As perfect as I can be?

This post marks the first of a series of entries I'd like to record in coming months as I catch the movies swinging through Chicago this Winter. Hopefully, this hitherto neglected space will assume the role of a screening log and notebook, making for a more productive way of procrastinating than watching previews of half-downloaded public domain films until the wee hours...

Brakhage 1952-1957

Stan Brakhage's early films are experimental trance pieces steeped in angst. They are rhythmically hypnotic adventures in psycho-sexual awakening ("Interim", "Desistfilm", "The Way to Shadow Garden", "Flesh of the Morning", "Daybreak & Whiteye") a la Maya Deren, or labyrinthine perceptual journeys across fantastic spaces ("In Between", "Reflections on Black") a la Sidney Peterson or Jean Cocteau. At this point in his development, Brakhage lacks the precise formalism of his forebears. What is beautiful about these films is rather the ripeness of their inspiration as manifested by unpredictable transitions in tone or atmosphere: a single rack focus from a window to the outline of a boy's face and the book he is holding in "In Between", an explosion of negative images at the end of "The Way to Shadow Garden", sensuous close-ups of hands and faces in "Interim", hyped-up performances and exaggerated shadow play in "Desistfilm", etc. In their boldness, these images indicate a young artist's elation at the very experience of making films, and, in this sense, few films are as emotionally naked.

But it is with "Wonder Ring" that Brakhage inaugurates his cinema, which will not be one of moods, of states of mind expressed in ritualized odysseys across high-concept dreamscapes. Brakhage renounces a kind of montage, which links one element to another according to a progression of emotional states. Like Bresson, he internalizes feeling, which is not to say Brakhage's films will be devoid of feeling, but that feeling is once and for all subsumed into and buried within densely patterned thickets of imagery, cut together with an inexorable, ecstatic rapidity.

In "Wonder Ring", the dynamic interaction of surfaces and outlines, captured in the window reflections of the moving Third Avenue El becomes an epic experience, particularly when projected, as it so rarely is, onto a large screen. The facades of buildings are transformed into monumental scrolls of pre-War architecture. The eye dances across these scrolls in search of subtle variations in detail, such as the distinctive color of one building's bricks. On another level, and requiring a precise change in the eye's focus to come into view, there is the interior of the subway car rendered indistinct and cavernous by the film's contrast levels. An abyss of darkness is thus superimposed upon an expanse of surface. Every now and then, we may catch a glimpse of a human figure, but its presence is rendered ghostly and tenuous as pure contour, there one moment, gone the next, disappearing with a change in the availability of filtered sunlight. Sifting through the car windows, this light strikes the city's surfaces in rectangular patches. When the train reaches top speed, everything in view is transformed into an ethereal array of racing abstractions. At a halt, there is unsettling stillness, and once again the ghostly figures of people boarding and dismounting the train. Thus, the world is reduced to all that I can see out my train's window, and yet it does not fail to contain universal possibilities as well as the threat of nothingness.