WHO is he?
American film artist and theorist who created over 350 experimental works of short and feature length in a number of formats between the early fifties and the early 2000s. Brakhage dropped out of film school in the fifties, deciding to make experimental films at home. He also taught film throughout his working life.
WHAT are his films about?
Themes
Broadly speaking, Brakhage’s films deal with themes of birth, death and the renewal of life. In their appreciation of natural patterns and landscapes, they fall in line with the American romantic-transcendentalist tradition. But his major domain of interest remains the sight itself — the limits of human perception and the possibility of rejuvenating it. Brakhage’s films together compose a kind of phenomenological cinema, in which the pictorial realism of conventional photography is rejected for a part-synthetic field of vision to which the viewer must respond without any perceptual baggage, with the eyes of a child, so to speak.
Style
The significant part of Brakhage’s silent filmography was made without a camera, with the director working on the film stock directly. His wide-ranging and exacting method involves painting or tarring the frames, scratching on them to create Abstract Expressionistic patterns, pasting non-filmic objects onto the stock and, in the case of his photographed works, exposing the film multiple times and rapidly cutting between shots. The result is a highly expressionistic stream of images that, in effect, put in relief the material, transient nature of the medium itself.
WHY is he of interest?
Brakhage is one of the most important avant-garde artists who worked on film. His vast repertoire of films is so personal and so unique that it is tough to imagine a movement or a school centred on him. He was among the few artists who, without any exaggeration, reinvented the medium by exploring cinema’s material presence as a perishable object in the world.
WHERE to discover him?
The most famous film by Brakhage, Mothlight (1963) consists of a flux of high-key images consisting of the body parts of dead insects stuck on to the rolling film. Terse, profound and incredibly beautiful, the three-minute film is a meditation on life and death in which these dead moths are brought to life by the very light that killed them and in which cinema, the great embalmer, resurrects dead objects and preserves them for eternity.
