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DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199337026.003.0009
Keywords: Stan Brakhage, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Maya Deren, Charles
Olson, Walt Whitman, Ronald Johnson, Faust, Vancouver Island
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Stan Brakhage’s Poetics
Stan
Brakhage
began to
make films in
1952 as a
precocious
teenager. His
encounter
with
modernist
poetry was
immediate
and eccentric.
But it made so
forceful an
impression on
him that the
modernism of
the American
Stan Brakhage:
avant-garde
cinema has [Left] The Mammals of Victoria (1994)
been largely [Right] The God of Day Had Gone Down
defined and upon Him (2000)
molded by his
Stills courtesy of Fred Camper and
achievements.
Marilyn Brakhage
He quickly
assimilated
the modernist dimensions of the avant-garde filmmakers who
were at work when he entered the field. His passion for poetry
and his eagerness to incorporate the advanced work in both
practice and theory, of the composers and painters of his time
as well, accelerated his meteoric development and influence.
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Stan Brakhage’s Poetics
more radical poet Gertrude Stein would prove to have had the
greater influence on his films. During the period of Brakhage’s
residence, Duncan had put himself under a regimen of writing
in the manner of Stein on a regular basis, ultimately producing
his book of “derivations,” Writing Writing. Thus it was
Brakhage’s peculiar fate to come under the influence of one of
the very rare poets of that generation who actively assimilated
the lessons of both Stein and Pound at a time when their
followers were as opposed as the two poets had been to each
other.
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Stan Brakhage’s Poetics
and most difficult work. This included most of her poetry and
particularly the very long serial poem Stanzas in Meditation
(1956) that continued to obsess Brakhage until his death in
2003. Just when Stein became posthumously a contemporary
poet, Pound followed the dazzling publication of The Pisan
Cantos (1948) with two more installments of The Cantos,
Section:Rock Drill 85-95 De Los Cantares (1955) and Thrones
(1959). The birthday present Brakhage received in 1949 would
have been the 1948 edition, which included The Pisan Cantos.
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The primary lesson Brakhage had learned from Stein was that
there is no such thing as repetition. Every recurrence has a
new meaning. The fugal mesh (p.155) of repeating images
and movements in Anticipation of the Night owes more to
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and the way they are filmed and combined point to the
thoughts and feelings of the unseen subject (filmmaker) of the
film.
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When Faust Foutu was first performed at the Six Gallery in San
Francisco in January 1955, Brakhage’s high school friends,
Lawrence Jordan and Yvonne Fair, played the chief roles;
Jordan was Faust, and Fair played Helen, the film actress
Faustina, and other roles. Earlier, in Colorado, Brakhage had
competed for Fair’s affection, but ultimately Jordan prevailed
in their erotic triangle. Therefore, if Duncan’s inflection of the
legend of Faust had once been interfused, for Brakhage, with
his potentially traumatic displacement by Jordan, certainly as
Fair’s lover and more remotely as the subject of Duncan’s
benign recognition, his surprising return to the Faustfilm, at
least in title and theme, after thirty years might be seen as a
reengagement with the sexual and psychic tensions that
immediately preceded his first marriage; for he started the
Faust series during the severe crisis of the failure of his
marriage to Jane and continued the series of four films
through the period of his divorce, living in isolation in rented
rooms in Boulder, Colorado, and he was still working on the
series during his subsequent courtship of Marilyn Jull. That
period was also marked by Robert Duncan death (1988).
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The catalogue note for the film reflects this language, while
providing a synopsis much more explicit than the film
itself:“This is the imaged thought process of the young Faust
escaping the unbearable pictures of his broken romantic idyll,
mentally fleeing the particulars of his dramatized ‘love,’
Faust’s mind ranging the geography of his upbringing and its
structures of cultural hubris—the whole nervous system ‘going
to ground’ and finally ‘becoming one’ with the hypnogogically
visible cells of his receptive sight and inner cognition...and all
that I could give him of Heaven in this current visualization of
these ancient themes.”31 Actually, there is a concentration of
images from Faust’s Other during the speech near the
opening, but visual echoes of it recur infrequently and
separated by long intervals; they have disappeared totally by
the time the second text is heard. Instead, the film is an
elaborate mesh of shots from a moving automobile, often in
superimposition. Synchronized to the phrase “symbols of
human hubris,” the image of a monumental sculpture of
praying hands appears for the first time. The montage
suggests the vanity of aspirations to permanence by
associating this bronze inflation of piety with the mysterious
ruins of Mesa Verde and the mournful look of the weathered
house where Brakhage lived as a baby. The superimpositions
of the ruins of Mesa Verde and the wooden house in near-
dilapidation suggest that these (and other modernistic
structures from the campus of Oral Roberts University) are
icons of the “error of envisioned meaning,” from which Faust
flees through the desert and past a body of water to a neutral,
flat, rural landscape. But since the weathered house is, in fact,
Brakhage’s first home in Winfield, Kansas, the oscillation
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eye
—Jupiter compressed west to the other—
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contra-
centrifugal
water to touch, all knowledge
as if a central silver
backlit in gust.
caryatid
one sudden tide of day
O
wide bloom the pathed earth yawn
(p.178) on purpose porpoised pattern
this reeled world whistling joist its polished fields
of sun
pulse race in a vase of beings, bearings
all root fold forms upon
to center eternity
or enter it
instruments of change.
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Two minutes after the bird in flight we see for the first time a
corny amusement park that will come to dominate the second
half of the film. The first adults soon appear, playing miniature
golf (54 minutes), then a car or two. The amusement area puts
up a greater resistance to abstraction than the sea or garden.
In one sense it is a pollutant to the sublime, Adamic vision
Brakhage is crafting on Victoria Island. But it is also an
ambivalent emblem of the middle-class normalcy which he
despises and yet of which he feels deprived. He attempts to
gauge that ambivalence here and to a lesser degree in the
subsequent film of the series. One of the central tropes of
Anticipation of the Night had been to participate mimetically,
through camera movement and editing, with the children
taking amusement park rides at night, in a rhythmic oscillation
between elation and more profound deflation. Nearly forty
years and more than 200 films later, Brakhage is considerably
more subtle and restrained. He keeps an eloquent distance
from the theme park, fascinated, disgusted, uncertain what to
make of it, discovering instead what he can make with images
of it.
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(p.191) At the start of The God of Day Had Gone Down upon
Him, Brakhage “began filming an envisionment of death, of
what one could begin to imagine of death when it was in the
bones...That stillness which pervades so much, and these were
the great sources of inspiration of Rothko’s last paintings, of
Braque’s old age paintings, of those of Joan Mitchell’s final
paintings and so on.”58 Earlier, when he began the Vancouver
Island series, he had spoken of the Muse as a figure for the
collective unconscious, as I mentioned. If he were now backing
away from the pagan theology of his earlier discussions of
inspiration and possession toward a personal version of
Christianity, he might have found in the parable of Jonah a
monotheistic version of the terrors of the Muse, as he had
been used to portray her. Jonah vainly tries to escape the
burden of prophecy, but neither a sea voyage nor being thrown
overboard nor even the belly of the whale can keep him from
his unwanted election. Then, even when he does submit and
prophesies the destruction of Nineveh, God relents because of
the city’s contrition. The humiliated, pouting prophet takes
refuge under the shade of a tree God provided for him, only to
wither it and harass Jonah with sun and wind to teach him a
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(his God of Day) has already begun to ebb away from him.
Later, in a spurt of energy and brighter light, for the first time
in the series, he turns his camera on rough waters,
intercutting a shot of his recently deceased father-in-law
(identified in the note as the elderly man of the “turning
point”). The violence in nature is both a metaphor for his rage
at his illness and an intimation of destruction, soon
represented by the flotsam on the sea surface, suggestive of a
shipwreck. Yet after the turbulent waves we see a sea lion,
ducks, geese, birds, and a frolicking dog, as if Brakhage were
reminding himself that the sea sustains life and that it can be
the arena of play for the mammals of Victoria, displaced from
the previous film in the series.
Marilyn Brakhage signed the catalogue note for Panels for the
Walls of Heaven:
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Notes:
(1) . Bruce McPherson, ed., Essential Brakhage:Selected
Writings on Filmmaking by Stan Brakhage (Kingston,
NY:Documentext, 2001), pp. 182–183.
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(49) . Ibid., p.36. With my ellipses I have moved this phrase out
if its context, in which the author is discussing prenatal vision.
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