Excerpt from Mothlight, Stan Brakhage, 1963.
Mothlight, which in its entirety runs close to four minutes, was created by encasing dead moths and other organic materials between sheets of perforated tape and then making a print to 16mm film.
I’ve been reading () and watching () Stan Brakhage lately, and it seems to be affecting my eyes.
I once had the privilege of watching an original print of Brakhage’s a silent (as most of his works were) film documenting his wife giving birth to one of his children in a pool of water. As in most of his films, the lack of sound seems to intensify the visual impact of the experience. Baby Moving had such an impact on me, in fact, that afterwards I literally felt as if someone had knocked the wind from my lungs. It was such an intensely physical experience that it took me a long time- days- before I felt that I’d be able to verbalize it.
As I saw more of his films, I realized that that very concept seemed to lie at the heart of Brakhage’s work- he succeeded in pushing filmmaking so far out of the realm of familiar visual language that viewers are left with no choice but to experience his work in a very physical, very primitive manner. It’s for this reason that I think so many people are turned off by Brakhage’s work- experiencing something unfamiliar can be uncomfortable; we are given no obvious point of reference, which can cause us to feel off-balance. Plus we’re so used to being fed a steady diet of plodding, predictable, narrative visuals by films and television that when we see something that strays from the usual framework, it can throw us for a loop.
I’m talking about this nearly half a century after Brakhage made some of these films, and his work is just as unsettling and challenging as it was when he made it.
Here’s Brahkage on filmmaking and “communicating”:
Is your intent in making a film to communicate?
I get this question everywhere; and the big hang up is the word “communication.” It’s like this: let me explain by way of a story, a true story.
A man falls in love. The girl doesn’t love him. She hurts him; she wants somebody to hurt and he wants somebody to hurt him, but he doesn’t know that yet. He’s downcast. Then he meets another girl and he loves her and she loves him. He no longer needs to try and communicate with her: they just take walks together, and make love, and talk. Then he has it: some expression of his love is out there in the world.
Then he takes her to introduce her to his parents, and he is involved in communicating again, and this is very difficult. Well, this is like when a man works out of love and the work is out there; and then he takes the work into society, and that’s always very difficult. I mean no one truly understands it, just as no one’s parents truly understand one’s true love. Yet a work of art must have a life in society; once the artist had finished making it, it belongs to others. But he never made it with the idea of taking it into society. Any man that sets out to find a girl to introduce to his parents is never likely to fall in love. Any man that sets out to make a work for audiences is never going to make a work of art. A work of art is made for the most personal reasons- as an expression of love.
- from Brakhage Scrapbook: Eight Questions
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