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Will Long

December 1st, 2017

ENGL 4860-001

Term Paper

A Survey of Stan Brakhage: Silent Music

Stan Brakhage was born in January of 1933 in Kansas City,

Missouri as Robert Sanders; the unassuming Ludwig and Clara Brakhage

later adopted him three weeks later. The two had no idea that their adoptive

St
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son would become one of the most influential and experimental filmmakers

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of all time. According to Bruce Elder, his films typify the independent cinema

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(Elder). Brakhage would go on to direct over 350 films during his life until he died in

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2003, due to cancer most likely caused by his preferred film dye (By Brakhage). He was

known for his incredibly magical style of editing, in which he would scratch, paint,

overlay other film, or draw directly onto the film in order to create wild effects never

before seen by audiences outside of the most underground filmmaking circles.

Brakhages legacy lives on in some of his more well-known, yet still deeply

experimental films Dog Star Man (complete 1964, filmed and released in segments 1961-

1964), Mothlight (1963), and Window Water Baby Moving (1959). He was influenced by

other avant-garde filmmakers/thinkers such as Maya Deren 1 (Russia), Jean Cocteau

Brakhages biggest influences, especially in his early career as a filmmaker. According to Brian Frye,

writing for Senses of Cinema, his invocation of Freudian ideas, while omnipresent, is much blunter than

Derens. For Derens cerebral idealism, Brakhage substitutes a rawer, psychologized version of reality.
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(France), Ezra Pound (US), and Charles Olson (US); many of his influences are poets, as

he held a desire to be one himself from a young age. Marilyn Brakhage, his widow, states

that she believes his ties to poetry, and also to his studies of music, continued to

permeate his entire lifes work (Brakhage, On Stan Brakhage). He was a

contemporary of Lawrence Jordan, John Cage, and Morton Subotnik, even working with

some of them throughout his career. Brakhage has inspired countless filmmakers like

David Lynch, Raymond Salvatore Harmon, Matt Stone, Trey Parker2, Danny Perez, Don

Hertzfeldt, and even Martin Scorsese. While he has attained great recognition throughout

the film world, much of his work, unfortunately, remains underappreciated by the

mainstream. One simply cannot overstate the immense contribution of the monumental,

experimental, and deeply philosophical postmodern abstract genius of Stan Brakhage.

Throughout his career as both filmmaker and teacher, Brakhage explored

postmodern creation in a strictly abstract sense, favoring the flow of chaotic, non-

narrative structures instead of using traditional non-linear styles of storytelling. He often

felt that his work was strongest when it made the person feel something from the images

alone, choosing not to work with sound or music throughout his career. Oftentimes,

viewers will choose to soundtrack his work with music they feel fits3. His attitude toward

those who chose to add music was nothing less than somewhat hostile, providing strict

2
Matt Stone and Trey Parker are both known as the creators of the cartoon parody series South Park. They

were his students in college.

distorted and through static aesthetic of both made a solid match. I tend to disagree with the idea that his

films shouldnt be played with sound. I find it a bit pretentiousits honestly up to the viewer, but I do think

Brakhage had a point when he declared his preference for the visual spectacle as a stand-alone piece.
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instructions on how to show his films and making sure that there was no sound at all.

Fred Camper, an artist who was close to the filmmaker tells us, The great majority of

Brakhage films are silent. For those films, please be sure to turn your sound system off

(Camper, Projecting the Films of Stan Brakhage). Brakhage was even quoted as saying,

I now see/feel no more absolute necessity for a sound track than a painter feels the need

to exhibit a painting with a recorded musical background (Marilyn Brakhage, On

Stan). Ironically, his influence on the music world can be experienced when one puts

on the work of bands like Sonic Youth, who did a re-score of several of his films right

after he passed away (recorded in April 2003 and released as SYR6: Koncertas Stan

Brakhage prisiminimui in 2005), and Stereolab, who have a song named after Brakhage

on their album Dots and Loops (Brakhage, September 1997). While Brakhage's work

still remains just below the surface, his influence shows up in many other great and recent

works of visual art.

There was a sequence in the new Twin Peaks season (Season 3, Episode 8:

White Light White Heat) that emulates his rapid-cut, fast-paced, abstract style. During

the scene, David Lynch uses scratched-up film that appears as static to visualize the

internal and microscopic processes that occur when atoms split at the moment a nuclear

weapon is detonated. The mirror to this in Brakhages filmography is his use of scratched

up film during the later part of his career, in particular the 1998 film Reel Five,

which depicts black leader for a while and then begins with images of scratches film in

quick succession for several minutes. Other important works by David Lynch, including

his early films and Eraserhead, can count Brakhages use of abstract visuals as an

influence.
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It's said that Martin Scorsese at one time had frames from some of Brakhage's

work hung up in his office, with one of the final scenes in his film The Last Temptation of

Christ serving as an homage to the accomplishments and influence of Brakhage's work in

his own films. According to Brakhage, Scorsese is the only one whos gone out of their

way to creditmy work. Hes the only one whos cared enough about film to actually

fight for the preservation of film (Ganguly).

Danny Perez, notably the director of several music videos and a full-length visual

album (ODDSAC, 2010) for the experimental band Animal Collective, exemplifies the

use of light-filled overlays consisting of colorful abstractions on shots of bizarrely

dressed people. One only has to look as far as the music video he made for Animal

Collectives Summertime Clothes off of their record Merriweather Post Pavilion;

during the course of the bizarre affair, one can see flickers of light on film flash by

quickly as strangely costumed humans dance around an ice sculpture. Techniques like

this, often considered techniques signature of Brakhage, arent too common in cinema, so

when theyre seen, theyre quite a delight to the eyes. Much of the work that Ive seen by

Perez most closely resembles

Brakhages film The Text of

Such a Beautiful Day" (2012)

exploration of light and reflection

refracted through the brown glow

of an ashtray.

Don Hertzfeldts 2012

heartfelt animated epic, Its Such

a Beautiful Day, Hertzfeldt makes use of Brakhagean film edits with the same purposes

Brakhage had in mind when he made his own films: emotional resonance of the visuals

themselves. In Beautiful Day, the effects are done on what appears to be film stock to

achieve reflection on both the temporal nature of human memory and the effects of

mental illness on worldly perception. The use of visuals to get the story and emotion

across is exemplary of pure cinema, which is a concept Brakhage deeply embraced and

one that hundreds of filmmakers, like Hertzfeldt here, have latched onto in order to

heighten the emotions of their best work (Frye). Hertzfeldt acknowledges Brakhages

influence on his own work in an interview with the Criterion Collection on his favorite

films: Brakhages visuals have encouraged lots of my own in-camera-special-effect

attempts these are fleeting glimpses of magic (Hertzfeldt).

Brakhage also had a (silent of course) film made about both the process and

fallibility of human memory, The Process (1972), in which he explored many of the same

concepts that Hertzfeldt explores in his body of work in a much more straightforward and

less comical way. In Process, we find flashes of solid color interspersed with shots of out

of focus images of people, places, and things, all mashed up in a collage worthy of the

human mind itself; each image, inverted in color, then regular, then followed up by

flashes of colors zipping by represents the burning of the image on the human mind.

However, the images do not last for long, and through the course of the short film, one

gets the sense that the images will not stay in the long run.

Later on in Brakhages life, he made a film called Comingled Containers (1997),

consisting of shots of water flowing by the camera lens, half-submerged in cold Colorado

creek water. He went and bought a new camera (a Bolex) and decided to make something
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new and not quite like anything hed been doing at the

time (scratched-on film). According to Brakhage, it

was meant as a personal last-will-and-testament,

Still from The Mammals of Victoria (1994)

up all hed done up to that point. Not long after

he filmed Containers, he had surgery to remove

his bladder, which had become cancerous

because of his exposure to his artistic medium

over the course of his life. Brakhage had become

artistically intimate with the way he made his

work and because of that, he suffered. With

Containers, he made the ultimate statement that

reflected the cyclical nature of life: always relentless,

always moving forward as the water that he filmed.

Nothing could be done to prevent the demise he was

awaiting, and yet his body of hundreds of films stands

testament to the sentiment of human delicacy, the idea that humans are only here

temporarily and all we leave when we die are impressions, memories, and a legacy.

Just under five years later, he died in 2003 to very little attention, with those hed

influenced paying tribute in small, yet heartfelt ways over the following months. He was

not recognized at the Academy Awards the year he died for his achievements; that would
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come the next yeara bit too late4. Shortly before he passed on, Brakhage and his second

wife, Marilyn, came to a deal with the Criterion Collection; in his tribute to Brakhage,

film critic Adrian Martin said about the possibility of a collection of Brakhages film,

Brakhage on DVD will never replace the true screen experience of his luminous work,

but its sure a welcome start (Martin).

4
A welcome note here would be to point out that starting in 2005, the Academy did a full restoration and

preservation of many of his films, the most recent being Rounds (2000) in 2014. A list of his works

preserved by the Academy can be found here: https://www.oscars.org/academy-film-archive/preserved-

projects?title=&filmmaker=brakhage&category=All&collection=All
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Works Cited

Abbott, Rebecca, and Stan Brakhage. The Avant-Garde in American Film: An Interview

with Stan Brakhage. Digital Commons @ SHU, Sacred Heart University,

digitalcommons.sacredheart.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1097&context=shur

eview.

Brakhage, Marilyn. On Stan Brakhage and Visual Music. Vantage Point, 31 Jan. 2008,

vantagepointmagazine.wordpress.com/2008/01/31/on-stan-brakhage-and-visual-

music/.

Brakhage, Stan, director. Reel Five. 1998.

Brakhage, Stan, director. By Brakhage: An Anthology. Criterion Collection, 2010.

Brakhage, Stan, director. Comingled Containers. 1997.

Brakhage, Stan, director. Dog Star Man (Complete Series). 1964.

Brakhage, Stan, director. Mothlight. 1963.

Brakhage, Stan, director. The Process. 1972.

Brakhage, Stan, director. The Text of Light. 1974.

Brakhage, Stan, director. Window Water Baby Moving. 1959.

Camper, Fred. Projecting the Films of Stan Brakhage. Projecting the Films of Stan

Brakhage, www.fredcamper.com/Brakhage/Projection.html.

Camper, Fred. By Brakhage: The Act of Seeing . . . The Criterion Collection,

www.criterion.com/current/posts/272-by-brakhage-the-act-of-seeing.

Elder, Bruce. The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound,

Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012.

EBSCOhost,
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ezproxy.mtsu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&

db=e000xna&AN=1423959&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Frye, Brian L. Stan Brakhage. Senses of Cinema, 12 Oct. 2015,

sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/brakhage/.

Ganguly, Suranjan. Stan Brakhage - the 60th Birthday Interview. Film Culture, no. 78,

1994, pp. 1838.

Hertzfeldt, Don. Don Hertzfeldt's Top 10. The Criterion Collection,

www.criterion.com/explore/225-don-hertzfeldt-s-top-10.

Hertzfeldt, Don, director. It's Such a Beautiful Day. 2012.

Jordan, Randolph. Brakhages Silent Legacy for Sound Cinema. Offscreen, Canada

Council for the Arts, offscreen.com/view/brakhage3.

Martin, Arian. Stan Brakhage: A Tribute. Film Critic: Adrian Martin, Mar. 2003,

www.filmcritic.com.au/essays/brakhage.html.

Perez, Danny, director. ODDSAC. 2010.

Schenker, Dylan. Original Creators: Stan Brakhage. Creators, Vice Media, 8 Aug.

2011, creators.vice.com/en_us/article/nzd5wk/original-creators-stan-brakhage.

Scorsese, Martin, director. The Last Temptation of Christ. Universal, 1988.

Stan Brakhage. Experimental Cinema Wiki, expcinema.org/site/en/wiki/artist/stan-

brakhage.