Cracking Up

 (The Girl's Nervy by Jennifer Reeves)

 (Light Work Mood Disorder [left side] by Jennifer Reeves)

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"For instance, Mary Beth and I as we worked together on the Persians, are often speaking of Jenn Reeves's hand-painted films.  And wondering, just to be specific, how does she get the paint to crack like that- we've tried burning a match over it, match under it, setting it in the sun, using India ink and so on, but she produces a distinctive cracking in her painting that's absolutely hers and of course we're not really supposed to have it, we're playing in a way, but in the mean time we're discovering other ways of creating that organic cracking of the paint or the substance of the paint." 

-Stan Brakhage

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 (He Walked Away by Jennifer Reeves)

(When It Was Blue by Jennifer Reeves)

Cinemology

(from Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age by Malcom Le Grice)

Regrets

"I used the word 'structural' to describe a tendency in certain films.  I never spoke of structuralism.  I never spole of structural film-makers, but of particular tendencies in particular films.  The use of the word meant to have nothing to do with anything in Levi-Strauss, or French structuralism.  I had no notion, at all, that this article would catch fire, more than anything else I had ever written; that it would become a disease; that it would come back to haunt me.  It was hopeless.  But it's a word that has stuck, and I'm stuck with it.  You're right, I wish I had thought of a different word at the time.  I want to state my total agreement with you on this thing- that that was a mistake.  I am sorry about it, but the mistake of associating structuralism with structural film was not in the text of mine."

-P. Adams Sitney in a 1977 debate with Malcom Le Grice

Trichotomy

(From Ronald Johnson's Modernist Collage Poetry by Ross Hair)

R.I.P. Robert Nelson

R.I.P. Robert Nelson

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The following interview is from Scott MacDonald's absolutely essential A Critical Cinema series.  If you have not yet done yourself the favor of exploring these works, please do so immediately; they offer a voice to many filmmakers who've often been and since remained criminally underheard.  Reprinted with permisson...

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(From Plastic Haircut by Robert Nelson)

(From Bleu Shut by Robert Nelson)

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The following is from the No. 48 issue of Film Culture...

The Return

(The Return by Nathaniel Dorsky)

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(The Return by Ezra Pound)

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"What 'The Return'...accomplished, precisely, was to shift our attention away from a search for what some dramatic character, identified or not, might be saying to something more nakedly present: what the poem before us is creating.  It is undoubtedly easiest to recognize the visual aspects of such a nakedly present creation-the picture or 'image' the words conjure up.  Yet obviously Pound's sense of the image as an 'intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time' suggest more than the visual element stressed in his definition of 'Phanopoeia': 'a casting of images upon the visual imagination'.  The 'intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time' is well on the way to our conception of the tonal center or affect....As for 'The Return' it is neither wholly speech nor wholly a succession of images cast upon 'the visual imagination'.  But if we see it as a progression of tonal centers, we shall indeed find something of 'interest' to say about it-and we shall point ourselves towards the evolution of the sequence in our century". -The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry by M.L. Rosenthal and Sally M. Gall

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(The Return by Nathaniel Dorsky)

Rhythm & Blues

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(From The Films of Stan Brakhage... by Bruce Elder)

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(Unconscious London Strata by Stan Brakhage)