Brakhage '67 - #518

I can't go on.

The time has come for me to bid a fond farewell to the Criterion films of 1967, a most legendary year in my recollection, even though I was only five or six years old at the time and don't have many specific memories to fall back on. The high regard is based on the sheer magnificence of so much of that year's cultural output, the enduring power and influence it's had on my life ever afterwards. Most of that power is based on the music of many great bands, along with the mythology of the Summer of Love and the fruition of the hippie ideal for a brief flickering moment before it all crumbled into the chaos and madness of 1968's assassinations, protests, insurgencies and the heavy-handed crushing of dissent by authorities in both the East and the West. The world was just not ready to handle that level of pure, intensified idealism, and the reactionary forces of Empire did their damnedest to stomp out the voices of resistance. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The cinema of 1968 will be allowed to speak for itself as a distinct chapter in the long-running saga that these Criterion films serve as a commentary upon through the succession of unique perspectives and cultural critiques they express.

As has been my custom since I reached the end of 1959 on this blog, I'm wrapping up my coverage with a survey of whatever it was that Stan Brakhage was up to during the year in question (at least, as far as his work is represented in the Criterion Collection.) Since Brakhage created his films completely outside of the studio system, without any commercial releases to speak of, none of his films have official IMDb release dates, as far as I've ever seen. So I've chosen to just do a catch-all post of however many titles could be traced to that year, and I'm going to continue that habit even though I changed my rules awhile back to write individual posts even for short films. Case in point, my most recent entry for David Lynch's Six Men Getting Sick, a minute-long slice of animation that loops four times before the screen goes black. However inconsequential its brevity may render Lynch's cinematic debut, it's a sprawling epic in comparison to the first Brakhage title on my list for today: Eye Myth, a furious explosion of color rendered with meticulous fussiness and propped up atop a gracefully indulgent display of intellectualized apologetic bullshit that is Brakhage's other great talent: the ability to drape his experimental cinema in a blanket of sincerely delivered verbal fluffery that does provoke imaginative pondering, I'll give him that. Here it is, in its entirety:

And with that you've just witnessed the fruit of a year's labor. I think it's safe to assume that he was attending to other projects as well during this time, but he claims to have spent that long crafting and puzzling over this film in the commentary clip included in the first volume of by Brakhage: an anthology. His intention was to create a "myth" that wasn't based on words at all (either spoken, written or otherwise implied) but was instead purely visual. I don't think he succeeds in meeting that objective, despite the confidence of his delivery and the apparent satisfaction he took in the finished product. The experience of watching Eye Myth is memorable enough, and from what I have seen of his later work, this was an important step for him to develop some techniques that he would use in future short films that didn't take him quite so long to produce. Thus the investment of time could be said to have paid dividends in the long run. But the images simply zip by too quickly, with insufficient material to create a genuine emotional resonance and an inconclusive climax, to deserve the status of a myth. Though the details become more intriguing and apparent when one takes the time to slow down the avalanche and move through the sequence at a deliberate frame-by-frame pace, it's not enough to elevate this piece beyond a novelty item as what must be the highest ever ratio of time in production to screen time. But don't just take my word for it, here's a representative breakdown so you can color in your own conclusions.

Moving on then...

As dismissive as I may seem toward Eye Myth, I'm utterly enthralled and transfixed by the second of Brakhage's trio of films I'm discussing here. 23rd Psalm Branch is a profound and powerful meditation on war and humanity, a perfect example of what makes this anthology of films such an important and distinctive part of the Criterion Collection. One reason that it connects so much more effectively with me than his more abstract shorts is that the film has more time to breathe (the two parts clocking in at just over an hour.) He's also working with images that communicate clearly and without ambiguity, on a visceral level even though they are often deeply sad and disturbing. The subject matter comes from an impressive variety of newsreels that he had at his disposal, mostly from the World War II era, some probably earlier, and put into a new context by their assemblage at a time when the USA's combat operations in Vietnam were rapidly escalating and starting to exert the deeply divisive influence on American (and Western) society that the war eventually became notorious for. Though Brakhage was never as pointed in this film as Jean-Luc Godard and others were in their critique of Lyndon Johnson's foreign policy, he does juxtapose images of prominent historic figures of then-recent decades - Hitler and Mussolini, but also Churchill and Roosevelt, without taking any pains to distinguish heroes from villains, seemingly implicating the whole bloody lot of them as "masters of war." Furthermore, glimpses into the infamous depravities discovered in concentration camps and atomic bomb attacks burn their images into our memories as they flash across the screen in hard brutal succession, intercut with a wildly prodigious demonstration of Brakhage's full repertoire of striking visual effects. The horror of mass killings, bombs exploding and pervasive indiscriminate death intentionally inflicted by imperial forces permeates the film, an indictment made all the more disturbing by the title's allusions to the famously pastoral 23rd Psalm ("The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, he maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he restoreth my soul...", etc.) as well as the pun on "palm branch" (waved at the Messiah during his humble entry into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey) and the further allusion to the olive branch, a famous harbinger of peace and reconciliation. Some small measure of domestic tranquility does enter the picture at various points of 23rd Psalm Branch, as Brakhage includes footage of his children playing contentedly (and nakedly, just to forewarn you) outdoors as if to remind us that the entire world hasn't yet descended into a spiral of destruction (and also to provoke questions as to why so many of us in the more comfortable parts of the planet enjoy privileges of security that others lose through no fault of their own.) This is a densely packed work of art, full of literary allusions only appreciated by Brakhage and his closest acolytes, with a few knowing cameos by the auteur himself to make the project even more personal. If you really want to dig into it, this article goes into encyclopedic, exegetical detail on the film. As was almost always the case, he released this film without a soundtrack, and I consider a basic matter of respect to watch his films in silence at least a few times through if you really want to get in on his wavelength. But having said that, I think these films are wonderfully enhanced by well-chosen musical accompaniment, so I'll go ahead and get blasphemous here (as far as some of the Brakhage purists are concerned) and recommend a viewing experience like the one I had the other night, when I paired 23rd Psalm Branch with the Grateful Dead's Anthem of the Sun, their second full-length album recorded in the fall of 1967 and winter of 1968, a nice contemporaneous collage of psychedelic sounds that flows exceptionally well with Brakhage's adventures in editing. (I also suggest using the expanded CD with bonus tracks rather than the original LP so that you don't run out of music before the movie ends.) Let the film play for about 45-50 seconds or so, then start the music, and you'll encounter some jolting lyrical, sonic and visual parallels that I'll leave you to discover for yourself. Of course, PLAY LOUD. Be prepared for some heaviness though. Depending on how deeply you get into the groove, it could become an intense emotional experience.

As for Scenes from Under Childhood, Section One, I'm OK with it but still not totally convinced. His intention is to convey a sense of the earliest stages of a child's life, beginning in utero with a simulation of sensing the world from a fetal perspective. That means we start the film with a two minute sequence of gently undulating reds fading into black over and over again, followed by some sharper flashes of light (the birth process?) before blurry shapes begin to emerge (the infant's first visual perception, significantly of other children.) From that point until pretty much the rest of the film, roughly another 20 minutes or so, we mostly just see children and faces meandering about, and if we're supposed to be seeing life through a child's eyes, that kid is probably going to need to start wearing glasses at a young age since the image never comes into sharp focus. And I'm not at all convinced that, except in the more acute cases of ADHD, that a child's perception is anywhere close to as frenetic and distracted as Brakhage's editing makes it out to be throughout much of the film. It's been quite a few years since my own kids were little, but I recall their ability to look deeply and with great stillness at things that intrigued them. Maybe that's why some of my favorite bits here are the images of slats in the wood floor of whatever room he was filming in. I myself remember noticing such details in the environments around me.

On the plus side, there's a lot of subtle and creative light play going on and I have to acknowledge Brakhage's highly attuned sensitivity and concern for the awareness of children and the abundance of hazards that impact our lives when we're less than three feet tall. Still, I think this impression could have been made more effectively in about half the time that Brakhage requires of us to get through this one. Weird. I don't mind sitting through an hour of death imagery and atrocity exhibition with 23rd Psalm Branch, but 22 minutes of Scenes from Under Childhood, Section 1 gets me restless to move on to something more stimulating and engaging. The fault is probably with me, or I'm just at a different stage of life. I'll own it, and I'm glad that I own by Brakhage: An Anthology - Volumes One and Two.

Next: Wild 90