When Stan Brakhage passed away in March 2003, not only did the international avant-garde lose a groundbreaking artist, magisterial teller of tales, and esteemed public presence; it also lost an original, audacious and insightful theoretician. The twenty-six pieces collected in Telling Time: Essays of a Visionary Filmmaker, first printed in the Toronto quarterly, Musicworks between 1989 and 1999, establish Brakhage’s place among the most elastic minds of his generation. Similarly at ease discussing Russian poetry, romantic love, visual perception, child psychology, human cognition, and religious belief as he is debating aesthetic of cinematic issues, Brakhage’s essays spark from stream-of-consciousness synapses, sudden insights, culled from a lifetime of voracious reading, attentive reflection, and piercing observation. The entries in Telling Time comprise Brakhage’s most mature writing, but they continue to maintain the playful slips of language and leaps of faith that distinguish earlier works such as Metaphors on Vision (1963), Film Biographies (1977), and Film at Wit’s End (1989). Devoid of footnotes and academic jargon, but replete with puns, intentional misspellings, humorous asides, conceptual enjambments, run on sentences and non-sequiturs, his speculative criticism is akin to a psycho-geographical dérive. Suggesting thought-in-motion (unselfconscious, deliberate thinking), these freshly buoyant essays express the organic, uneven “now-ness” of his more intuitive film compositions.

Given his lifelong study of modern classical music, the pronounced, asymmetrical rhythm of Brakhage’s writing is apt. Music, he says, served as inspiration for both his “photographic aesthetics” and his “actual editing orders” even as his “creative philosophies” were becoming “silently oriented.” As Bruce McPherson points out in his Editor’s Note, Brakhage’s column (titled “Time… on dit”) arose as an exploration of film and music’s analogous relationship, and was intended for Musicworks’ specialized readership. As time-based modes of expression, both music and film depend on rhythm for unity, development, and coherence. “Film and Music are continuity Arts,” he writes. “They share ‘kin senses of rhythm and tempo,” as well as “corollary aesthetics with respect to ‘tone.’”

But, as McPherson observes, Brakhage quickly departed from his investigation of film and music parallels to explore a vast array of cultural, scientific, and philosophical genres, drawing links between poetry, painting, astronomy, aesthetics, and phenomenology. An unwavering fascination with rhythm, however, permeates all of these interests. On the first page of the volume’s initial essay, “About Time,” Brakhage introduces Charles Olson’s famous dictum, “Of rhythm is image./ Of image is knowing/ And of knowing there is a construct.” These three lines form a wellspring for many subsequent departures, such as the book’s final, brief conjecture on vision, memory, and perception. By juxtaposing open- and closed-eye descriptions of fallen leaves, Brakhage illustrates how representational likeness is only one means for recounting a familiar visual scenario. He argues that we must forget how we are trained to see (i.e. the normative perspective derived from Renaissance art) in order to arrive at a fuller, more complex engagement with the natural world. In his example, the intertwined swirl of imagined, remembered, open-eye and hypnagogic images are inseparable components of heightened perception. He writes, “The Leaf Ritual paradigm, which began this essay, can be read, then, as a verbal parable which attempts to explicate the results of such visual loss as is affiliated with the development of speech, as well as experienced as a lament composed of rhythms in memoriam.” Here, Brakhage’s oddly formed, prolix prose unintentionally points up the line dividing perception and description, while simultaneously confounding figurative associations.

Contradictions between vision and language, between experience and arbitration, animate Brakhage’s central aesthetic concerns. His cinema attempts to create an unmediated vision through direct, ecstatic confrontation with the world. In this sense his filmmaking can be thought of as a performative art subject to coincidence and chance. But this notion takes for granted the discipline and precision of his shooting style (in part determined by financial necessity). Like Action Painting, projective verse, and jazz improvisation, Brakhage concentrates meaning in the individual spontaneous act, where the artist, free from logistical constraints and rational conscious thought, is both agent and site of interpretation. Brakhage’s writing is part of a larger attempt to transgress the limits of language, to arrive at a form that is purely cinematic and therefore outside of verbal description. As he claims in Telling Time, “primarily I write to exhaust language on a given subject, to drive the mind beyond words, so that I can begin, and begin again and again where words-leave-off [sic], veer their references into vision, each verbal connective synapse, to effect that my mind’s eye have full sway so that I can commence my work: I am a filmmaker.”

To this reader, the most captivating sections of Telling Time recall or rehearse dialogues with his peers and/or investigate their work. Jim Davis, Phil Solomon, and Bruce Elder are among the filmmakers who receive extended attention or close analysis. “An Inner Argument” relates a mid-1950s encounter at the New School for Social Research in New York City in which Brakhage misunderstood Davis’s claim that cinema had rendered all traditional arts superfluous. Thirty-five years later, he offers a posthumous corrective for his brash criticism, and an appreciation of Davis’s prescient vision. Brakhage upholds Davis’s realization of film’s formal potential, while pondering the fundamental aesthetic tension in his work: a desire for pure, unnamable “light-play” on the one hand, and a (culturally imposed) deference to photographic “likeness” on the other. Brakhage’s writing on Solomon, a close friend, colleague, and collaborator, is embedded within a two-part essay that unpacks several cultural myths around romantic love. Applying a psychoanalytic interpretation, Brakhage incisively extracts a subtle critique of the Romantic representation of children that runs throughout the layered visual fabric of Solomon’s lush, optically printed films. Finally, in his “argumentative dance” with Elder, to whom he claims “closer kinship than any other living filmmaker,” Brakhage’s postulate that thought can exist independently of language, as felt sensation, is scrutinized.

Elder’s films also receive consideration in the volume’s longest and most ambitious essay. “Space as Menace in Canadian Aesthetics,” which delineates common characteristics between the Group of Seven and Canadian avant-garde film, is a skilful act of comparative analysis, enabling the reader to perceive each tradition in a new (newly-shared) light. Enlisting the inspiriting treatment of landscape as a primary point of reference, Brakhage outlines assorted tactics utilized by Canada’s first wave of cinema experimentalists, including Michael Snow, Jack Chambers, Keewatin Dewdney, Arthur Lipsett, David Rimmer, and Joyce Wieland; as well as a second wave comprised of Elder, Rick Hancox, Ellie Epp, Barbara Sternberg, Richard Kerr, Phil Hoffman, Mike Hoolboom, and others. Brakhage’s penetrating analysis of flattened perspective in Canadian film and painting validates him as a uniquely attentive and generous critic of Canadian art. Meanwhile, through his active touring and lecturing, as well as his long-running Monday night film salons, Brakhage engendered the first stateside recognition of many of the aforementioned filmmakers. His encouragement and promotion of daring lesser-known contemporaries remains one of his greatest legacies.

Another noteworthy essay offers a self-reflexive glimpse into Brakhage’s own artistic method. “Painting Film” imparts the synaptic mental processes that guide his hand-painted work. The image of a plate of salad atop his kitchen table, transposed into written words through the prism of his mind’s-eye, reveals (in both poetic and technical terms) how visual stimuli produced by the interplay of light, shape, color, and shifts of perspective are processed and translated onto strips of clear celluloid. And in “The Lost Films” Brakhage endeavors to understand the elusive nature of his less-recognized films, such as Nightcats (1956), Oh Life–A Woe Story–The A Test News (1963), Black Vision (1965), and Nodes (1981). A body of 400 films is destined to yield overlooked and under-appreciated gems, not to mention ordinary or routine material. His sensitive consideration of these “visually ineffable,” “unremarkable,” “ghost films” demonstrates the evolving clarity an artist acquires about his or her own work over time.

Throughout this volume Brakhage’s writing is eminently quotable, occasionally mystifying, and, at times, maddeningly allusive. Readers expecting an anthology of key articles, essays, and statements, or a précis of Brakhage’s theoretical ideas and aesthetic interests, may be perplexed by the book’s wide-ranging subject matter as well as the idiosyncrasy and wandering arc of some of its texts. Many of the ideas presented in Telling Time, such as his notion of the “meat-ineffable,” a pictorial extreme of human consciousness in direct contrast to “geometric” thought, challenge accepted modes of behavior, communication, and perception.

Telling Time is an elegant, thoroughly engaging, timely and wide-ranging work–though the cover image, which features hand-painted frames from Brakhage’s Dante Quarter (1987), might suggest at first glance a book simply about his filmmaking. As evidenced by the Chicago Review’s special issue, Stan Brakhage: Correspondences (Winter 2001/Spring 2002), the DVD entitled By Brakhage, a two-disc set released by Criterion in 2003, and Brakhage, Jim Shedden’s 2001 feature documentary, Telling Time arrives at a period of increased interest in, and dissemination of, the work of this legendary avant-garde filmmaker. This situation is destined to expand over the coming years: a collection of essays, photographs, personal statements, and reminiscences about Brakhage, edited by David James, is already forthcoming, while other DVD plans are currently in the works. These recent and impending additions to the Brakhage literature and home video catalogue continue to entrench his legacy as the twentieth century’s most significant American film artist. Telling Time is an essential book for anyone interested in Brakhage, theories of visual perception, the relationship of film to music, and the beats in between.

 

 

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* This review was first published in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, vol. 14, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 101-104.

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