NEW FILMS BY STAN BRAKHAGE
The films of this period portray a highly subjective world seen through Brakhage’s eyes or, just as often, a world that seems to have been created by Brakhage’s eyes. If external objects, including his wife and children, often seem to be revolving around the camera like planets around some mythic sun, this was a necessary, albeit in some ways tragic, consequence of the particular nature of Brakhage’s immensely valuable quest. It is a credit to his vision as an artist that in some of his later films of the period, such as the Duplicity series and Tortured Dust, he portrays explicitly some of the family alienation that inevitably resulted from his work.
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For me, the three great films on the program are Kindering, I . . . Dreaming, and Faust’s Other: An Idyll. Kindering is the shortest, only three minutes long. It depicts young children playing in a typical backyard. Brakhage films them through an anamorphic lens, a device he has used in earlier films, which tends to expand (“fatten”) the image in one direction while compressing it in the other; some of the same effects can be seen in fun-house mirrors. In his earlier films, Brakhage tended to twist the lens rapidly, creating a sense that the seen world was rapidly and continuously being transformed by the artist’s shifting consciousness. (The direction in which the image is expanded and compressed depends on which way the lens is oriented.) In Kindering, the lens mainly turns slowly or not at all, so that the type of distortion present in each image is relatively constant. The viewer is presented with cramped, cluttered images, images that feel utterly filled, in part with children made grotesque by the lens. The film’s short running time works in its favor, and in fact is used by the filmmaker as a formal element, as a part of its expression. Because of its brevity, the film seems to represent a single terrifying dream image, a sudden, awful vision. One senses the image not as a window that may be entered by an imaginative mind but as a barrier, a filled world with its own inner logic of space and seeing that denies the artist, and us, admission. Brakhage’s alienation from the children–who are, not insignificantly, his grandchildren–is clear. But also we have a vision of American suburban childhood in general–as a backyard horror, a prison that denies imaginative freedom. The dense collage sound track by Architect’s Office completes the trap; sound is felt as material substance, filling the air in the same way that image-as-barrier fills the screen.
