Event 1: Metaphors on Vision: Films by Stan Brakhage

I attended Metaphors on Vision, a screening of films by Stan Brakhage. An important figure in experimental film, Brakhage challenged the standards of film techniques as well as vision itself, utilizing film to breach topics including fear, religion, sex, and death. Through his work, he wanted to create the ability to see the unseen, strip our vision of labels and learned understanding, to “transcend the original physical restrictions and inherit a world of eyes.” (Brakhage).

Though I was prepared to experience something unfamiliar and perhaps unsettling, I was taken aback by how far Brakhage went in his attempts to challenge our ideas of visual perception. First, his films were completely silent. The absence of sound made me realize how much our usual film experience relies on it. Instead, Brakhage’s films confine viewers to their sense of sight alone, pinpointing their focus and compelling them to lose themselves in the visual world before their eyes. The slightest details and motions in his films thus have a more distinctive impression and effect. Anticipation of the Night was the longest film shown. The most apparent technique employed was the repetition of images, interspersed with jarring cuts. Playing with this repetition, alteration, and reversal of images, Brakhage immerses his viewers in a completely novel visual experience. I was intrigued by how he was able to utilize this manipulation of what we see to create a new idea of perception. I also noticed how Brakhage played with light and shadow, particularly in a sequence of amusement park lights that included a fractal-like pattern formed by a ferris wheel (Brakhage). This reminded me of how mathematical concepts can take on a different context and visual complexity to bestow meaning within art.

Thigh Line Lyre Triangular depicted the process

Flashes of color during Thigh Line Lyre Triangular

of childbirth in graphic and jarring fashion. The birth depicted in this film was actually of Brakhage’s own child (Barr). His personal connection to this film elucidates its emotional rawness and intensity, expressed through shaky camera movements and flashes and bursts of color. Brakhage is able to illustrate this biological, scientific process of childbirth in a way that allows the viewers to experience its vigor organically along with the family in the room. 

Though this experience was more startling than I expected, I appreciated how Brakhage was able to challenge our typical understanding of vision and introduce a new way to see, indeed creating his own metaphors on vision.

Image of Metaphors on Vision by Stan Brakhage

References

Anticipation of the Night. Directed by Stan Brakhage, 1958.

Barr, William R. "Brakhage: Artistic Development in Two Childbirth Films," Film quarterly: forty years, a selection, University of California Press, 1999, pp. 536-541.

Brakhage, Stan. Metaphors on Vision. Anthology Film Archives, 2017.

Thigh Line Lyre Triangular. Directed by Stan Brakhage, 1961.