MAKING LIGHT OF IT

The following are just a few of the many wondrous images contained on a site I recently completed for the artist Carl E. Brown, who has been very generous with me, and whose work I greatly admire...

Among the many musings on his own exquisite artistry, Phil Solomon has also used his blog as a means of offering rare insights into the various daily exchanges of his close friend, collaborator, and colleague Stan Brakhage, as Solomon puts it, “to try and help those people who didn’t really know him what daily life with Stan was like (rather than Brakhage…)”.  These are truly invaluable to those of us who did not have a chance to be in his presence, and can offer snippets of revelations not found in the many pages written on the man and his work.  Solomon has most recently posted a striking 16mm glimpse into Brakhage’s delightfully idiosyncratic working process:

http://musings.philsolomon.com/?p=204

Trains of Winnipeg (the short) :: excerpt, printing press sequence from Images Video on Vimeo.

Holden has also made himself available for questions on the forum portion of the website...

(Also very much worth reading is this article by David Foster in Scope Magazine, which extensively explores the use of lyricism in the work)

I was browsing through an older interview between Jonathan Rosenbaum and Jean-Luc Godard concerning his Histoire(s) du Cinema the other day when I came across a statement similar in nature to one made more recently in an interview with Andrew Noren, both concerning their use of video:

“Well, I’d say for technical reasons, because video is closer to painting or to music. You work with your hands like a musician with an instrument, and you play it.” - JLG 


“if you think of cameras and editing systems as potential instruments for visual music, which I do, then this is empowering…For me, the entire digital apparatus is like a great visual piano of a wonderful sophistication.”-Noren


PURE SPECULATION on my part (and fairly superficial regardless) , but I wonder if Godard’s use of video, which dates back a ways, had any sort of influence on Noren (who stated in A Critical Cinema 2 that he still had an interest in Godard), in that they both, as stated in an article by David Phelps on Aberration of Starlight  “understand that video’s faculties are not for showing the world anything as it concretely looks like.”

Louis Zukofsky, like Ronald Johnson (for whom Zukofsky was a vital influence), is a poet of unparalleled musicality, who was and still remains criminally under appreciated (at the very least relatively speaking).  One of his great achievements (of which are numerous, his Bottom: On Shakespeare is a stunning and confounding work of criticism unlike any I have or am likely to encounter), "A", is comprised of twenty-four movements and encompasses almost a half-century of his life.  It is a shame that "A" (again like Johnson’s ARK) is currently out of print.  The following is the eleventh movement ("A"-11), which is visually quoted in Brakhage’s own haunting song of grief, 23rd Psalm Branch.
 ---

River that must turn full after I stop dying
Song, my song, raise grief to music
Light as my loves' though, the few sick
So sick of wrangling: thus weeping,
Sounds of light, stay in her keeping
And my son's face - this much for honor.


Freed by their praises who make honor dearer
Whose losses show them rich and you no poorer
Take care, song, that what stars' imprint you mirror
Grazed their tears; draw speech from their nature or
Love in you - faced with your outer stars - purer
Gold than tongues make without feeling
Art new, hurt old: revealing
The slackened bow as the stinging
Animal dies, thread gold stringing
The fingerboard pressed in my honor.


Honor, song, sang the blest is delight knowing
We overcome ills by love.  Hurt, song, nourish
Eyes, think most of whom you hurt.  For the flowing
River'   s poison where what rod blossoms. Flourish
By love's sweet lights and sing in them I flourish.
No, song, not any one power
May recall or forget, our
Love to see your love flows into

[page break]

Us.  If Venus lights, your words spin, to
Live our desires lead us to honor.


Graced, your heart in nothing less than in death, go -
I, dust - raise the great hem of the extended
World that nothing can leave; having had breath go
Face my son, say: 'If your father offended
You with mute wisdom, my words have not ended
His second paradise where
His love was in her eyes where
They turn, quick for you two - sick
Or gone cannot make music
You set less than all.  Honor


His voice in me, the river's turn that finds the
Grace in you, four notes first too full for talk, leaf
Lightning stem, stems bound to the branch that binds
                                                                                    the
Tree, and then as from the same root we talk, leaf
After leaf of your mind's music, page, walk leaf
Over leaf of his thought, sounding
His happiness: song sounding
The grace that comes from knowing
Things, her lover our own showing
Her love in all her honor.'

("A" by Louis Zukofsky, Joun Hopkins University Press)

---

”When I begin to work in the editing room, my method is elimination. I begin to eliminate until what's left is just what I want it to be. Then I begin to change the order, or trim something here and there. Some people have said that I'm careless, random, anything goes. The truth is that what stays in – every frame – is approved by me. The seeming randomness of my filmmaking is actually very deceiving. Because what I film is very precisely determined, chosen by my memory and intuition. And in the editing room it all goes through the Procrustean bed of my editing method. In short: I control absolutely every frame of my film.”

 The Vancouver Island Quartet (1991-2002, Stan Brakhage)


 The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse Pt. I-IX (1968-2008, Andrew Noren)


 The Book of all the Dead (1982-1994, R. Bruce Elder)
  
                                                                                   
Secret History of the Dividing Line, A True Account in Nine Parts (1999-ongoing, David Gatten)


Eniaios (1948-1990, Gregory J. Markopoulos)

[1]Eyes Upside Down [p. 124] P. Adams Sitney

In an essay [1] on fellow Canadian artist Carl E. Brown, Bruce Elder examines parallels between such films as Man Ray’s L'étoile de mer, Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man Pt. 3 and Carl Brown's Air Cries “Empty Water” Trilogy (I would specifically point towards part two, The Red Thread)
that involve thematic explorations of the human “erotic impulse”, highlighting the material effects each filmmaker has applied to the surface of the film.








A fascinating subject I think, one that has, and if mined further can continue to, yield considerable insight into a certain mode of film that many richly creative and expressive film artists have produced.