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Painting Film (1996) Author(s): Stan Brakhage Source: Chicago Review, Vol. 47/48, Vol. 47, no. 4 - Vol. 48, no. 1 (Winter, 2001 - Spring, 2002), pp. 61-64 Published by: Chicago Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25304806 Accessed: 16-03-2017 00:17 UTC

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Erigena). This interplay is the balance/counter-balance of any brain's genetic cultural individual "dance," and this, therefore, stance-dance would seem to be the only fully meaningful (i.e., means-less-usage) en tertainment available of cognition (as distinct from re-cognition).

Film ought aesthetically to exist flickering electric and free of pho

tographic animation, free of the mechanical trickery of, the outright fakery of the illusion of movie pictures. All interferences with The Light (all shaped tones and formal silhouettes) ought to be an illumi nation of source-as-light (or at least be subservient, as symbol, say, representatives of Time, to Light's life...as is, to be sure, the almost equal space of Black in the projection of every split second of lighted frame). The light, then, would be seen to move because of the light signifying shapes and tones in their signatory continuities (especially if these were tones in visual chromatic harmony, and shapes in evolu tionary form at one with illumination). This anyway, is the aspiration of

artists whose Art aspires to Music, and "Art is art-as-art. And every thing else is everything else" (Barnett Newman, painter, sculpture).

PAINTING FILM (1996)

If it be an art, then it is intrinsically aesthetic, requiring aesthete? that is to say, it is beautiful, integrally balanced, and (as unique) of some individually discovered integrity: its appreciator is one who is capable of sensory justice and evolutionary thought, free from dogma and representational bias, because the art work's this-for-that is not clock-like but rather evolves eccentrically within, and only within, the limits of being Human. Art forms and colors, or rhythms and tones of words, progress asymmetrically or eventually settle into some

complexity of beseeming haphazard composure. The art work defines a paradigm of the experienced chaos of everyday life while being in itself a construct quite distinct from it.

The salad is on the table, every ruffled edge of lettuce crisp with the glitter of its own being-at-one with water and/or overlay of oil.

STAN BRAKHAGE I 61

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Musically, such crispness can translate pizzicatto, or into some slow uncoil of overall (say oboe) curl of tone, some tone of green punctu ated by drum, and so on, or it can just be distorted by dream?the limp-lettuce nightmare, crack and timbre reverberation in phosphor glint of cathected leafage, soforth.

Were I to paint the plein-aire abstraction of this (as I do) onto a strip of film, my whim would be to absorb what could be seen of such lettuce, its surrounds of table and all, the very room, and then to

allow into my consideration the movements of such absorption? the shifts of eye in contemplation, the electrical discharges of synap tic thought, the "translations," as it were, from optic imprint to memo rabilia.

For color ("magic markers," dyes, india inks) I choose greens, yes, but vein them with yellows and ruffled shadow-black, applying isopropyl alcohol on a twisted pointed Kleenex to thin dye lines, smudge the tones or (with alcohol flicked from a thumbed tooth brush) create circles to dab into partial-circle-curves or (with weak ened, spit-diluted alcohol) do manage filigrees midst mixes of con glomerate color. Sometimes varieties of tone are marked directly upon the transparent "palette" (or clipboard which holds the film-strip), so that I can then make toned puddles of alcohol to dip the film into, feathering the shapes with quick twists of the wrist, pressing the film so that the dyes collect as edges to half-dried shapes, and so on. More often than not the alcohol is used to erase an entire frame or collec

tion of frames which have, so it seems, come to naught. There is very little of "lettuce" left after all this, but when success

ful, the truths of moving visual thinking are made manifest along a strip of film.

As to the "table," strips of adhesive tape provide varieties of straight

lines, after applied dyes, in mimic of eye's slippage?brevities of "cub ism," if you will, in Time...continuities of cubistic envisionment when

flashed (twenty-four frames a second) through the projector and upon the motion-picture screen. Very little of geometry survives "transla tion" into organic thought, so it seems to me. The meat of the mind (at least my mind) puts curve to linearity, blurs hard-edge percep tion; but the thought of (for example) "the shortest distance between two points" prevails in a mix of cellular irregularities sufficient to

62 I CHICAGO REVIEW

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necessitate its occasional representation. The table is in the range of nomenclature "yellow brown"; but

the eye's retention of yellow is blue, and the after-image of brown is often something I call "red-black"?a very muted red, to be sure...more in the range of purple, say?actually unnameable. The shifts of tone, as the mind absorbs, is understandably variable along a strip of film, but almost always tending to recycle its orders, like the pitches of a tune, but a tune undergoing melodic variations. These variations are subject to interruptions by absorption of all other tones (and shape shifts) of the surrounding room (for shape does surely affect recep tion of tone...and tone of tone in color-chordal variance)

The plate upon which the salad sits (oval-shaped, as it happens) presents curves which tighten in relation to each other as if pulled string-to-bow, becoming variances of interruptive "horizontals," "ver ticals," "diagonals" (as we name them?mimicking the language of painting and still photography) in the field of compositional logic for film. Semi-dried "magic markers" can effect a line quite similar (on this small scale) to brush-stroke; but these I tend to smudge with alcohol twist of Kleenex until they more nearly approximate some sense of optic flickering of such. As the plate is "white," and the film strip transparent film-leader, I delicately scratch at the lines of the "stroke," so to speak.

The truth of the "plate" is that it affects visual absorption of the lettuce very much like a break in the sight-lines, distraction from forms, rhythmically castanet-like, because otherwise its paradigm on film, its variable oval, would act as container?a word appropriate to its service vis-?-vis lettuce (appropriate surely in language and per haps to description of snapshot) but absolute non-sense in respect to moving visual thought process. Such containment would preclude the peripherally perceived effects of the room, the in-pouring light of the world beyond, the process of memory and expectation; and thus would obliterate Time.

I haven't really written about the paradigmatic play of memory in this process of painting a film...nor do I intend to now; but suffice it that "lettuce" perceived as a word and lettuce seen across any (how

ever limited) "space of time," like we say, constitute two entirely dif ferent processes of thinking.

STAN BRAKHAGE I 63

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Let me end on three "Tender Buttons" by Gertrude Stein:

MORE

An elegant use of foliage and grace and a little piece of white cloth and oil.

Wondering so winningly in several kinds of oceans is the reason that makes red so regular and enthusiastic. The reason that there is

more snips are the same shining very colored rid of no round color.

A NEW CUP AND SAUCER

Enthusiastically hurting a clouded yellow bud and saucer, enthusi astically so is the bite in the ribbon

OBJECTS

Within, within the cut and slender joint alone, with sudden equals and no more than three, two in the center make two one side.

If the elbow is long and it is filled so then the best example is all together.

The kind of show is made by squeezing.

THE LOST FILMS (1996)

The Lost Films is a series of nine untitled films, from the late 1980s

through to 1995, which are photographed and/or painted, sometimes painted-over photography?and are "lost" in the sense that, across the whole period of time, I could not manage nor imagine any way to pay for printing them. Finally a C.R.C.W. University of Colorado sab batical grant allowed me to take them out of "the lost drawer" in my office, string them together chronologically, and send them on to

Western Cine labs.

64 I CHICAGO REVIEW

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