Stan Brakhage - Scenes from Under Childhood part 2.avi

Scenes from Under Childhood by Stan Brakhage is an attempt to imagine fetal seeing and hearing. From this haze a child emerges in fuzzy halo superimposed on images of Brakhage himself... " (from Criterion By Brakhage Anthology Volume Two).
The experimental investigation about the hypnagogic hallucinations achieves in this film a climax that Brakhage masters in amazing editing of glimpses, rapid montage, use of black or clear ladder, superimpositions, time lapse, flicker, in-camera editing, jump cuts, hand-held camera...
"What we call 'closed-eye vision' is for me the template in the mind upon which all further formative envisionment is to occur", Brakhage was used to say.
So, in evoking a purely sensory 'knowledge', opposed to the conceptual one, the images, often vague, blurry, distorted, even messy, easily call to mind the treatment of space by color-field abstraction (Rothko over all).
The bliss of red flickering glows and mesmerizing floating balloons is what Rimbaud called inner light, a vision captured by a fingers massage on the closed eyelids: a sort of childhood's 'vision in meditation'... "The color red that dominates those early moments of the film has always struck me as the same color I see when I look at the sun with my eyes closed".
An anecdotal curiousness about this film is that in printing the rolls it needed three thousand light changes in 40 minutes of filming: this work was pushing the edge of technological possibilities up-to-date at that era for light changes 'cause light was changing constantly across one, two, three, four rolls.
The spell of filmmaking soars here to a culmination that bears this film to an absolute greatness in Brakhage's Art and in Cinema Art at all.

Part 2

Category:

Film & Animation

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• Stan
• Brakhage