As I've discovered over my last few attempts at doing so, writing a worthwhile essay on any Stan Brakhage film presents its own unique set of challenges. His narratives (if they exist at all) are elusive, the pictorial sequences he assembles are often indecipherable as they fly by faster than most minds are capable of indexing, he rarely utilizes sound and he stubbornly refuses to work with the cinematic vocabulary that most movie watchers have taken for granted since they were old enough to make sense of visual images on the screen. Despite those hurdles, there's a reward to be found (hard earned though it may be) in making the effort to forge that mental connection that allows us to close in on the unique vision that he seemed so intent on sharing with us as he crafted several hundred decidedly non-commercial films over the course of his adult lifetime. So what is Brakhage trying to communicate, anyway?
The demands placed on a reviewer by a work as dauntingly complex as Dog Star Man are especially formidable, if the objective is to avoid composing another obvious take that either offers up some kind of glib dismissal (for those who don't really want to work very hard at decoding Brakhage's eccentric visual vocabulary) or just resorts to paraphrasing what others have already said about it. My inclination, as usual, is toward the latter option. I know there's more going on in the construction of this work than the random splicing of distorted and fuzzy-focused film fragments that a first impression registers. But I have to admit that if I hadn't bothered to read up on some of the literature generated by the film (starting with Brakhage's own explanations, either in audio or written form, but also including a few insightful critical responses like this one or this one or this one or this one), I'd probably do my best to come up with something clever and funny to sum up my casual response, then quickly move on to the next movie on my list. Whatever title I found in the queue, it's guaranteed to be more comfortable and comprehensible than this densely-packed 74 minute epic, delivered in five convenient and more easily digestible chunks. If you want to see it for yourself, it's available in Criterion's by Brakhage: an anthology sets, either as a standalone Volume One on DVD or as part of the fuller (and strongly recommended) Volumes One and Two Blu-ray package. My practice on this blog is to review his output from a given year when I get to the end of my list, and for this, my final post dedicated to the films of 1964, I'm covering Brakhage's most celebrated omnibus that he worked on from 1961-64, and later expanded into a much longer work called The Art of Vision which is explained in great detail here.
So rather than put together a redundant undergraduate Art House 101 research paper seeking to "explain" Dog Star Man, I'm happy to recommend that you go ahead and click on any of the links I provided above (since I figure none of you have actually done that yet) to get filled in just as much as I have. I trust that the guys who wrote those essays have lived with and pondered the film longer and more deeply than I have. They probably love it a bit more than I do as well, to be able to write so rapturously and meld their thoughts more exquisitely than I've been able to in translating Brakhage's visual language into words that help their readers bridge the gap into this odd transformation of the medium we thought we knew.
But I really have enjoyed the process over these past four or five days of settling in with Stan on his eternally cycling quest up the snow-covered mountain as he swings his axe at a dead and desiccated tree trunk, a mythic and immortal exuberant expression of the lifelong curse and blessing of the toil with which we fill our days, with loving and marvelous and lusty thoughts of his wife and baby and God and time and pain and ecstasy and boredom and wonder, all running through his mind, as he contemplates the sun moon and stars and feels the blood pumping out of his heart and through his veins, powering the muscles of his limbs and the impulses of his sex drive in rapturous outbursts that alternately stride and stumble, squeeze and let go, procreate and kill, conquer and collapse. With his dog at his side, surrounded by a grand old forest nestled on an ancient slope overlooking a serene valley, Stan does a commendable job, with his desperate shoestring budget, hand-cobbled tools of camera lenses, etching utensils, developing equipment and a patiently mastered repertoire of resolutely amateurish homespun self-taught editing skills, of immortalizing not only himself as a specific personality in his own time and place in the world, but of the timeless fearless creators such as himself who have allowed their lives to fall into a state of relative calamity (poverty, relational ruin, self-imposed obscurity, taunting mockery and even persecution bby the ignorant and the authorities) for the sake of their art. His climb grows ever steeper, his feet slip and slide, he tumbles backwards, the fatigue is overwhelming and undeniable, the weariness of a million anonymous lives drags him backwards with their collective fatigue, even as their spirits, summoned from their scattered graves by the Man's unconscious remembrance, somehow inspire him to push forward and resume that quest, for no discernible purpose but to swing that axe and tear into the tree for the purpose of bringing something home, back to woman and offspring, kindling to burn, for heat, for light, before the sun sets, to illumine the darkness, to warm the naked skin and to push away the cold emptiness of space just a little longer so that life may continue, so that love may be known, so that sight and sound and consciousness may be experienced for the sake of their own phenomenal mystery.
I appreciate any work of art that can bring such thoughts to mind.
Next: Yoyo
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