four early films of stan brakage
by douglas messerli
Stan
Brakhage (director) Interim / 1953; Unglassed Windows Cast a Terrible
Reflection / 1953; The Extraordinary
Child / 1954; The Way to Shadow
Garden / 1954
Brakhage’s first
film from 1953, Interim might easily
be sloughed off as a minor love story featuring a short series of on-screen
smooches. But, in fact, this short work is a far deeper study in social and
cultural strictures and class differences.
The obviously bored and confused boy
(Walter Necomb) stands on a bridge in an industrial wasteland of a city. In the
distance we can see a few skyscrapers, obviously suggesting the heart of the
city, which he has, at least temporarily, left behind. Cars speed back and
forth across the bridge as the youth looks over the barren landscape from far
above, while one driver, perhaps distracted from the blond-haired youth, screeches
to a momentary stop, waking the teenager up from the trance-like state of so
many early experimental works, obviously influenced by Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus (of 1950)—although expressed
even earlier in Joseph Vogel’s 1947 short work, House of Cards. A bit confused by his possible endangerment, the
young man determines to follow the many-leveled stairway attached to the bridge
to the unknown world below.
At first the couple seem to have nowhere
to go, and try to wait the storm beneath a tree. But they soon spot and barren
shack into which they hurry as the rain grows more fearsome. Within the shack,
they reach out to one another, briefly touching, and, finally, in a short and
sudden frenzy intensely kissing. But soon after, as the storm passes, they
break away from each other, the young man taking the lead in moving out of the
darkened spot in which they momentarily took refuge, a kind of ramshackle home.
The girl, a bit shaken, follows, but clearly realizes that the brief moment of
passion between them—and anything it might offer her regarding a way out of the
world in which she is entrapped—is over; and after she leads the young man,
taking him once again to the barrier, under which, this time, she ducks, before
being forced to waiting between tracks for the passing of a train. As she looks
back with a wistful smile, the boy turns to leave, making his way gradually
back to the stairway and returning to his obviously socially superior world.
The relationship between them, quite
obviously, has been doomed before it started. If the girl might have wished for
something more, for the bored boy it was nothing but a moment, an “interim” in
his life, which gives this early version of speed dating an almost tragic
quality. The poor girl is doomed by the world in which we find her, a society
apparently inferior to that in which the bridge leads to something or someone
else.
Almost the moment they begin to explore
the several mining buildings, which have all lost their windows, one boy and
girl (Eva Neuman and Walter Newcomb) break off from the others. The male,
clearly disinterested in his companions, opens a book, and, sitting alone on a
high beam above begins to read, the girl, clearly frightful of exploring,
tentatively following him. Meanwhile the lead woman (Fair) goes off with two
handsome boys, ready to investigate nearly every hallway and open door.
From the beginning, however, we sense a
kind of tension between the two males: it may be that they both are interested
in the girl, but we also suspect a possible homoerotic attraction between the
two, a relationship the direct hints at my posing them in a single shot, one
facing straight out at the camera, the other looking off into space. And at
that very moment, the girl, having gone off to explore the space above them
comes swinging into view between them, as if she has almost interrupted their
intense stares.
Whether or not the tension between them is
heterosexual competitiveness or a darker fear for their inner feelings, it is
quite clear the tension between may, at any moment, turn to violence. When in
her fearless exploring, the girl suddenly encounters a dizzying room wherein a
huge waterwheel obvious sifted the ore from other ingredients, she screams out
in terror, bringing all the others to her on the run. It has been a kind of
false cry, but the possibility of danger clearly brings the male tension even
closer to the surface, as the two begin to fight. The passive book reader,
observing the male rivalry being performed, is clearly dismissive, and goes
even further afield to seek out privacy, while the shyer girl meekly follows.
The battling duo are within inches of killing one another, until the girl
intrudes, and they back off, one walking away, the following behind almost as
if he were attempting to apologize—or, just as possibly, to actually declare
his love for the other. Indeed, we might suspect the latter, since the leader
of the two, finally noting the other one following, fiercely turns upon him,
this time with a ready-found weapon, and kills him.
The film ends there, in medias res, with no resolution. How and when the dead man is
found, how the murderer is brought to justice, and how it effects the others of
this holiday party doesn’t truly matter—although it does very much matter to
Antonioni, and, indeed, is the essence of his study in tensions between his
vacationing group. For Brakhage, however, the more interesting aspect of his
work is how the sun, shining through the open windows of this former
economically viable spot, reflect and play upon the inner conditions of its
visitors. The tensions between them all are not only sexual, but, once again,
social and economic.
The
Extraordinary Child of 1954 is a most unusual Brakhage work in that it is
almost entirely comical and links the experimental director more to the works
of Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton—or even to the films of W. C. Fields—than to
any forward-looking cinematic tradition.
That same year, we observe, for the first
time, Brakhage moving almost entirely away from narrative. In The Way to Shadow Garden, the situation
is apparent as a young man (once again Walter Newcomb) is suffering, no need to
explain why. Light, noise, inner fears, anything and everything is quite
obviously torturing the young man, who after a cinematic representation of
his sufferings
(quite melodramatically portrayed with only a modicum of realism), suddenly
gouges out his eyes in a scene that is quite reminiscent of the suffering figure
of Cocteau’s Orpheus. In large this
is another trance film, in which the character’s loss of sight gives Brakhage
the opportunity to briefly experiment with images. Moments after the sufferer’s
eyes begin to profusely bleed, the screen suddenly presents everything in
negative image, which further removes us from narrative as the work ends in a
imagistic series of patterns.
Los Angeles, July
4, 2015
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