Friday, February 13, 2004
Rousseau's circle
"What is even more cruel is that the whole progress of the human species removes man constantly farther and farther from his primitive state; the more we aquire new knowledge, the more we deprive ourselves of the means of aquiring the most important knowledge of all; and, in a sense, it is through studying man that we have rendered ourselves incapable of knowing him" - Rousseau, preface to the Discourse on Inequality
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
"A Child's Garden and the Serious Sea" - Stan Brakhage
Just caught this at Anthology on Sunday. I don't know how well this film is known in the Brakhage canon, I've never heard of it, but then again, he made something to the tune of 350+ films, so there are quite a few I'm not familiar with.
Here's what I wrote about it on IHM:
--
Beautiful on every level it could have been......improv folks should take notes, Brakhage uses extended camera techniques on this one: stopping down really low and shooting sand that the sun is reflecting off.....playing with rhythms of light and dark, so that after a long dark passage, he'll put a few quick bright blue frames, and then a shimmering cooler cooler, so that when the blue frames hit, you see a red afterimage, and then to be immediately confronted with rays of another contrasting color. Watching this movie feels like what being in the womb would be like, I remeber thinking in the theater that I never wanted to leave. It's silent too.
What was even better was that Sean Meehan and Tim Barnes played downstairs at the same theater (Anthology Film Archives) right before the film, in really low light. So, you've got a concert where my ears were open and eyes closed, and then a movie with the exact opposite.
--
There are stills from the film that are well worth looking at on Fred Camper's site.
The film has strong personal resonanaces for me, in that I grew up in a beach town, and spent my high school years a 10 minute walk from the water. The beach in the film is much different than the one I grew up with, in that one, you can look down and see fish, starfish, plants and various forms of aquatic life, the water is clear and blue, and generally pristine. It's not that the beach in Brevard county was dirty per se, it just wasn't like the beach you generally imagine. The water is more opaque than transparent, when you get in more than, say two feet, your feet are pretty invisible. The ocean was more of a monolithic thing for me: it was never about the details you get lost in, it was more about the sheer scale, of either looking at it, or swimming in it. Think of the "oceanic feeling" that Freud cites Romain Rolland as using to justify the experience of religion, and that's it.
The Brakhage film is more like the transparent and colorful sea than my experience of the ocean. The structure is micro, not macro, it has more to do with immadiate recollections of images past than of larger patterns within. What proves his virtuoisty (as if we needed to know that Brakhage is a virtuoso) is that he tips his hand occasionally (stopping up, and showing the sand that just looked like a star-chart to us before), and the effect remains just as powerful. It's like John Butcher playing muliphonics on his sax; he's come to the point where when listening to him it's more about what he's doing, rather than how he's doing it.
When I was watching the film, the metaphor came to me: much of his represented content - footage of the water - bears a similarity to the eye itself: a tense, refractive surface behind which there is a water, in which are suspended various particles, veins and nerve fibers. So the immersion in light and color bears a relation to what is making the immersion possible.
This is rambling and incoherent so I'll stop now. Besides, I need to go to school.
Here's what I wrote about it on IHM:
--
Beautiful on every level it could have been......improv folks should take notes, Brakhage uses extended camera techniques on this one: stopping down really low and shooting sand that the sun is reflecting off.....playing with rhythms of light and dark, so that after a long dark passage, he'll put a few quick bright blue frames, and then a shimmering cooler cooler, so that when the blue frames hit, you see a red afterimage, and then to be immediately confronted with rays of another contrasting color. Watching this movie feels like what being in the womb would be like, I remeber thinking in the theater that I never wanted to leave. It's silent too.
What was even better was that Sean Meehan and Tim Barnes played downstairs at the same theater (Anthology Film Archives) right before the film, in really low light. So, you've got a concert where my ears were open and eyes closed, and then a movie with the exact opposite.
--
There are stills from the film that are well worth looking at on Fred Camper's site.
The film has strong personal resonanaces for me, in that I grew up in a beach town, and spent my high school years a 10 minute walk from the water. The beach in the film is much different than the one I grew up with, in that one, you can look down and see fish, starfish, plants and various forms of aquatic life, the water is clear and blue, and generally pristine. It's not that the beach in Brevard county was dirty per se, it just wasn't like the beach you generally imagine. The water is more opaque than transparent, when you get in more than, say two feet, your feet are pretty invisible. The ocean was more of a monolithic thing for me: it was never about the details you get lost in, it was more about the sheer scale, of either looking at it, or swimming in it. Think of the "oceanic feeling" that Freud cites Romain Rolland as using to justify the experience of religion, and that's it.
The Brakhage film is more like the transparent and colorful sea than my experience of the ocean. The structure is micro, not macro, it has more to do with immadiate recollections of images past than of larger patterns within. What proves his virtuoisty (as if we needed to know that Brakhage is a virtuoso) is that he tips his hand occasionally (stopping up, and showing the sand that just looked like a star-chart to us before), and the effect remains just as powerful. It's like John Butcher playing muliphonics on his sax; he's come to the point where when listening to him it's more about what he's doing, rather than how he's doing it.
When I was watching the film, the metaphor came to me: much of his represented content - footage of the water - bears a similarity to the eye itself: a tense, refractive surface behind which there is a water, in which are suspended various particles, veins and nerve fibers. So the immersion in light and color bears a relation to what is making the immersion possible.
This is rambling and incoherent so I'll stop now. Besides, I need to go to school.
