Seeking Brakhage

PART I : SEEKING BRAKHAGE

ONE

BURSTS OF LIGHT

This essay served as the liner notes to the first DVD edition of Brakhage's work, issued by The Criterion Collection in 2003.

Stan Brakhage's films explode with sensual beauty: bursts of color heightened by extreme contrasts in hue and shape and by stunning depth effects; more monochromatic passages of nonetheless equal intensity that sensitize one to the glories of tiny differences; nearly flat slowly changing fields of color that wave like blankets in the wind, only to be interrupted by a cut that opens up a vast space; rapid explosions of paint that seem just on the cusp of suggesting a namable object. The viewer is taken through such complexities of experience that the effect is a little like having one's eyes flushed out. But the work generally doesn't aspire to what is often meant by purity; instead it's chock full of the conflicting emotions and general messiness of life itself. The montage of Dog Star Man which juxtaposes its characters, principally Brakhage himself, with imagery of blood vessels and the sun, the forest and the stars, family and architecture, and explicitly erotic imagery, evokes numerous associations, from the banal to the sublime. Layers of faces and rocks and paint on film combine in multiple superimpositions, ultimately building to a meditation on one man's place in the cosmos that can also be read, apart from its hint of a plot, as a light-poem.

Though his status as the most important and influential of avant-garde filmmakers is secure, many still seek to justify Brakhage's significance by pointing to the degree to which his stylistic innovations have influenced mainstream movies (the credits of Seven being one recent example) as well as television commercials. This formulation is more than a little ironic, because his fifty years of filmmaking, constituting nearly four hundred films ranging in length from nine seconds to over four hours, provide a passionate opposition to the ethos of both conventional dramatic narrative films and most documentaries – offering alternatives in the ways in which they were made, in how they should be viewed, and in what they're all about.

A conventional narrative film is a machine for the manufacturing of emotions: some characters and scenes evoke empathy and others create tension and fear. These emotions are provoked primarily by the subject matter – an image of a marauding ax-murderer would scare anyone – and only in the very best of narrative films also by the style. But while subject matter is important in Brakhage's films, they do their work primarily through composition, camera movement, rhythms within images, and the rhythms of editing or paint on film – they’re best seen, in other words, as light moving in time. A documentary is typically of interest because of its subject matter, proceeding as a kind of show-and-tell with talking heads or an omniscient narrator conveying information. Brakhage's films have few or no objective facts, existing primarily in a kind of virtual space within the viewer's imagination, and in the subjective interaction between viewer and film.

Brakhage wants to make you see, a D. W. Griffith line he often cited, but with a crucial difference: his films eschew the manipulations of mainstream narrative, and instead invite you to a variety of different kinds of seeing.

If the model for the Hollywood film was Henry Ford's assembly line, with each phase of the production being handled by a different individual or group, Brakhage, like most avant-garde filmmakers, worked almost completely alone. He occasionally made films with actors, and even used a small crew; some of his films are collaborations with individual workers at film labs – or with other filmmakers. But his central model is the loner with a camera, filming the world and then editing alone, or the loner scratching and painting directly onto the filmstrip. Most of his films were made on minuscule budgets, tens or hundreds of dollars rather than tens or hundreds of millions, which allowed him, though not without considerable difficulty, to finance them himself, free of any interference.

One key aspect of avant-garde film, present perhaps most strongly in the work of Brakhage but found also in that of his predecessors such as Maya Deren and Gregory J. Markopoulos, and in the work of successors such as Ernie Gehr, Hollis Frampton, and even later filmmakers who weren't heavily influenced by Brakhage, such as Lewis Klahr and Su Friedrich, is the different kind of relationship it establishes with the viewer. Like much modern art, and unlike mass-market entertainment, it addresses the viewer as an individual rather than as a member of a group. To watch a Brakhage film is to be profoundly alone: alone with oneself, alone in the process of discovering new things about oneself. And indeed, Brakhage often said that he preferred that his films be seen in the home, and in the Sixties and Seventies he made a number of 8mm films, whose purchase was affordable.

Thus, it's especially important not to view Brakhage films in the way most are accustomed to screening videos. I would suggest trying to approximate the conditions of a cinema as much as possible. Because of the complexity and subtlety of Brakhage's films, they prove most rewarding on multiple viewings. Persons new to his work might be better off choosing a few to see rather than trying to watch these discs straight through. Also, the room should be completely dark. One should sit fairly close to, and perhaps at eye level with or even below, the screen. The projected film image has, in its clarity and colors and light, a kind of iconic power that is key to Brakhage's work, and it's important to try to see whatever monitor one is viewing these films on in a similar way. Brakhage made most of his films silent because the rhythms of almost any soundtrack tend to dominate the rhythms within an image, and visual rhythms are crucial to his work. Thus the interruptions of chatting, people coming into and leaving the room, the phone ringing, and so on, can prove almost completely destructive to these films' subtle delicacies.

Most importantly, the viewer of a Brakhage film must learn both attentiveness and openness. I've long guessed that when most people start to watch a movie, their speed of perception slows down if they are expecting a relaxing encounter, images that will tell them what to see and think, and a story that sucks you in. This won't work at all for a Brakhage film. The viewer needs to be relaxed, of course, but ready to receive varieties of images and rhythms and able to see fast – in the Sixties, a generation of viewers not yet trained by the rapid cutting of later TV commercials and music videos used to complain about headaches from Brakhage films because of their rapid speed. But even in the apparently slower sections, every jiggle of the camera is important, Most of all, the viewer's role needs to be reimagined: not as a passive receiver but as one who meets the film halfway, actively plumbing the depths of its imagery and the various themes and ideas suggested by its subject matter – imaginatively dancing with its flickering rhythms.

Ideally, these films should also be seen on film, because the quality of projected film light is completely different from the light of a video monitor. For one thing, a projected film has a more chiseled, absolute quality, despite its flicker, because the flicker is caused by the projector shutter opening and closing many times a second, so that what one actually sees is a succession of still images. Video light, by contrast, is constantly moving. The great advantage of DVD is its availability for home viewings, and especially for multiple viewings, but it should never be taken as a substitute for viewing the films on celluloid, and it is my hope that more screenings, rather than fewer, will be the result of this project.

Brakhage said of reading Freud, The first thing I understood is that here was a man trying to save his own life, Brakhage later acknowledged that the quote applied to him: his films are made with an intensity, a kind of wit's end desperation, that suggests a consciousness on the brink. Brakhage was not only a craftsman doing something he loved; he used his craft to try to come to an understanding of whether – and on what terms – he could continue to go on living. This is true in the lurching, intense movements used to shoot an adolescent party in his third work, Desistfilm, where the camera mimics drunkenness; in the epic mixture of triumphantly poetic montage and abject failure that haunts Dog Star Man; in the terrifying suggestion of death in the central strip of darkness at the beginning of The Dark Tower. While the at-the-edge quality of his work may have been born out of his personal psychology, it ultimately becomes, particularly in his major films, a philosophical inquiry into the nature of existence.

There is no solidity in Brakhage's work, no fixity, no predictability, no symmetry – and when one or more of those things is present, one can be almost certain that it's present as an intended horror, a vision of dread, as in the mirror image symmetries in Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse. His work was made in opposition to, even in terror of, the notion of the static, the fixed, the given. Objective measurement, predetermined forms, the overall arc structure of most narratives – were all to be undermined, because they block the individual from experiencing the unpredictability of the inner life.

Many of the techniques Brakhage developed or refined – the use of the hand-held camera to express his subjective reactions to what is being filmed, his very physiology realized through its tiny jitters; the physical insertion of tiny images directly into the filmstrip in Dog Star Man; or the application of scratches and paint directly to the film surface to approximate closed-eye vision (lower your eyelids to see what he means) – can be seen as part of a larger exploration of human subjectivity in all its varieties. He answers the idea that photography is the impersonal recorder of reality with the notion that reality itself is inseparable from human consciousness, and that shared seeing – the type of eyesight that allows one to walk across a room without bumping into things – is no more valid, and aesthetically less interesting, than the play of light on objects, the movements of dust particles in the air, or personal mental images. The immateriality of his films' light becomes a metaphor for the shifting nature of thought itself.

The variety of images and techniques in Brakhage's films is partly about giving form to his eyesight, and in that sense he can be called a documentarian of subjectivity. But a key effect of his work is to sensitize each individual viewer to his own subjectivity. One can't completely figure out the provocative but mysterious interaction between the four figures in Cat's Cradle, but, kept on edge by the very rapid intercutting, the viewer is at once encouraged to come up with his own interpretations – and then prevented from settling on any one idea. The viewer who struggles through the autopsies in Brakhage's film, The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, will soon discover that the film is also a curious, admittedly creepy study of the varieties of light reflected off of skin, with luminous fluid appearing to dance with the camera. Lovers of Brakhage's work have found, in fact, that it can constitute a kind of eye-training, a way of helping one see the world more imaginatively in a variety of situations, ranging from moments of intense emotional crisis (in his early Anticipation of the Night he contemplates suicide) to sitting, bored, in an airport (which was the subject of his Song 12).

Despite their apparently private nature, Brakhage's films also have a social dimension, arguing with, and offering an alternative to, the object-fetishism that dominates our culture today. To the ethos of a television commercial (of which he made a few, decades ago, though with no great enthusiasm), in which a series of images lead up to a picture of the product, reducing beautiful women or pastoral scenes to an automobile or a beer can, Brakhage offers the opposite: objects being transformed into moving light. Using changes in perspective and focus (including extremely soft focus), changes in exposure (Brakhage argued that there is no such thing as correct exposure, that light and dark images are as valid as correct ones), paint on film, and other devices, he redirects attention away from objects and possessiveness and toward a state of non-acquisitive, almost immaterial flow.

Omnivorous in his acknowledged influences – which ranged from Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein to J.S. Bach and Olivier Messiaen, to modern choreographers Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, from J.M.W. Turner and Jackson Pollock to Chinese ideograms, and much, much else – Brakhage makes no pretense to academic objectivity, instead finding elements in each that inspired him, that he could make his own. Perhaps the vast range of his influences partly accounts for the diversity within his work, from the almost documentary Window Water Baby Moving to the collage film Mothlight, to the epic narrative Dog Star Man, to films in which he hand-paints over photographic imagery, such as The Dante Quartet, to completely abstract hand-painted films such as Lovesong. But his project was always to explore the richness of seeing, and of life in its totality, accepting no givens about what seeing, or the film image, or life itself is, but always pushing toward the unknown.

Brakhage's work frequently proceeds by setting up contradictions on a variety of levels. In many of the later hand-painted films, one opposition results from the fact that most individual images are repeated for between two and four frames, producing images lasting from one-twelfth to one-sixth of a second. The speed is fast enough to suggest movement, but slow enough to permit each painting to be seen as an individual still, creating an exquisite tension between cinema's dual natures.

While Brakhage's films are replete with other oppositions on the levels of both style and subject matter, his editing is not merely – or even mostly – oppositional. Instead, most frequently a sequence will be followed by a kind of lateral move; rather than answering one set of visual forms with an opposite, he understood that opposition is a form of affirmation because it accepts the terms of what is being opposed – and instead sought to shift the very grammar of the film's discourse. For most of the brief two minutes of Black Ice, we see superimpositions of abstract patches of color that seem to be zooming toward us with other fragments that are moving in different ways. The zoom effect is itself a perfectly-balanced contradiction: shapes are rushing toward the eye, but it also feels as if one is failing into a void. (The film in fact was inspired by a fall Brakhage took on a patch of black ice.) Then suddenly, at the end, the image flares to white with a hint of color, goes to solid black, and then fades again to almost solid white. This surprise ending, a suitable conclusion to a fall, nonetheless feels very different from everything that had come before it, redefining the film's terms.

Black Ice

Brakhage was a master of filming human subjectivity, but every moment that appears to valorize the affections, the moods, is balanced by a sense that the work itself is in danger of coming apart, that its beauty and unity is fragile, that its making acknowledges its own destruction. And just as his films' self-referentiality can be defended on a strictly factual basis, as an acknowledgment of what they materially are, so can this larger theme: In the world, too, no object is permanent, and these assemblies of vibrating particles will eventually crumble into dust. Even the cathedrals that seem so solid today will not survive forever, and so the brevity of Brakhage’s hand-painted evocation of stained glass windows in Untitled (For Marilyn), spectacular fragments of color that coalesce for a few moments into a miraculous sense of wholeness, ultimately reflects, almost in the manner of a vanitas painting, on the impermanence of all things. At the same time, meaning in Brakhage's films is itself fragile: while at every moment one can envision multiple interpretations, one also, in part because of the constant metamorphosing of his forms, glimpses a void in which the whole possibility of meaning vanishes.

The white at the end of Black Ice has analogues throughout Brakhage's work, and in his film-to-film evolution as well. Sensually beautiful but fragile, containing records of their own incompleteness, always haunted by a contemplation of death, these films are at once true to the complexities of life itself while also expanding its possibilities. Proceeding from an awareness of our tendency to limit ourselves by settling on a single way of thinking, a single way of seeing, a single set of objects desired or possessed, Brakhage's art denies the whole skein of bourgeois complacencies inherent in possessiveness, in the notion that who we are depends on what we own or what personality we project. Brakhage offers this alternative: that each of us can become an inner explorer, continually pushing toward some new frontier of consciousness.

TWO

EYE-TRAINING

This short introduction to Brakhage was written for the online magazine, Senses of Cinema, and published in May 2003.

On March 9, 2003, the airplane that was taking me from Chicago to New York for a short visit encountered unusually violent turbulence, and of a type I’d never felt before: a few very sharp and abrupt jolts made it seem as if the fabric of space were being ruptured. That night, I learned that Stan Brakhage had died in Victoria, British Columbia, a bit over an hour after the turbulence I’d encountered. The time of that turbulence was roughly coincident with Brakhage’s last moments of consciousness.

I have never believed in psychic action at a distance, and have always taken events such as this one as coincidences, but the fact that I took the trouble to check the time of the turbulence against the time of his death shows that even a non-believer such as myself can harbor atavistic superstitions. The operating myth that I insist I don’t believe is that the consciousness of Stan Brakhage had such power in the world that his passing created sudden vacuums in the air – as far away as the other side of the continent.

The facts of Brakhage’s life are readily available: born on January 14, 1933, adopted as a baby, raised mostly in Colorado, an aspiring poet who discovered cinema while still in high school and completed his first film in 1952 shortly after dropping out of college, he made almost 400 films over the course of his half-century career, ranging in length from nine seconds to over four hours. Some are completely abstract (a word he hated); others are apparently abstract but full of suggestions of things seen (anyone who has been to Chartres cathedral will recognize the echoes of its famous windows in Chartres Series [1994]); others use photographed imagery in a way that undercuts the associations one brings to it; others depend on the associations one brings to their photographic imagery for much of their meaning; still others come surprisingly close to observational documentaries, while still remaining light poems. More often, a single film will seem to be most or all of the above.

Brakhage’s great subject was light itself, its infinite varieties seen as manifestations of unbounded and unrestricted energy and its concretization into objects representing the trapping of that energy, and his great desire was to make cinema equal to the other arts by using that which was uniquely cinematic – by organizing light in the time and space of the projected image – in a way that would be worthy, structurally and aesthetically, of the poetry, painting, and music that most inspired him. The subtleties of his work, the intricacy with which he used composition and color and texture and rhythm, resulted in films that virtually demand multiple viewings. The best known and most important of avant-garde filmmakers, he was also in my estimation among the half-dozen greatest filmmakers in the history of the medium – and, as I believe time will establish, one of the very greatest artists of the 20th century in any medium.

Chartres Series

Brakhage’s enthusiasm for cinema extended beyond his own filmmaking practice. A teacher of film history for three decades, first at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (to which he commuted from Colorado) and then at the University of Colorado at Boulder, he showed – and advocated for – a wide variety of films, including some that he didn’t necessarily consider art. (Some of those lectures were collected into three separate books.) All his life he argued for the work of other avant-garde filmmakers, from his early activities in preserving and making available the films of Christopher Maclaine, to his tireless advocacy for the work of the little-known Canadian Jack Chambers, to the way he championed and personally encouraged many younger filmmakers over the decades. Tall and imposing, a commanding presence in person, he could also interject drama, not always with the best of results, into a lecture or an argument even as he tried to exclude it from his films.

His central achievement is often seen as the personalizing of the medium, his transformation of the projected image away from the relatively neutral record of the world to which documentaries aspire to an expression of an individual’s emotions, ideas, dreams, fantasies, visions, eye-music, closed-eye seeing, and nightmares. To achieve this transformation he marshaled – and in some cases pioneered – a daunting panoply of techniques, from out of focus and over and under exposure to rapid editing to painting directly on the film strip to anamorphic distortion to collaging objects directly onto celluloid to heating raw stock before exposure. Hand holding his camera allowed him to transfer his own physiology to film, through a controlled use of jiggle that suggested his pulse and heartbeat.

But personal cinema is in some sense too easy: almost any film student can figure out how to use imagery and editing to express an emotion, and Brakhage always meant to present much more than the affections. More significant is the way that his films elude predictability. There is, of course, none of the arc of anticipation created by conventional narrative, but his films are also less predictable even than those of most of his colleagues. At the moment that a few seconds of a Brakhage film appear to be establishing a pattern, he breaks the pattern, and his purpose in doing so was not simply to be contrary. At the center of his ethos is a desire to create a filmic parallel to what Gertrude Stein, a major influence, called the continuous present. His films don’t present themselves as a mappable terrain each part of which helps one understand the other – and in that sense his work is the antithesis of Peter Kubelka’s, though they admired each other’s achievement –but rather they continually locate, and relocate, the individual viewer in the perceptual instant. While the paragraph about trying to imagine childhood vision that began his first book, Metaphors on Vision, is his most-often quoted statement, less often mentioned is the desire, expressed in that same paragraph, to try to experience everything in life as an adventure of perception. But adventure of perception is what his films aspire to: his avoidance of predictable forms places the viewer at the center of a figuring-out process that will not only be different for each viewer but is never intended to lead to a fixed conclusion.

One small detail of Brakhage’s work that all too often gets left out is that his films are stunningly, even ravishingly beautiful. It’s no easy or static prettiness that he was after, but the kind of beauty that cleans out one’s sensorium, that seems to scour one’s sight all the way from the cornea to the optic nerve, that reorients the very way one sees. Brakhage’s films serve as eye-training, both for seeing other films and as an opening onto more imaginative ways of seeing the world. If I had a friend who wanted me to teach him how to look at films, and unlimited access to an archive of world cinema, I’d begin with a couple of months’ worth of Brakhage.

THREE

SHEER VIRTUOSITY

This essay was written for the Festival Catalogue for 5th Belo Horizonte International TIM Short Film Festival, Brazil, 2003. They mounted a four-program memorial to Brakhage following his death, and at their invitation I spoke on each program.

At some point in the future, when authoritative histories of twentieth century art begin to be written with the wise judgment that only distance from the present time can confer, I believe that Stan Brakhage will loom not only as one of the very greatest of filmmakers but as one of the major figures in all the arts. The sheer virtuosity of his work, the sensual beauty of his films' shapes and colors and textures, his creation of a unique and complex kind of visual music (most of his films are silent because the music comes from the screen), his appeal to the viewer as individual rather than as a member of a crowd, the ecstatic unpredictability of his spaces and rhythms, all assure the monumental importance of his close to 400 films, both individually and as a body of work.

This best known and most influential of all experimental or avant-garde filmmakers took light as his great subject, and his interest in light itself was tied to his interest in recovering that which he acknowledged no adult could ever recover, the pre-linguistic seeing of children (How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'? he famously asked), an interest which transmuted itself into a desire to free objects and light from structures based on language.

Brakhage's films vibrate between a series of opposing poles that are never quite as opposite as they seem at first. Chief among them are the two senses that light and objects have in his films. We see things for their recognizable and namable forms – that is a pregnant woman in Window Water Baby Moving – and also, even in this most documentary of Brakhage films, as a play of light and shape, for example his poetic stress on the way light is refracted through water droplets on the woman's belly. Part of Brakhage's goal is to enrich viewers' seeing of things in the ordinary world, to help each viewer uncover unique and imaginative ways of seeing.

Window Water Baby Moving

Brakhage made many films by painting directly onto the film strip, sometimes producing suggestions of shapes or spaces: The Lion and the Zebra Make God's Raw Jewels and Chartres Series are both stunningly effective evocations of their subjects, even though they contain no pictures. In others, such as the Arabics, Brakhage creates shifting, out-of-focus abstract forms that seem to elude nameability completely. And in the found footage used in Murder Psalm, Brakhage explores the negation of his aesthetic as found in mass culture: light seems imprisoned in objects that reduce active living and thinking to static things – the brain is seen as a shape that's visually rhymed with a ball used by children to torment each other.

A narrative film creates an arc of expectation that sets up conflicts and tensions the viewer expects to have resolved – or at least, lead to some form of conclusion. Brakhage's films are organized according to a precisely opposite principle. There is no overarching or predictable form; his emphasis is on each instant of perception. One way he achieves this emphasis is by organizing his films around unpredictable changes in composition, subject-matter, and rhythm: each small pattern that a film sets up is violated just at the moment when you think you have finally apprehended it. The process of viewing a Brakhage film becomes part of the film's subject; in answer to the passivity encouraged by a mainstream commercial narrative movie, Brakhage requests active participation. Relaxing one's perceptions when the lights dim, as many movie viewers are accustomed to doing, won't work here: one must learn to see faster, more precisely, and more deeply.

Brakhage's work offers an eloquent and deeply affecting alternative to consumer culture in the West. He abjures predigested emotions, predictable formulas, and pretty pictures. His films cannot be reduced to a simple summary or message, and each viewer's experience of them will necessarily be somewhat different. The engaged viewer is removed from the state of mind in which to look at a scene or sight is to desire it, covet it, think you understand it, and wish to own it: instead, Brakhage asks for both much less and much more – he asks that you dance with it.

FOUR

A SHORT BIOGRAPHY

This was written for the Criterion Collection in conjunction with their 2003 DVD release.

Stan Brakhage was born on January 14, 1933, in a home for unwed mothers in Kansas City, Missouri. On February 4, he was adopted by Ludwig and Clara Brakhage in the hope that having a son would help save an already unstable marriage. It did not, and the couple split up when Stan was six. After his parents' divorce, Brakhage and his mother relocated, to Denver, Colorado. A boy soprano from a young age, he sang on radio.

Brakhage attended South High School in Denver, where he and his friends formed a small group of outsiders who called themselves the Gadflies; several, including filmmaker Larry Jordan, composer James Tenney, and actor Robert Benson, would go on to prominence in the arts. Brakhage's first ambition was to become a poet. While in high school he saw Jean Cocteau's Orphée, which helped him realize that film could be an art in the same sense as poetry. After high school, Brakhage attended Dartmouth, but dropped out after two months with what he called a nervous breakdown. He returned to Colorado by way of a visit with his father in Chicago, who agreed to give him the remainder of his college money to buy filmmaking equipment. Brakhage's first film, Interim, was completed in 1952. Within a few years he realized he was not to be a poet, though he continued to be an avid reader of poetry and would later compare dramatic narrative films to prose and his form of filmmaking to poetry.

The Wonder Ring

Brakhage’s early films were dramas of alienation stylistically Influenced by Italian neorealism, often expressing a desire to escape an agonized present. Gradually, his films moved away from storytelling – a key shift occurred with his first silent film, The Wonder Ring (1955) commissioned by artist Joseph Cornell, a visual study of the spaces and movements of an El platform and train that abjured drama. The 40-minute Anticipation of the Night (1958) constituted Brakhage’s first major foray into subjective seeing: much of the imagery, at once lyrically beautiful and terrifyingly disjunct, is represented as the first-person eyesight of the man who we see only as a shadow.

After stays in New York and San Francisco, Brakhage married Jane Collom in 1957. They lived in Princeton, New Jersey for a time while he worked for a commercial film company, something he did out of necessity more than once in those early years. They were frequently poor, and he sold off the original strips of Mothlight (1963) in the mid-1960s to raise funds. Before the late 1960s, there were few screening opportunities for films such as his, and the fees were low. He began to teach film history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1969, commuting every other week from Colorado.

He later found a teaching post at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he stayed from 1981 until 2002. This best known of American avant-garde filmmakers could never make a living from filmmaking.

In 1959, the Brakhage family returned to Colorado; after brief stays elsewhere, they eventually settled in the Rockies near the town of Rollinsville. Their home life, and the growth of their five children, provided the subject matter of many of his films of the 1960s and 1970s, but at the same time he made films that had no obvious roots in family life, from the intensely rhythmic water-study Song 22 (1966) to his first long abstract work, The Text of Light (1974), for which he filmed refraction patterns in a crystal ashtray. An obsessive filmmaker – he used to say that if celluloid became unavailable he’d make flip books by scratching on rocks and lining them up like dominoes – he made almost 400 films in a wide variety of modes over his half-century career.

Brakhage was a lifelong consumer of the other arts. Deeply influenced by the poetry of Gertrude Stein, Robert Duncan, and others, and by a wide range of painters and classical composers, he also was a voracious reader of history