Brakhage - 1998

Brakhage - a documentary made for Canadian television

A very good 1-1/4 hour documentary, if any one's interested, from Netflix.

In the documentary, an elderly American critic says, "Film is just about over now." This is a very old-fashioned distinction which will soon be lost: he could have said, "Film as an analog medium is giving way to all the digital media out there." This distinction is most important to those who use the chemistry and physics of the plastic piece of film to create images. Still, just as CD's have not wiped out records, there are other considerations more linked to the quality of the image than to the "art" of Brakhage-style film making.

But the most interesting comments were those that applied the label "abstract expressionism" to what Brakhage was doing. Thirty years ago, this would never have occurred to me because, no matter what camera trickery is employed, I knew the camera was pointed at something in the world around us. In fact, no one can claim that every second of Brakhage is transcendental: sometimes you're sitting there just trying to figure out what the camera is pointed at. I figured he was closer to Georgia O'Keefe (get close enough to that flower and it becomes abstract) than he was to the Abstract Expressionists. But now I'm coming around to the "look, don't think" philosophy. It's abstract. It's expressive. It's expressively abstract and it's abstractly expressive. I'm thinking in particular of everything he did after "Dog Star Man" (which, after all, told a simple story) particularly "Text of Light" and on to the later films made with scratches and noxious chemicals.

Although Brakhage's life fit the counter-cultural mold of the 60's (without the drugs and the rock and roll) his personality really makes him seem closer to those Abstract Expressionist painters of the 50's: the emotional intensity, the high-seriousness, and the urge to "make it new." And here's the point where his personal life makes sense. I've said before that American avant garde cinema didn't disappear, it's images simply flowed out into the very real world of TV advertising, the impressionistic pitchmaking of the 21st century. Abstract Expressionism, in contrast, met a very real death, when Pop Art killed it in the early 60's. But Brakhage, the oblivious filmmaker, just kept going and, sure enough, starts suffering from the filmic version of writer's block. It may have been bad, but at least he didn't wind up like Jackson Pollack.