Window Water Baby Moving

"Window Water Baby Moving" is possibly influential experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage's most well-known film. In this masterpiece, he simply documents the birth of his first child. And it is possibly the greatest film he's ever made.

To be fair, I haven't seen Brakhage's "Dog Star Man", which also looks like a masterwork, but whether or not it is truly his best film, it is still a beautiful film.

Stan Brakhage uses his normal fast paced, experimental editing that has been used in his other documentary works (ex. "The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes"), as well as some very artistic, and highly experimental, camera-work. Brakhage's documentary films aren't just simple home movies, but great works of art, just look at the film! Every shot is an artistic masterpiece, and it is a truly great document of life and love.

Although the film uses highly graphic imagery to tell it's story, it is really a sweet document. Yes, the birth is shown in EXTREME detail, but, at the end, you see how loving these new parents are. The mother (Jane Brakhage) holds her newborn in her arms, and the father (Stan Brakhage) looks greatly excited and happy, he's hoping up and down, with a great smile on his face.

Stan Brakhage has proved himself, in my opinion, to not only be one of the great experimental filmmakers, but of of the great documentary filmmakers, as well.

You ever see that cliché happening, if not in TV or movies then in real life, of the husband documenting every single excruciatingly painful but miraculous happening that is birth? Apparently, according to Stan Brakhage on the DVD this film is on, this trend was at least in part inspired by his original efforts. Shot on a minimal budget (save for what it must've cost to have a birth in the Brakhage household as opposed to the hospital), this film IS the difference between a simple 'home movie' and something close to the most personal art possible. Documentary film-making has always been about a subject that compels the filmmaker enough to get hours and hours of footage down. That here Brakhage, who often does montage work of paintings and the like, is focusing his subject matter on his wife, and his child just itching to get out, in all graphic detail, is astounding. For the 60's, when this was first released, it was probably a lot more shocking than now.

Not to say that the film isn't shocking, but it is on a different level than what you might see on one of those 'birth' shows on one of the Discovery channels. The way certain things are presented in the film are surprising, and (if you're a guy like me) definitely unnerving. But Brakhage somehow makes his film almost beautiful in a way by cutting the film's subject matter in half, so to speak. The first half is just the mother of his child, in a bathtub, feeling the baby kicking, et all. It's really just a great montage of the woman as a whole, nothing unseen, with the belly getting the most screen-time aside from the mother's face and genitals. Then comes the second part, the birth. Basically, if you still wonder how it works, in near unflinching detail, watch the film. That it is presented in such a grainy 16mm kind of filming, and still using the intense, mad montage of Brakhage's two cameras on her (I think it was two, one more close to the 'action' than the other).

And when it ends, it is, like all (practically) successful births, a miracle in and of itself. So much happens within these 13 minutes of film than, in a way, it feels longer. I loved how it dealt with its subject matter, which could be very tricky, and messy (the latter of which is very true), and was still a wonder for the eyes. It lacks music, which is sort of a pro and a con for me- you could do with some music, make it even more home movie-like. As it is, Brakhage has one of his most notorious- and possibly best- works here, and maybe the only film that makes that bridge between a health class and film class in school.

i liked his filmic style at first, his use of jump cuts and sped up footage was effective in portraying the woman's fear and angst although she looked calm on the outside. it also elevated the importance of the action of giving birth.

but i don't think the lingering graphic shots of the vagina bleeding did anything for the film and took me out of the rather mysterious tranquil feeling given off by the film previously.

he certainly knows how to make a film affecting but i won't want to watch it again and i don't think it conveyed any of the actualities of birth, the beauty and the miracle.

Quite a few years ago, I attended a secondary school excursion to the Melbourne Museum, where we focused primarily upon the science of the human body. As part of the tour, we also attended a screening for the IMAX film 'The Human Body (2001),' which used some nifty film-making techniques to demonstrate the workings of our organs, bones and muscles. The documentary even delved into the subject of reproduction, though I couldn't help noticing that the newly-born infant emerged in an peculiar state of utter cleanliness. Avant-garde Stan Brakhage apparently had no such inclinations towards prudishness. Perhaps his most notorious film, 'Window Water Baby Moving (1959)' {filmed in November 1958} documents in unflinching detail the birth of his first-born daughter, Myrrena Brakhage. Unlike the bewildering 'Mothlight (1963),' this is a Brakhage film that one doesn't need to decipher; the editing and images tell the entire story, not just of a human birth, but of the tender emotional bond between husband and wife, parent and child, and the all-seeing lens of the movie camera.

As a warning to potential viewers, 'Window Water Baby Moving (1959)' doesn't recoil from capturing the most intimate (and explicit) moments of the baby's delivery. Events that would ordinarily be glossed over in other films, such as the cutting of the umbilical cord, or the ejection of the placenta (which looks just as painful as getting the baby out), are documented in detail, over a 13-minute running time that feels substantially longer. Being a student of biology myself, I felt confident that I could manage well enough, though the truth is that I'm a complete prude. In fact, I probably should have filmed myself watching the film, because my facial expressions must have betrayed something akin to revulsion on at least one occasion. However, as soon as that tiny head emerged from the necessary orifice, I began to understand this "miracle of birth" that people talk about so frequently. Even this term, however, is a misnomer, given that there's absolutely nothing miraculous about reproduction – in fact, it's perhaps the most natural phenomenon of all.

Brakhage's film surprised me in that I had expected a straightforward, literal documentation of the childbirth process, filmed in that continuous hand-held manner that characterises most modern home movies. However, his use of editing really breathes emotion into every scene. Even throughout the most crucial moments of the delivery, Brakhage cuts to shots of his wife, Jane, sharing an affectionate smile with the camera (behind which stands her husband, of course), or the couple's tightly-clasped hands, the husband offering his love and support during a time when the male was typically ejected from the room. 'Window Water Baby Moving' is a movingly personal ode to the immortal bond of family, and to cinema's ability to capture and bottle these emotions as best as it can. Brakhage obviously found this documentary excursion to be a worthwhile endeavour, because he repeated the effort several years later with 'Thigh Line Lyre Triangular (1961),' to record the birth of one of Myrrena's siblings. Not for the faint-hearted, but an unmissable avant-garde experience.

An amazing avant-garde short of the birth of Brakhage's first child. This film is both graphic and beautiful while effecting each viewer a little differently. The colors in the film are especially striking. (Warning this film is not for the queazy).