Tag Archives: Stan Brakhage

Canonically Weird (The List)

296. DOG STAR MAN (1964)

3 Comments

“One thing I knew for sure (from my own dreaming) was that what one dreams just before waking structures the following day. That dream material is gathered from the previous day, and therefore is a gathering of all previous days, ergo contains the structure of all history, of all Man… I wanted PRELUDE to be a created dream for the work that follows rather than Surrealism which takes its inspiration from dream; I stayed close to practical usage of dream material, in terms of learning and studying, for a while before editing. At this time I left strict myth considerations out of my study process as much as possible..”–Stan Brakhage speaking on Dog Star Man in “Metaphors on Vision”

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Stan Brakhage, Jane Brakhage

PLOT: This silent non-narrative film is presented in four parts: a 20-minute “Prelude” introduces many of the visual motifs that will show up in later installments, followed by “Part One,” which focuses on a man  climbing a mountain with his dog. The man continues his climb in the seven-minute “Part Two,” but the picture now focuses on a baby boy, with abstract figures superimposed directly on the film. “Part Three” is a “sexual daydream” of a nude woman, with even more layered images, and “Part Four” is an even more abstract culmination of all that has come before.

Still from Dog Star Man (1964)

BACKGROUND:

  • Experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage completed almost 400 films during his life (some of which run for less than a minute).
  • Dog Star Man is the final compilation of five short films Brakhage produced between 1961 and 1964. They are almost never screened separately, although the Prelude could stand alone.
  • While making Dog Star Man, Brakhage was unemployed and living with his wife and her parents in their Colorado cabin; to earn his keep, he chopped wood for the family.
  • Brakhage named his movie after a pulp novel he picked up as a boy, because he thought it a shame that such a great title would be forever wasted on a tawdry paperback.
  • The film is structured with increasing visual complexity. Brakhage shot one layer of film for part one, two for part 2 (and also for the prelude), three for part 3, and four for part 4. The layers of film were then superimposed on top of each other.
  • Brakhage later produced a four-and-a-half hour cut of this material called The Art of Vision, which rearranged every layer of film Brakhage shot for the project into every possible combination of superimpositions (within each part).
  • Chosen for preservation in the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 1992.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Most of the amazing visual effects Brakhage achieves with his complex superimpositions fly by too quickly for us to consciously register—some can be seen for only a single frame or two. The most important repeated symbol in the film, however, may be the most mundane: the woodcutter struggling up the snowy mountain with his axe, stumbling and falling, while his dog happily bounds at his side.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Phosphenes on film; baby with snowflakes; sex and beating hearts

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Meticulous and intentionally unentertaining, Dog Star Man is a masterwork of consciously constructed dream cinema.


Excerpt from Dog Star Man (Prelude)

COMMENTS: When ordinary people think about experimental Continue reading 296. DOG STAR MAN (1964) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE ACT OF SEEING WITH ONE’S OWN EYES (1971)

Leave a comment

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Anonymous corpses

PLOT: Footage of autopsies performed at the Pittsburgh morgue, delivered without commentary.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: At first I didn’t find Act at all “weird,” but the next day I found myself spontaneously describing it to another person thusly: “I saw the strangest documentary last night…” Both thoughts were true, based on different meanings of the words “weird” and “strange.” Act is strange in the sense of rare, uncommon, seldom-seen; it’s also disturbing and unsettling. But it’s deliberately rooted in reality, and not “weird” in the sense we use the term on this site: surreal, mysterious, hinting at the irrational.

COMMENTS: Society hides corpses from view—not from shame, but from unease. We seek to hide the evidence of a crime that has been committed against us. The title of Stan Brakhage’s charnel house poem (a somewhat literal translation of the Greek “autopsis”) suggests that here we will see death, and do so authentically: with our “own eyes,” not secondhand. The “act” of the title further suggests that this will not be a passive experience, but something we deliberately undertake to do.

Be prepared. Male and female, young and old, they all eventually arrive on the slab. Brakhage’s camera does not focus on any faces (a condition of his being allowed to shoot in the morgue). The anonymity of the bodies makes them more universal. He engages in little experimental camerawork (there are a few moments with strange zooms, or with abstract closeups). Bodies are clinically hacked apart and disemboweled, internal organs scooped out and placed in bins. In the most disturbing segment, the skin on the back of a man’s head is peeled upward to expose his skull, with the folds of flesh eventually bunching up around his eyes. There are closeups of meat sticking to ribs. Brakhage could have inserted footage from a butcher shop at some points, and you would not know the difference. The film runs for thirty minutes, although he could have stopped the camera after ten minutes or kept it running for another hour and a half. The end result is the same.

You might be disgusted. After a while, you might become numb, or even bored. You may be fascinated by the machinery of the body; your thoughts will likely turn to your own mortality. It’s grisly, but not exploitative. The camera does not tell you what to think or feel. The take home message of Brakhage’s audacious documentary seems to be, “look: this is what you are.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…perhaps the longest uncomfortable silence in the history of cinema, Stan Brakhage’s documentary short The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes is a harrowing, unshakable, but fundamentally fascinating, viewing experience.”–Jeremy Heilman, Movie Martyr

(This movie was nominated for review by “Regicide.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules, Shorts

CAPSULE: “MASTERWORKS OF AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE EXPERIMENTAL FILM 1920-1970”

Leave a comment

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: James Agee, , Bruce Baillie, Stan Brakhage, James Broughton, Rudy Burckhardt, Mary Ellen Bute, Joseph Cornell, Jim Davis, , Marcel Duchamp (as Rrose Selavy), Emlen Etting, Oskar Fischinger, Robert Florey, Amy Greenfield, Alexander Hammid, Hilary Harris, Hy Hirsh, Ian Hugo, Lawrence Janiak, Lawrence Jordan, Francis Lee, Fernand Léger, Owen Land, Helen Levitt, Jay Leyda, Janice Loeb, Jonas Mekas, Marie Menken, Dudley Murphy, Ted Nemeth, Tom Palazzolo, Bruce Posner, Charles Sheeler, Phil Solomon, Ralph Steiner, Paul Strand, Francis Thompson, Slavko Vorkpich, J.S. Watson Jr., Melville Webber

FEATURING: Too many actors (many amateurs) to list

PLOT: A collection of influential short experimental films spanning five decades.

Still from Our Lady of the Sphere (1969)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: To be clear, one of the individual films featured in this compilation (Meshes of the Afternoon) has already made the List. Many of the others are noteworthy, but we deem none quite List-worthy. As a collection, these discs are recommended for weird movie fans and adventurous cinephiles. This is a must-own, cornerstone release for dedicated experimental film devotees.

COMMENTS: Released by silent movie specialists Flicker Alley and curated by director/film historian Bruce Posner, “Masterworks of American Avant-Garde Experimental Film” is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin—although we might quibble about whether every one of these films is actually a “masterwork,” they are all, at the very least, representative of a major figure or category of experimental film. These shorts, spread out over two DVDs or Blu-rays, are  rich and challenging, and may be best experienced in small nibbles, one or two at a time, contemplated over a span of several evenings, accompanied by a fine sipping beverage.

The films are arranged chronologically and although they span the full range of artistic expression, they often fall into several distinct types or subgenres. One of the earliest forms is the “city symphony” (à la 1929’s Man With a Movie Camera), of which the very first film in this collection, “Manhatta,” is an example. In a city symphony the director simply takes his camera into an urban environment (in American film usually New York City) and films what he sees, later arranging the footage into a montage that paints a portrait of the town. There are five or six examples of the form here, and although this can be one of the dullest of formats, Francis Thompson’s 1958 eyebending opus “N.Y., N.Y.,” shot with an array of distorting lenses of the director’s own design, is a notably thrilling exception. Other film types you may notice are the figure study, where the lens focuses on the human body in motion (“9 Variations on a Dance Theme,” “transport,” Maya Deren’s “Meditation on Violence”) and purely abstract films (“1941,” which uses broken light bulbs and wet paint, or Stan Brakage’s “scratch on the emulsion” experiments).

An especially noteworthy subset of these experiments is the music Continue reading CAPSULE: “MASTERWORKS OF AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE EXPERIMENTAL FILM 1920-1970” →