On Stan (II)

 Brakhage's films organize themselves around contradictions. These contradictions include oppositions between: representation and abstraction; the multiple associations summoned up by images of objetcs and people and their presences as embodiments of pure light; hints of narrative and film as "visual music"; the illusion of movement and film as a succession of stills; organic flowing rhythms and unpredictable shifts in pace.

 Brakhage was contradictory in person as well. He could present a commanding, oracular, even imperious presence in public, while inwardly he was frequently beset by fears. He could cut off a conversation with a blunt pronouncement when he was sure of his rightness, yet be incredibly considerate of young artists whose work he wasn't in complete sympathy with. He spoke of his films a emanating first of all from himself, yet the range of other artists he was inspired by in film, poetry, painting, music and dance was incomparably vast.

 The making of Brakhage's "visionary" films proceeded from his own inner necessity. These are not films that brakhage thought it might be nice to create, or that he made because he knew he was a filmmaker and thought it was time to make a new film — they are films he made because he had to make them, in his early years in particular, filmmaking was a way of deciding whether, and in what terms, he could go on living — or dying, as the overpowering sense of failure that haunts his lyrical meditation on suicide, Anticipation of the Night, so movingly documents.

 Inner and outer necessities are also linked. If Brakhage made films because he had to, he also made films because he wanted to change the world. To be moved by a Brakhage film is to be denied the manipulated emotions of the commercial feature film, and denied the fetishistic attraction to static views and collectible objects that bourgeois society encourages. To be moved by a Brakhage film is to dance, alongside the filmmaker, with the tiniest particle of dust — or light. To be moved by a Brakhage film is to have oneself opened to more imaginative possibilities of looking at, and thinking about, everything in the universe.

Fred Camper