Cradle  (1959)

Window Water Baby Moving  (1959)

Mothlight  (1963)

Eye Myth  (1967)

The Wold Shadow  (1972)

The Garden of Earthly Delights  (1981)

The Stars Are Beautiful  (1974)

Kindering  (1987)

I … Dreaming  (1988)

The Dante Quartet  (1987)

Night Music  (1986)

Rage Net  (1988)

Glaze of Cathexis  (1990)

Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse  (1991)

Untitled (For Marilyn)  (1992)

Black Ice  (1994)

Study in Color and Black and White  (1993)

Stellar  (1993)

Crack Glass Eulogy  (1992)

The Dark Tower  (1999)

Commingled Containers  (1997)

Love Song  (2001)

**

A warning is necessary for two of these films for a first-time viewer: The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes contains footage of actual autopsies. Not for the faint-of-heart; Brakhage himself says he almost fainted while filming. But the title is accurate — the word autopsy derives from the ancient Greek autopsia — “to see for oneself.”

Window Water Baby Moving shows his wife Jane giving birth to their daughter in a bathtub. It is a beautiful film, and if you’ve witnessed a woman giving birth, it shouldn’t be a problem.

**

My favorites are the ones from the late 80’s (The Dante Quartet) through the 90’s (the last dozen or so).

Film Rating (0-60):

57

The Extras

The Booklet

Twenty-four page booklet featuring essays by Fred Camper.

“Stan Brakhage’s films explode with sensual beauty: bursts of color heightened by extreme contrasts in hue and shape and by stunning depth effects; more monochromatic passages of nonetheless equal intensity that sensitize one to the glories of tiny differences; nearly flat, slowly changing fields of color that was like blankets in the wind, only to be interrupted by a cut that opens up a vast space; rapid explosions of paint that seem just on the cusp of suggesting a namable object The viewer is taken through such complexities of experience that the effect is a little like having one’s eyes flushed out. But the work generally doesn’t aspire to what is often meant by ‘purity’; instead it’s chock full of the conflicting emotions and general messiness of life itself. The montage of Dog Star Man, which juxtaposes its characters, principally Brakhage himself, with imagery of blood vessels and the sun, the forest and the stars, family and architecture, and explicitly erotic imagery, evokes numerous associations, from the banal to the sublime. Layers of faces and rocks and paint on film combine in multiple superimpositions, ultimately building to a meditation on one man’s place in the cosmos that can also be read, apart from its hint of a plot, as a light-poem.”

Camper’s description of each film is concise and informative.

Commentary

None.

Video encounter

With the filmmaker.

In four parts, on both discs. Brakhage describes his processes and provides anecdotes about his life and work.

Reflections

On selected films by Brakhage.

Extras Rating (0-40):

35

57 + 35 =

92

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