Stan Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision

“Oh, slow-eyed spectator, this machine is grinding you out of existence.”
—Stan Brakhage

Stan Brakhage’s —first published in 1963 by Jonas Mekas as a fabulously special issue of , designed by Fluxus forefather George Maciunas, bound in beautifully corrugated cardboard pierced with an eyehole, beyond whose vellum retina lurked Brakhage’s own eye (in negative) returning your gaze—is back. Back the way vinyl records are back,’s second edition, where the corrugations were replaced by what felt like heavy-duty, brown-to-grayish construction paper and Brakhage’s famously smush-faced visage wedged up against the book’s title—includes a faithfully reproduced facsimile of the entire typewritten-on-acid-blotter-stock original volume (interviews, photographs, and all), followed by a cleanly set and painstakingly corrected and annotated version of same by editor P. Adams Sitney, all from the venerable Anthology Film Archive and Brooklyn’s thriving film collective Light Industry. Do you need to own it? Undeniably, especially if your backin- the-day copy is as spine-damaged as mine is. Do you need to read it? Well, naturally, even if its opening strains are already ingrained in our film-cultural memories: “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws…”, etc., etc. Need I continue? In these confines, those words ought to complete themselves. It’s the very Pledge of Allegiance of the experimental film world, that edifying, cinema-defying opening Stan-za—our emulsion-hugging .