Brakhage.

Madison.

I've completed watching what I believe to be the most bizarre collection of film I've ever seen: By Brakhage: An Anthology, a selection of Stan Brakhage's films released on DVD by The Criterion Collection. It contains, in total, twenty-six films running 243 minutes, but it took me nearly eight hours to make it through all. Every so often - sometimes in the middle of a film - I'd have to take a break. It's intense.

Just to give a brief overview of Brakhage and his work, as I understand things:

• Brakhage's work is grounded more in poetry than cinema. Though he notes, on the DVD, that he greatly enjoys Hollywood movies, it doesn't appear that he ever made a film even remotely close to Hollywood's aesthetic. He made films, yes, but more analogous to paintings than to any sort of narrative medium.
  
  
• His early films are primarily shots of actual things, though scenes are cut up, overlaid on top of each other - up to four different reels in the case of Dog Star Man - and otherwise garbled. Later, he began painting and scratching the film itself, sometimes over exposed images, sometimes on blank or fully exposed film. In essence, he began creating films without a camera.
  
  
• Most of his films have no sound; he explains that he feels any sound would be a distraction from what's on screen. Sometimes, especially during his longer pieces, I found myself wishing there were something to listen to, but couldn't possibly imagine what would fit with the images I was watching. Some sort of hyper-frenetic John Zorn composition, maybe.
  
  
• Brakhage's films explore, in his words, "birth, sex, death, and the search for God," and he had no qualms about showing deeply disturbing images. Dog Star Man features snippets from the birth of his daughter, overlaid with solar flares and shots of the Colorado wilderness; Window Water Baby Moving is much of the same footage, no longer obscured by other imagery. Then there's The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, which the DVD prefaces with this warning:
  

  PLEASE BE ADVISED: This film consists
  entirely of footage of actual autopsies.

  It does. It's both disturbing¹ and fascinating. Like when the coroner's thumbprint leaves a dent in flesh, where a living person's body would have sprung back. Or when slicing open the skin produces no blood, just a layer of skin and subcutaneous fat that's drawn back for... whatever they're doing, exactly. With no sound, and a constant shifting from one autopsy to the next, you're left without the sort of context that might let you linger on one, specific corpse for too long. It's eerily disengaging.
  
  
• An experimental icon, Brakhage even took to taping objects to film to see what would happen. The most famous of these is Mothlight, which, like many of his hand-painted films, is as fascinating frame-by-frame as it is at 24 fps. You can see individual frames from a number of his works on Fred Camper's Brakhage website. Seeing them in this format, with frames laid out as they were during the painting process, gives another level of understanding and appreciation for the work.
  
  
• Regardless of what you think of the overall craziness of Brakhage's work - and there's craziness aplenty - it's worth noting the amount of effort and craft that went into this. When working directly on (usually 16mm) film, he could only complete one quarter- to one half-second's worth of film in a day. Some of his later works were several minutes long, representing a phenomenal amount of work for something that, until the creation of this DVD,² flitted past in a barely-recognizable instant. Some of them, particularly those in Nightmusic, are absolutely beautiful.

Suffice to say, it's a lot collected onto two DVDs. It's not the sort of thing I'd want to watch over and over again, but I'm glad to have seen it. I'm still not sure what to make of it all.

If you'd like to see an example, YouTube has a few Brakhage films. They're a little lackluster - the digital compression makes a blurry mess of the frantic eruptions of color - but it's enough to get an idea. See The Garden of Earthly Delight for a series of montane flora taped to a reel of film; The Dante Quartet is a good example of his painting technique.

And, speaking of abstract, modern art, I went to see the current exhibit at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art on Friday, Alyson Shotz: Topologies. The artist was there to discuss her work, and a group of math grad students went over to check it out. (Then we went out for drinks.)

The exhibit had good and bad. It's contemporary art, which, free from the rigorous forms and styles of traditional arts, means it's open to a wide range of interpretation. Ms. Schotz admitted this much herself, explaining that she often creates a piece, then tries to determine what it means to her. Okay. Works for me.

Except that she sometimes had extra layers of meaning that weren't apparent, which she used as the crux in understanding the work. My general thought is that if, say, you need to know that the work consists of hyperbolic paraboloids that may or may not represent the shape of the universe in order to see it as more than a pretty pile of crumpled paper, perhaps that ought to be noted beside the little plaque bearing the work's title. It's one thing to be able to seek out a deeper, multilayered, more personal appreciation of a work of art, but I'm less than thrilled by art that's intentionally obscure.

Even that I can look past, brushing it off as plain pretension, a sort of myopia imposed by focusing on one's own work all day, every day.³ But there were two specific things that dug under my skin at the exhibit.

One: Ms. Shotz admitted to having an assistant who helps put together a lot of her work; on at least one piece, she said, her assistant had done all of the work. The assistant's name was not noted anywhere.

Two: The level of craft on most of the works was shoddy, at best. Regardless of the artistic merit, several of the pieces were just... poorly made. I'd be embarrassed to have my name on a piece like Cocoon. (Detail here.) Given the delicacy and translucency of the materials used to construct it - glass beads and fresnel lenses - she chose to use staples to hold it all together. Metal staples. The sort you might use to hold together your construction paper projects in elementary school. And the Forced Bloom series, while interesting enough in concept, are examples of genuinely poor computer graphics skills.⁴

Allusion of Gravity was nice, though. Note: it's more impressive at a distance.

* * * * *

¹Not the most disturbing film I've ever seen. I've been mulling over this, and I think the award - at least, of the films I've seen - goes to The Battle of Algiers. Not Cronenberg's most visceral work, or George Romero's zombie films, or anything that looks like a movie. The Battle of Algiers looks almost like a documentary, which is why the vicious scenes of torture - brief, not bloody, but looking entirely real - turn my stomach. Even more so is the scene, just before the torture, where FLN bombs explode in the bleachers at the horse races, a place filled with wealthy French spectators. An enraged mob converges on a small Algerian boy selling concessions, beating him unconscious until the police lift him out. You don't see any of the explicit violence, as it's hidden by the bodies of the mob, but the scene is so stark and brutal that I find it extremely difficult to watch.

²As near as I can tell, the Criterion DVD is the first time Brakhage's work has been made available digitally. The greatest benefit of this is that you can step through it, frame by frame, examining each as you would a painting in a gallery. Indeed, it's very much like a collection of thousands upon thousands of unique works of abstract art.

³This is a special talent that many architects (and related designers) have, in my experience. It most often occurs when they begin to think they're designing spaces for aesthetics first, and practicality second.

⁴I refuse to send out any graphics work that looks as choppy about the edges as those pieces do. She's a professional, in a field that should have a finer attention to detail than mine.