Brakhage

Love him, hate him, or ignore him, Stan Brakhage has been as influential as any filmmaker of the last half-century. Why this is so is evident from Jim Shedden's exceptionally rich documentary. Using clips from Brakhage films and films about Brakhage, Shedden locates his subject in the mainstream of the postwar American avant-garde, among Pollock, Cage, Ginsberg, Charles Olson, and Ornette Coleman. He traces Brakhage's evolution from the early "psychodrama" period, with its emphasis on the figure of the solitary male hero, to the breakthroughs of the late '50s and early '60s, in which seeing becomes as much the subject of a film as, for example, the birth of the filmmaker's child (Window Water Baby Moving, 1958).

Brakhage's films aren't well served by the documentary's inevitable clips format because it takes time to get attuned to their rhythmic subtlety. One does indeed, as filmmaker Phil Solomon points out in Shedden's film, hear the cuts in Brakhage's usually silent films -- but first the ear must learn how to listen for them. Brakhage's fabulously beautiful painting-on-film works from the '80s and '90s come across better in this context than the epic Dog Star Man (1961-'64) or the autopsy classic The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (1971).

The Brakhage of today seems a person of much humor, insight, and idealism -- qualities evident in his funny account of watching the reactions of someone he takes to be an engineering student stumbling into a screening of The Text of Light (1974) on a London (Ontario) campus. Such moments give a welcome rounding-out to Shedden's lucid portrait of a romantic visionary.

-- Chris Fujiwara