If one pictures the act of sex happening, one may think about a person's face during the act or their breasts or their hair. And of course when it comes to pornography in cinema you get many close-up shots of genitalia connecting and going in-out and so on, and other times if it's only one genitalia or another then it's simply seeing the man's or the woman's.
For Dog Star Man Part III, which is supposed to be from what Brakhage said in some interview somewhere the part of the protagonist's (mountain climber?) sexuality flourishing, this can mean different things to different people. But what that means for Brakhage is that his own "porno" is most graphic in the interior-biological sense and, as one may happen when sex occurs, things fly by so quick as to barely be able to think straight.
This is my favorite part of the series, I think in large part because the focus is around a key subject - human sexuality and the process of copulation - but the abstractness of the images, how fast everything goes by and yet how I can discern and recognize so many things makes it intimate in ways that are hard to describe. This is where I can *feel* the imagery, more than just an intellectual escapade like some of the other parts or where things simply flow over me. And in its own way it's paradoxically extremely sensual and coarse in how its produced.
Here I felt engaged with the art that speaks to something that is essential and primordial. Human beings need to have sex in order to procreate, but the key thing is that sex is... messy, for lack of a better word. This is a messy movie that moves fast and feels rough and raw and the scratches on the film obscure just enough so that we know what's going on and yet it all culminates in... a heart-beat, whether it's the man's or the woman's or, maybe, the life that's just created, who knows? I loved every second.
