I suppose every film student in the world for the past 40, perhaps 50 years has had to endure Brakhage, sitting through whatever of his filmed essays the professor thinks he can speak to.
So, as a matter of simply measuring success, he has achieved.
Its an odd thing, how films get leverage. "1984" (in all versions) as a film will have a life for generations not because it is a good film, or book, but because it fills a market need for packaged insights of a clean and trivial enough nature to fit industrialized education.
Theatrical success often hinges on one hook or another, and it is worthwhile knowing what works if for no other reason than realizing how you are being manipulated. It's usually about narrative in some form.
In Brakhage's case, the narrative is external to the actual film, instead in his essays. These may not directly be exposed to a student, instead filtered through the saliva of the teacher only slightly modified. Its an odd phenomenon, that art is supposed to be deep, boundless, challenging and lifealtering, but ideas about art must be the opposite: succinct, closed, comprehensible, easily conveyed. Even that observation is one of the acceptable ones! So we have so-called "experimental" films, made as small lessons and sailed into a huge, fawning audience of (mostly) lazy academics.
I could have picked any of his films for this observation: there are a few hundred and now a couple dozen on a Criterion DVD. I chose this because it is one of his most Pollack-like. I must admit that when I see these -- the ones that have no narrative pretension -- I think of them as dynamic paintings, as interesting experiences to prompt some thinking about optic impression.
They are filmed, but not film for me. They are paintings, just as almost all of Gaudi's work is sculpture rather than architecture. A real film is architectural, you enter it and live in it, interacting with it in as many ways as you have grown tendrils. A painting is something you experience from a distance, the fog of space, separation being part of the experience.
Brakhage cannot understand what movies are all about. Never could, never did -- so "study" of these may give you some insight into color and rhythm, but not what makes cinema the art that can destroy.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.
