JERRY WHITE

B R AK HAG ES TAR KOVS KY AN D TAR KOVS KYS B R AK HAG E: Collectivity, Subjectivity, and the Dream of Cinema

Rsum: Malgr leurs diffrences videntes, les films de Stan Brakhage et Andrei Tarkovsky prsentent dimportantes similitudes tant formelles que thmatiques. Notre article tire son argument de lhommage que Brakhage rendait Tarkovsky au Festival du film de Telluride en 1983, dans lequel il affirmait que le grand artiste de cinma doit raconter les histoires de sa tribu, tout en demeurant personnel et en travaillant un matriau onirique. Notre hypothse, selon laquelle ces cinastes ont plus en commun que les critiques ne lont gnralement reconnu, sinspire aussi de la suggestion de J. Hoberman que Brakhage et Tarkovsky sont tous deux des surralistes qui rinventent le langage cinmatographique, des shamans nationaux tendances religieuses et solipsistes.

I personally think that the three greatest tasks for film in the 20th century are 1) To make the epic, that is, to tell the tales of the tribes of the world. 2) To keep it personal, because only in the eccentricities of our personal lives do we have any chance at the truth. 3) To do the dream work, that is to illuminate the borders of the unconscious. Stan Brakhage1

tan Brakhages meeting with Andrei Tarkovsky at the 1983 Telluride Film Festival is still an important part of world-cinema lore, an example of the meeting of two great minds that ended up as something of a train wreck. The Brakhage quote that serves as this essays epigraph is well-known to many as the core of Brakhages speech during the Tarkovsky tribute. Organisers Bill and Stella Pence had asked Brakhage to formally present the festivals Silver Medallion to Tarkovsky. They had also arranged for the Russian visitor to see some of Brakhages films. For this private screening, they reserved a small room in Tellurides Sheridan Hotel, along with a portable 16mm projector. The Sheridan had quite excellent cinematic karma; it was from that little hotels window that Abel Gance had first watched the resorted version of Napoleon, which was projected outdoors

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at Telluride in 1979. Unfortunately, it also had floral wallpaper, and this is what Brakhages films ended up being projected against. Unsurprisingly, then, this encounter, which also included Jane Brakhage, Larissa Tarkovsky, Tarkovskys assistant Olga, the Polish animator Zbigniew Rybczynski, and Kryzstof Zanussi, went very badly indeed. J. Hoberman, whose writing on Brakhage has inspired this essay, offers a pithy summary: Tarkovsky screams throughout in a non-stop rage, claiming that the films are hurting his eyes; the wives giggle and hold hands; Zanussi vainly tries to translate for everybody.2 Except for Hoberman, it is very difficult to find discussions of the Tarkovsky-Brakhage connection that get much beyond vaguely recalled memories of this semi-catastrophic meeting. That is a real shame, because whatever Bill and Stella Pence may have lacked in room-selection skills, they more than made up for in their novel sense of world cinema. Brakhage was the right person to present the Tarkovsky tribute; these two are kindred spirits, at least via their films. Yes, Tarkovsky made films with characters and narratives and dialogue, while Brakhage (with only a few exceptions) made completely silent films that dispense entirely with the basic conventions of narrative film language (and often with photographic representation); they are indeed radically different in that way. But they are not different like apples and oranges. Instead, both share formal and thematic preoccupations that represent an attempt to bridge the gap between romantic mythopoeia and high Modernism. Brakhages three-part formulation of Tarkovskys work is one way into the connection, for Brakhage is describing his own oeuvre as well. Another, just as fruitful connection, is J. Hobermans description of Tarkovskys place in world cinema, one of the few exceptions to the difficulty of finding detailed Brakhage-Tarkovsky comparisons. Introducing the oeuvre of Andrei Tarkovsky for American Film upon the release of Nostalgia (Italy/France/USSR, 1983), Hoberman wrote, Like Brakhage and Hans-Jrgen Syberberg, he seems as conservative as he is avant-garde. Indeed, these three strongly individualistic filmmakers form an unholy postwar troika. All are seers who see their artand all of artas a quasi-religious calling; all three tend towards the solipsistic, invoking their parents, mates and offspring as talismanic elements in their films. All three are natural surrealists, seemingly innocent of official surrealisms radical social program. All three privilege childhood innocence...and all three are militantly provincial. Tarkovsky is as hopelessly Russian as Syberberg is terminally German as Brakhage is totally American.3 A revised version of this formulation published in the Village Voice also includes the suggestion that all three see themselves as essentially unique and have reinvented film language to suit their visions.4 This formulation of Hobermans

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lines up quite well with Brakhages Telluride speech. Doing the dream work necessitates re-inventing film language, perhaps along surrealist lines; keeping it personal is only a small step away from the solipsistic. A few choice Brakhage films (Wedlock House: An Intercourse [(USA, 1959], Dog Star Man [USA, 1961-64], 23 rd Psalm Branch [USA 1966/78], Creation [USA, 1979], Untitled: For Marilyn [USA, 1992]) seen alongside some of Tarkovskys narrative and lessnarrative films alike (Solaris [USSR, 1972], Stalker [USSR/Germany, 1979], The Mirror [USSR, 1975], and Nostalgia), show these points of connection very clearly indeed. Any consideration of these sorts of connection should, however, be qualified by some consideration of the considerable cultural and not inconsiderable historical gap between these two filmmakers. The analysis that follows largely considers, via formal and thematic commonalities, Brakhage and Tarkovsky as exemplars of international cinematic Modernism. But Brakhage is just as legitimately considered both as an heir of American Romanticism or as an important figure (if not the crucial figure) in the institutionally distinctive American avantgarde cinema. Tarkovskys institutional position is similarly distinctive; being an avant-garde-minded artist working in the post-1960s Soviet film culture created a very distinctive set of creative tensions, as did his experience in exile towards the end of his life. Furthermore, while elements of Romanticism are certainly present in Tarkovskys work, they do not provide as coherent a cultural placing as they do for Brakhage. Looking at these two filmmakers from the perspective of an international Modernism, though, does pay dividends that trump this cultural and historical disconnection. The way in which Brakhage and Tarkovsky wrestle with similar themes and formal patterns of Modernismthe tensions between the social and the interior, between convention and innovation, between realism and artificevia very different cinematic strategies, does give a very clear sense of how filmmakers working in different contexts often shared the same obsessions. Brakhage and Tarkovsky had a very similar set of conflicts driving their work; differences in narrative approaches or historical circumstances should not overly obscure this commonality.
DOING THE DREAM WORK

Brakhage and Tarkovsky are most connected via their surrealist sensibilities, their interest in the unconscious. Sometimes this is engaged via visuals, sometimes via structure. We can see this most clearly in their use of landscape imagery in Dog Star Man and Nostalgia; a dream-engaged sensibility is also visible in more abstract Brakhage films such as Untitled: For Marilyn. Brakhage and Tarkovsky are re-inventing film language in very different ways, but they share a need to speak the unspeakable and use images that, in fine surrealist style, look familiar enough to be unnerving when they are made strange. This tendency to read surrealist or avant-garde film grammar as dream-like

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is well established in the criticism and theory of American avant-garde cinema, as can be seen in the work on the movement by Fred Camper, Bruce Elder or P. Adams Sitney.5 But just as valuable for Brakhages work, and even a bit closer to the spirit of Tarkovskys work, is Parker Tylers 1960 essay Dream Structure: The Basis of Experimental Film. There, Tyler writes, The ritual instinct in man is inseparable from the rhythmic instinct; the human body naturally develops a choreography of gestures expressing its most intense, and especially its recurrent, emotions.6 The otherwise quite different aesthetics of Brakhage and Tarkovsky are marked by a decreased importance being placed on clear explanation, and an increased importance being placed on recurrent emotion, a set of priorities that leads to an aesthetic operation similar to gesture. This speaks to the slippery signifier/signified relationship that is a crucial part of both filmmakers work. Although his work is ostensibly narrative, Tarkovskys films frequently contain breaks with narrative that are only barely explained, and which approach the abstract. One of the most famous examples comes at the end of Nostalgia, when Gorchakov walks back and forth with a small candle, trying to shield it from the wind. This sequence is not aggressively anti-illusionist. Indeed, it would be easy to read it in terms of a Modernist tendency to see aesthetic innovation in already existing formal pattern, a tendency recognized by Douwe Fokkema and Elrud Ibsch in their definition of Modernism: the syntactic code of Modernism is no more than a one-sided emphasis on particular syntagmatic optionsa particular selection from among the many syntagmatic possibilities, which in general are provided by the linguistic system and only rarely are newly invented.7 That one-sided emphasis in the case of the scene in Nostalgia has mostly to do with duration and repetition. But even though the break with narrative illusionism is relatively moderate, the effect is considerable. Indeed, it constitutes a kind of interior speech, a mode of cinematic address quite close to what Tyler has in mind as dream choreography. Trying to give a semiotic explanation of what he calls the problem of inner speech, Paul Willemen writes that during such a moment, [t]he materiality of the signifier does not become irrelevant, but merely becomes a second order factor affecting the movement of signification.8 The materiality of signification (which would lead the viewer to consider what this has to do with Gorchakov as a character, or his place in the narrative of Nostalgia) is, in this sequence, a second-order factor that does not entirely lose its relevance. Tarkovsky is making direct reference to an illusionist, relatively clearly evoked narrative, but that is not the only signifying function, or even the most important one. Less than description or clarification, this sequence is about movement. It nudges a viewer towards the films unresolved considerations: the meditative aspects of exile or the connection of spiritual consideration, memory and landscape. Many of Brakhages films also nudge a viewer towards unresolved considerations; Dog Star Man makes a good example (colour plates 19, 20, 21). That

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films recurring images of Brakhage climbing through snow (in some, the camera is tilted, giving the illusion of upward progress) are, on the surface, completely different from what we see chez Tarkovsky; Brakhage works via a frenzied montage strategy (even though Dog Star Mans takes, at least of Brakhage in the snow, are relatively long by Brakhage standards), while many of Tarkovskys key sequences, especially in Nostalgia, are possessed of a long-take aesthetic. But Nostalgias candle sequence serves an ostensible narrative function; for Gorchakov this is a kind of summary of the spiritual difficulties that hes been having throughout the film, a meditative, semi-abstract image that sums up key parts of the films storyline. Brakhage, in an interview quoted in P. Adams Sitneys Visionary Film, says that he saw Part 1 of Dog Star Man, where we see the climbing man for the first time (he is absent from the Prelude, which Brakhage argues is more closely linked to the logic of dream), as a Noh drama, the exploration in minute detail of a single action and all its ramifications,9 which sounds quite close to what is going on at the end of Nostalgia and to what Tyler describes as choreography of gesture. Another crucial connection, of course, is that this all happens via a second order of signification (as opposed to a literal or physical sense of signification); this sort of signification is very close to Willemens conception of interior cinematic speech. This kind of choreographed interiority is also on display in the way Brakhage and Tarkovsky make use of interior spaces; their use of church imagery is especially interesting. The final sequence of Nostalgia is a long take comprised of a zoom out revealing a rural landscape that is contained (via superimposition) within the walls of the cathedral whose architecture has framed the film. This is clearly meant to echo the films opening sequences, which take place inside that cathedral and, via highly composed deep-focus photography and subtle camera movements, give a sense of the spiritual problems faced by the protagonists.10 But by the end of the film, the existential crises remain unresolved, and Tarkovsky needs to up his representational ante. He moves from highly expressive but still mimetic photography to a strategy that is far more artificial, expressing a shaken faith in the power of the representation to meaningfully explain the interior life of the characters. We move, in short, from heightened realism to a dream state, from Bazinian choreography for the camera to a more fully choreographed image meant to express recurring emotion. Brakhages 1992 film Untitled: For Marilyn works in a very similar way. Broken into four parts, the film starts out with shots of windows that are heavily painted over. Some of these look like apartment windows (and so recall Brakhages 1987 film Marilyns Window). Some of them, however, look like church windows; they are very high up on the wall, and sometimes one fairly tall window is directly below another tall window. This impression of church windows is re-enforced by Brakhages scratching on the film the words I am here where is She and then later She The Mother Church (one word is

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scratched at a time). Fred Campers liner notes to the Criterion Collections By Brakhage DVD make mention of how long, hand-painted sections cover over the window, both referencing stained glass and obliterating the idea of subjective eyesight as expressed through selective framinga selectivity that windows so often represent in Brakhage.11 This sequence itself seems like the kind of collapse of church architecture and subjective imagery that closes Nostalgia. But in fact, the film is a gradual progression towards complete abstraction, complete abandonment of a photographic idea. The first three sections had gradually declining (and sometimes barely perceptible) flashes of photography that were more and more overwhelmed by painting-on-film. But the fourth section marks the films complete immersion in the hand-painted aesthetic. The beginning is mostly black with flashes of colour; Brakhage scratches the words The Children and then Anton, followed by Vaughn, (the names of Brakhages youngest sons) followed by more black mixed with colour. But then Brakhage scratches the words Praise Be and then to God (two words at a time). What follows is a painted-on-film aesthetic of a very different sort. There is much more colour, the images are far denser, and there is not even a hint of photography. Camper, in his liner notes, calls this one of the most spectacular sequences in any Brakhage film. It does not last for long, and is, in essence, a coda, much like the last sequence of Nostalgia. With both of these codas, we see filmmakers facing crises of faith not only in God or spiritual belief, but in the ability of mimetic art to evoke religious feeling. The endings of both Nostalgia and of Untitled: For Marilyn see the photographic/realist impulse fully overwhelmed; an abstract impulse (semi-abstraction Tarkovskys case, fully abstract in Brakhages case) takes over, as a religious ritual is rejoined with its rhythmic elements.
TALES OF THE TRIBE

Brakhages tales of the tribe is, I think, a much better way than the epic for understanding Tarkovsky, and for understanding his own films as well. For while I basically agree with Hoberman that Brakhage is totally American and Tarkovsky is hopelessly Russian, I question the degree to which these filmmakers are working in a truly epic mode. They are, however, both keenly interested in, if not obsessed with, landscape, and that is one way in which they both tell the tales of the tribe. But they are also interested in the cultures that helped create them, even if that interest is sometimes submerged. Brakhage and Tarkovsky are engaged with aspects of their cultures that are difficult to enunciate and sometimes painful; they stand very much in opposition to the aloof stereotype of the avant-garde artist. Brakhage took the expression tales of the tribe from Ezra Pound, who borrowed it from Rudyard Kipling. In The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic, Michael Andre Bernstein considers the implications of treating poetic epics as tales of the tribe and finds that among the crucial features

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of epics is a narrative of its audiences own cultural, historical, or mythic heritage, providing models of exemplary conduct (both good and bad).12). This is, of course, not so far from Pound himself, who wrote in the essay Date Line that [a]n epic is a poem including history, which sounds very abstract and Romanticism-influenced, but which is followed by the assertion, I dont see how anyone save a sap-head can now think he knows any history until he understands economics.13 All of this is quite a bit more detailed and materialist than anything we find in either Brakhage or Tarkovsky, and suggests that epic is not the most appropriate label to apply to their cinematic tales of the tribe. Bernstein also usefully contrasts Mallarms mots de la tribu and Kiplings tale of the tribe. The difference between these two terms lies in the antithetic notions of language implied by each phrase. Although Kipling speaks of the magical power of words, their magic resides precisely in the power to crystallize history, to make actual events live again in the minds of future readers. Language is not an absolute, transcendent force, but rather the most enduring and powerful means of representing a specific occurrence in the world, an occurrence which, by itself, already contains a significant meaning.14 Both Brakhage and Tarkovsky are closer to the mots than the tales; for both of them, languagethat is their cinematic languageis indeed a transcendent force. Bernstein writes that Mallarm thought the Great Work would absorb the entire, anarchic raw material of human life into its own depth, transforming it into a sacred text, self-sufficient and autonomous.15 This is very close to the way in which Tarkovsky and Brakhage absorb the daily life of their communities; their practices are devoted to making sense of the raw material of human life, and, as Hoberman wrote, transforming it via a quasi-religious calling. Brakhages connection to Charles Olson, Bernsteins other subject of inquiry, is well known,16 although there are surprisingly fruitful connections to be made between Olson and Tarkovsky as well. Olsons best-known essay, Projective Verse, is the most logical way into these filmmakers, especially when it comes to landscape and culture. In that essay Olson writes, [A] poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations) by way of the poem itself to, all the way over, the reader. His shapes will make their own way. It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artists act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man.17 This larger field of objects includes actual fields (landscape) and more metaphorical fields (culture). A sense of locality is crucial for understanding Olson, whose unfinished opus The Maximus Poems is thoroughly rooted in Gloucester, Massachusetts (Olson is just as totally American as Brakhage). Throughout that work, he, like Brakhage and Tarkovsky, is always engaged in a

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Solaris(1972). Courtesy of the Criterion Collection.

kind of back and forth between the artist and the larger field of objects, always trying to evoke that which is larger than the poet himself. The films that seem most closely linked in terms of their use of landscape and their engagement with the tales of the tribe, are Brakhages Creation and Tarkovskys Stalker and Solaris. Although these films are telling very different sorts of tales, both are marked by a pulling-back, a desire to explain basic aspects of existence via images of a distinctively local environment (this impulse would, of course, be familiar to any romantic poet). Creation was shot while Brakhage was with Jane Brakhage on board an icebreaker moving through an Alaskan bay, and is comprised of a highly complex montage of floating ice chunks and some images of Jane (colour plates 22, 23, 24). Sitney writes that [t]he organization of material in Creation unmistakably follows the basic Biblical scenario, although even before the division of the waters, Brakhage introduces images of vegetation, as masses of fog rise from pine covered mountains.18 Fog moving across mountains is a familiar trope from Dog Star Man (with time-lapse imagery of fog moving across the mountains of Colorado), and here it is used in a similar way, offering this distinctively North American landscape as a key to basic matters of existence. But unlike Dog Star Man, Creation does not phrase these problems in explicitly mythical terms. Whereas the man climbing the mountain in Dog Star Man is an almost iconic and basically abstract figure, the presence of Brakhage (behind the camera) and Jane Brakhage (who appears in front of it fleetingly), serves a more narrativised purpose.

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The Mirror (1975). Courtesy of Kino International Corporation.

Sitney writes of Creation, Brakhage pretends to be so utterly alone in the Alaskan bay that his persona imperceptibly emerges from an embodiment of the divine wind itself.... Brakhage was at great pains to eliminate almost all traces of other people or signs of civilization in filming the landscape.19 Much the same is true of the landscape of Stalker, made the same year as Creation; landscape in this film is also photographed in such a way as to either highly qualify or eliminate any traces of civilisation, or of human connection. What recognisable civilisation we do see in this film is shown mostly to be hallucination; what survives is the post-apocalyptic Zone. The landscapes of Solaris, although more Edenic (both the early pre-launch scenes at the dacha and of the planet Solaris itself), are just as bracketed, just as anxiety-inspiring. For, although Tarkovsky uses images of roiling seas to represent a pre-lapsarian life-force, peaceful images, as in Stalker, are always qualified by the narrative awareness of death and hallucination. We see the opposite end of the cosmic timeline in Stalker and Solaris; Creation is using a submerged narrative about a trip though Alaska to evoke the beginning, whereas Stalker is using a submerged narrative about a trip through a dark labyrinth to evoke the end. In neither film, though, is the landscape visualised as a kind of terra nullius. Instead, both films see space as a problem, a puzzle that cannot be solved, a powerful force that cannot really be understood. For Brakhage this semi-spiritual, semi-narrativised use of landscape is part of his involvement with an American re-interpretation of Romanticism that is very much a reaction against industrialisation; for Tarkovsky this painful evocation of territory is clearly engaged with the deprivations of late-Soviet life. There is a

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Wedlock House: An Intercourse (1959). Courtesy of The Estate of Stan Brakhage and Fred Camper (www.fredcamper.com).

sense in both films of space as menace. This was the title of a five-part essay about Canadian film and painting that Brakhage wrote as part of his column in the Toronto music magazine Musicworks. Considering Group of Seven influence Tom Thomson, he writes, I sense that Thomson took Nature as his only hope apropos the no-thing that Space is, in context of any such largesse as is not walled in by City: for the town had failed him in his loneliness; but he it was who would brick over the representation of sky with slabs of paint, or make a paisley weave of them as if to net the sky, and/or even represent cloud billows to approximation of fist, their thrusting arms making absolute X over the entirety of heavenly scene....20

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This ambiguous sense of non-urban landscape is, for Brakhage, a defining characteristic of Canadian aesthetics; it also defines Creation, Stalker and Solaris. Jonathan Rosenbaum writes about Solaris camera movements across ocean and underwater seascapes in a way that recalls Sitneys analysis of the montage of Creation: All of these camera movements mystically imply a continuous progress towards revelation that never actually arrives at onea kind of spiritual tease. As in Stalkerprobably Tarkovskys greatest film, another work adapted from a science-fiction novel that uses the genres comeon, the notion and promise of infinity, only to frustrate this expectation with an insistence on mans finitude and the poverty of human imagination the external journey of the plot, which we see, proves to be secondary to the inner journey of the characters, which we dont see.21 The landscape of Stalker and Solaris is not Edenic; its fallen-ness is expressed not only by the post-apocalyptic imagery of Stalker but also by the kinds of interior crises that citizens of a late-industrial, collectivist-obsessed society like the late Soviet Union would have recognised. The floating icebergs of Creation are not perfect embodiments of the Genesis narrative; a Romanticism-inspired retreat to nature can never entirely obscure sexual politics, and the reconsideration of sexual politics was, of course, central to the American counterculture of which Brakhage was a part. Writing in Musicworks about Canadian experimentalist Ellie Epp, Brakhage marvelled at the heart of the filmmaker causing huge barren landscapes to subtly tremble.22 He, like Tarkovsky, saw the trembling of the landscape as an important means of evoking existential problems via familiar, rooted imagery. I question the degree to which this makes either Brakhage or Tarkovsky militantly provincial, as Hoberman says (although he is clearly on to something there as regards Syberberg). But their use of local landscapes (country dachas, bombed-out industrial sites, broken arctic ice) to evoke both existential longing and more localised tales of the tribe (alienation under late communism, the waning of a Romanticism-influenced counterculture) does make them provincials of a most reticent sort. They understand what their countries look like, and what their countries feel like, which they convey through drawing upon very specific elements of Soviet or American life that best cohere with their own aesthetic projects. Selective though their views of their communities inevitably are, the films of both Brakhage and Tarkovsky do give viewers a sense of what was going on in parts of the United States or of the Soviet Union. Their cultural view is just as wide, and just as important to take note of, as the cultural or historical elements that can be found in contemporary products from Hollywood or Mosfilm.

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KEEPING IT PERSONAL

The middle part of Brakhages triad, the imperative to speak in personal terms, is the part of his own work that is the most clearly visible and often discussed, and perhaps the hardest to see chez Tarkovsky. But rather than look for biographical traces in Tarkovskys films, I think it is better to discuss how he, like Brakhage, is drawing upon images that evoke what Brakhage called the eccentricities of our personal lives. These eccentricities are very clearly visible in The Mirror, perhaps the most explicitly political (and at least the most historically minded) of Tarkovskys films but also one of the most intimate in focus. Brakhage, particularly the Brakhage of Wedlock House: An Intercourse or 23rd Psalm Branch, would find much familiar there. Indeed, the early moments of Wedlock House: An Intercourse bear remarkable similarities to the opening sections of The Mirror. Early in the Tarkovsky film, we see the Mother character, Natalya, wash her hair. The sequence opens with a close-up of her husbands bare back, which is shiny against the black background; the camera moves slightly, as she slowly moves her hair out of the water, and then the camera moves back slowly to frame her in a long shot as she runs her hands through her hair. This all looks very similar indeed to what we see about a minute into Wedlock House: An Intercourse. With the iris pulsing in and out of complete black, we can see Jane Brakhage stand very close to the lens, then back up, then spin around (in a way that looks very much like the motions of Natalia in The Mirror), then go towards a window; although there is some superimposition in addition to the breathing of the iris, this is a relatively long take. What follows these two sequences is very different: in the Brakhage film we see Stan and Jane together near a window, followed by shots of the window itself, followed by medium long shots of Jane walking back and forth; in the Tarkovsky film, we see the house crumble with water coming down from the ceiling, followed by a close-up of Natalia again running her hands through her wet hair, all in slow motion. In both films, though, images of everyday life and domestic architecture are transformed into something mysterious and resonant, not via any mythopoetic fireworks involving birth/sex/death (although that holy trinity is present in The Mirror, and, arguably, in Wedlock House) but by cinematic manipulation which brings the documentary into the realm of the lyrical. This kind of transformation is also present in The Mirrors more explicitly historical sequences. The first of the films several historical montages merges documentary images of the Spanish Civil War with footage from a Soviet-kitsch ballooning event. These images are bookended by scenes in a middle-class apartment; before the montage there is a party where trips to Spain are awkwardly discussed, and after them there is a long take of Ignat, as an adolescent, paging through a book of Leonard da Vinci prints. This kind of highly complex personal-historical dialectic is very similar to the strategy of Brakhages 23rd Psalm Branch. Although this is ostensibly one of Brakhages more politically engaged

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films, it is also one that evokes the kind of interior struggles that define his work. David James writes that the films cross-cutting of violent World War II imagery with images of domestic life makes it clear that the war that is produced is a function not of a specific imperialist undertaking nor even of Western culture, as a whole, but of nature as such, and its traumas are those of private consciousness and memory.23 This re-personalisation, or domesticisation, of history is, in essence, the inverse of what goes on via the tales of the tribe in films like Solaris or Creation. Whereas those films sought to articulate an essentially collective vision via tales that were couched in detailed terms, The Mirror and 23rd Psalm Branch seek to recover the eccentricities of history. They ask the viewer to see montages of the Spanish Civil War and Soviet parades, or of World War II, via images of kitchens and living rooms, of mates or children simply walking away or towards strategically placed cameras.
CONCLUSION

Seeing Brakhage and Tarkovsky together is, in some ways, the sort of exercise that comparative literature scholars love to indulge in and which drives historically rigorous scholars crazy: choose two artists separated by culture, language, geography, history, and formal strategy and put them side by side (for my next trick, an essay called From the walls of Uruk to the walled city of Qubec: Jacques Ferron as Gilgameshian Novelist). But seeing Brakhage and Tarkovsky together is also an opportunity to examine a strain of world cinema that is too often spoken of only in rigidly isolationist terms. Brakhage and Tarkovsky were obsessed, throughout their careers, with irresolvable binaries like intimate/collective, transcendent/detailed, or narrative/elliptical. They were both, to paraphrase J. Hoberman, deeply conservative avant-gardists, haunted by tradition and fundamental existential problems at the same time that they felt impossibly constrained by film language as they found it. These kinds of discussions are commonplace both in criticism of the New American Cinema and of Tarkovskys oeuvre; the almost total lack of comparative work across cultural, linguistic or formal boundaries seems puzzling. I do not think that Brakhage, whose cinematic appetites were famously voracious, would approve of this isolationism. In a 1992 interview, Brakhage said that Tarkovsky was one of the meanest men Ive ever met, and he certainly had no illusions that the Russian had felt any connection with his work. But he also remarked, Maybe if we had met in eternity, which I hope someday we will, wed do better.24 I have tried to show, through this incomplete essay, that they can still do better in this world too.
NOTES 1. Quoted in P. Adams Sitney, Tales of the Tribes, Chicago Review 47:4 (Winter 2001): 97. Sitney was quoting Rolling Stock #6 (1983), where Brakhages account of his meeting with Tarkovsky at the Telluride Film Festivals 1983 tribute was originally published.

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Rolling Stock was a Boulder-based literary magazine published by Ed and Jennifer Dorn; it published its last issue in 1991. On 11 October 2004, the Rolling Stock article could also be found at http://www.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/Brakhage_ and_Tarkovsky.html 2. 3. 4. 5. J. Hoberman, Vulgar Modernism: Writings on Movies and Other Media (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 97. J. Hoberman, Between Two Worlds, American Film 8 (November 1983): 75. Hoberman, Vulgar Modernism, 96. See especially P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Elder invokes Freud in his essay for New Yorks Museum of Modern Arts 1995 Brakhage retrospective; see the pamphlet Stan Brakhage: A Retrospective, 1977-1995 (New York: MoMA, 1995), n.p. Camper also mentions this connection, noting that Brakhage is a longtime reader of Freud (p.84), and sees Freuds writing on dualism as particularly important. See Fred Camper, Brakhages Contradictions, Chicago Review 47.4 (2001): 69-96. Parker Tyler, Dream Structure: The Basis of Experimental Film, in The Three Faces of the Film: The Art, The Dream, The Cult (South Brunswick, NJ: A.S. Barnes, 1960; Second Edition, 1967), 64. Douwe Fokkema and Elrud Ibsch. Modernist Conjectures: A Mainstream in European Literature, 1910-1940 (New York: St. Martins Press, 1988), 37. Paul Willemen, Cinematic Discourse: The Problem of Inner Speech, in Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 36. Quoted in Sitney, Visionary Film, 190. James MacGillivray reads the use of religious imagery in terms of Tarkovskys indictment both of feminism and of the West as a whole (p.97) via a close engagement with the architecture of San Pietro, the church where he filmed the opening images of Nostalgia. See James MacGillivray, Andrei Tarkovskys Madonna del parto, Canadian Journal of Film Studies/Revue canadienne dtudes cinmatographiques 11.2 (2002): 82-99. Fred Camper, film notes for the By Brakhage DVD (New York: Criterion Collection, 2003), n.p. Michael Andr Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 14. I am grateful to William Wees for directing me to this work. Ezra Pound, Date Line, in T.S. Eliot, ed., Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1968), 86. Bernstein, 9. Ibid., 5. See especially Bruce Elder, The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Charles Olson (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1998), 348-422, and David James, The Filmmaker as Romantic Poet: Brakhage and Olson, Film Quarterly 35.3 (1982): 35-43. See also Brakhages letters to Olson, reprinted in Chicago Review 47.4 (Winter 2001): 25-28. Charles Olson, Projective Verse, in Robert Creeley, ed, Charles Olson: Selected Writings (New York: New Directions, 1966), 25. Sitney, Tales of the Tribes, 101. Ibid., 102. Stan Brakhage, Space as Menace in Canadian Aesthetics: Film and Painting. Part One of an Extended Essay, Musicworks 68 (Summer 1997): 29. The five-part essay ran in Musicworks numbers 68-72 (1997-98). Jonathan Rosenbaum, Inner Space, Film Comment 26.4 (July-August 1990): 60. Stan Brakhage, Space as Menace in Canadian Aesthetics: Film and Painting. Part Three

6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

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of an Extended Essay, Musicworks 70 (Spring 1998): 45. 23. 24. David James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 54. Interview with the author, 3 February 1992, Eugene, Oregon. This interview was published as Screen Test: An Interview with Stan Brakhage, Emergency Horse (Spring 1992): 20-22. Emergency Horse was a Eugene-based literary magazine whose circulation, longevity and influence made Rolling Stock look like the Times Literary Supplement.

JERRY WHITE is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Alberta, President of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies, and a member of the education staff of the Telluride Film Festival. He is co-editor (with William Beard) of North of Everything: English Canadian Cinema Since 1980 and editor of 24 Frames: Canada

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