Balagan is honored to collaborate with Fred Camper, a writer and lecturer on film and art, to put together a program in memory of Stan Brakhage, one of the greatest filmmakers and thinkers of experimental film in the United States who has recently passed away.

Fred Camper is a writer and lecturer on film and art who lives in Chicago. He has written for "Film Culture," "Artforum," and other publications, and his writing appears regularly in the Chicago Reader. His web site is http://www.fredcamper.com.

"Stan Brakhage made almost 400 films in his fifty-year career, ranging from psychodramas to near-documentaries to completely abstract works. His films display great sensual beauty, and reveal complex and profound meanings. He made film worthy of the other arts not by documenting art but by creating uniquely cinematic forms that reflect his many influences from poetry, music, painting, and dance. Brakhage is perhaps best known as an advocate of the first-person mode, of films that reflect their maker's individual vision, but much of his work eludes categorization, and part of his project was to constantly expand notions of "subjectivity" and "self." Creating visual music by focusing on organizing light moving within the time and space of cinema, he also made films that, in their relentless avoidance of predictability, renew themselves, and the viewer, at each instant of their unspooling. This program presents some of Brakhage's greatest achievements. By exploring the tension between daily seeing and the more abstracting elements that he saw as ways of plumbing other stratas of consciousness, Brakhage explored the boundaries between quotidian existence and the more imaginative, even unknown, realms that he took as a principal subject. A few of these films are joyous light bursts, and a few are somber death-songs, but the majority negotiate the twilight world between the life and death drives, riven by apparently contradictory impulses that seek to unify and fragment, to connect and to distance. Indeed, these opposing aspirations are present in virtually all Brakhage's best work, films that dance with light while also appearing to peer over a precipice." - Fred Camper

The program: Mothlight (1963), The Dead (1960), Murder Psalm (1981), Sexual Meditation: Open Field (1972), The Process (1972), Arabic 1 (1980), Arabic 2 (1980), Chartres Series (1994), Stately Mansions Did Decree (1999), Lovesong (2001), Mothlight (1963).

from "Mothlight" (Courtesy of Fred Camper, www.fredcamper.com)

Mothlight 4min, 16mm, 1963

"Essence of lepidoptera re-created between two strips of clear mylar tape: an anima animation. What a moth might see from birth to death if black were white and white were black." - Stan Brakhage
"Brakhage made MOTHLIGHT without a camera. He just pasted mothwings and flowers on a clear strip of film and ran it through the printing machine." - Jonas Mekas

"MOTHLIGHT is a paradoxical preservation of pieces of dead moths in the eternal medium of light (which is life and draws the moth to death); so it flutters through its very disintegration. This abstract of flight captures matter's struggle to assume its proper form; the death of the moth does not cancel its nature, which on the filmstrip asserts itself. MOTHLIGHT is on one level a parable of death and resurrection, but most really concerns the persistence of the essential form, image, and motion of being." - Ken Kelman

The Dead 11min, 16mm, 1960

"Dead" (courtesy of Fred Camper www.fredcamper.com)

"... a very sombre and intense visual poem, a black lyric, if you like, but full of an open dramatic energy which puts it well above a formal or rhetorical exercise on Time and Eternity. In the visual form of the monuments of the Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the persistent and impenetrable geometric masonry gets to be less a symbol of death than a death-like sensation." - Donald Sutherland

"Europe, weighted down so much with that past, was THE DEAD. I was always Tourist there; I couldn't live in it. The graveyard could stand for all my view of Europe, for all the concerns with past art, for involvement with symbol. THE DEAD became my first work, in which things that might very easily be taken as symbols were so photographed as to destroy all their symbolic potential. The action of making THE DEAD kept me alive." - Stan Brakhage

"Murder Psalm" (courtesy of Fred Camper www.fredcamper.com)

Murder Psalm 16min, 16mm, 1981

"... unparalleled debauchery, when man turns into a filthy, cowardly, cruel, vicious reptile. That's what we need! And what's more, a little 'fresh blood' that we may grow accustomed to it ...." (Dostoyevsky's The Devils, Part II, Chapter VIII)

"In my novel The Devils I attempted to depict the complex and heterogenous motives which may prompt even the purest of heart and the most naive people to take part in an absolutely monstrous crime." (Dostoyevsky's The Diary of a Writer)

Sexual Meditation: Open Field 8min, 16mm, 1972

"This film takes all the masturbatory themes of previous "Sexual Meditations" back to the source in pre-adolescent dreams. OPEN FIELD is in the mind, of course, and exists as a weave of trees, grasses, waters and bodies poised and fleeting at childhood's end. The scene is lit as by sun and moon alike and haunted by the pursuant adult." - Stan Brakhage

The Process 13.5min, 16mm, 1972

"LIGHT was primary in my consideration. All senses of "process" are (to me) based primarily on "thought-process"; and "thought-process" is based primarily on "memory re-call"; and that, as any memory process (all process finally) is electrical (firing of nerve connection) and expresses itself most clearly as a "back-firing" of nerve endings in the eye which DO become visible to us (usually eyes closed) as "brain movies" - as Michael McClure calls them. When we are not re-constructing "a scene" (re-calling something once seen), then we are watching (on the "screen" of closed eye-lids) the very PROCESS itself." -Stan Brakhage

Arabic 1 5,5min, 16mm, 1980
Arabic 2 7min, 16mm, 1980

Arabic Numeral Series. "This series of films, each extraordinarily unique from every other (except "0 + 10" going together) is inspired and governed by strata of the mind's moving-visual-thinking different from that of the ROMAN NUMERAL SERIES ... or perhaps one should say that the ARABIC NUMERALS come to fruition thru some tree-of-nerves separate from that which gave birth to the ROMANS (as it is physiologically deceptive to think of thought as existing in "layers"). The ARABICS range in length from approximately five minutes to 32 minutes and may be projected at 24fps as well as 18, tho' the latter speed seems preferable for starts. I think each film's integrity of rhythm would allow viewing at a greater variety of speeds, were there the 16mm projectors to permit that exercise. So far as I can tell, they defy verbal interpretation (even more than their ROMAN equivalents) and would, thus, seem to be closer to Music than any previous work given me to do; but if that be true, it is (as composer James Tenney put it to me) that they relate to that relatively small area of musical composition which resists Song and Dance and exists more purely in terms of Sound Events in Time/Space. Finally, then, the inspiration of all those modern (and a few ancient) composers I've most loved since my teens overwhelms the easier, and comfortably lovely, habits of jig and do-re-mi AND creates a visual correlative OF music's eventuality - i.e., each ARABIC is formed by the intrinsic grammar of the most inner (perhaps pre-natal) structure of thought itself." - Stan Brakhage

"Chartres Series" (courtesy of Fred Camper www.fredcamper.com)

Chartres Series 9min, 16mm, 1994

"A year and a half ago the filmmaker Nick Dorsky, hearing I was going to France, insisted I must see the Chartres Cathedral. I, who had studied picture books of its great stained-glass windows, sculpture and architecture for years, having also read Henry Adams' great book three times, willingly complied and had an experience of several hours (in the discreet company of French filmmaker Jean-Michele Bouhours) which surely transformed my aesthetics more than any other single experience. Then Marilyn's sister died; and I, who could not attend the funeral, sat down alone and began painting on film one day, this death in mind ... Chartres in mind. Eight months later the painting was completed on four little films which comprise a suite in homage to Chartres and dedicated to Wendy Jull.
(My thanks to Sam Bush, of Western Cine, who collaborated with me on this, much as if I were a composer who handed him a painted score, so to speak, and a few instructions - a medieval manuscript, one might say - and he were the musician who played it.)" - Stan Brakhage

Stately Mansions Did Decree 5.5min, 16mm, 1999

"This hand-painted, elaborately step-printed film begins with what appears to be torn fragments of thick parchment erupting upward, out of which emerges a series of landscapes, gardens, exteriors of mansions, castles and the like, then (as yellow predominates over vegetable greens, sherwood greens and deep floral reds, blood reds) interior corridors and rooms, as if lit by chandeliers and cendelabras - all of which eventually bursts into flames, explosions, which somewhat 'echo' visually the beginning of the film." - Stan Brakhage

Lovesong 12min, 16mm, 2001

"LOVESONG is a hand-painted elaborately step-printed work which utilizes light transparencies in combination with light bounced directly off the surface of the individual film frames to establish and eventually enmesh two distinct entities of variable paint (more distinct than superimposition or bi-packing could acvieve) - said entities taking on separate personae against which (and finally in conjunction with which) the glyphic representations of body-parts gradually entwining, separating and re-combining again and again, are interwoven with the expressively drawn sexual organs represented in dark outlines which often 'explode' into black sperm-marks surrounding mutliply colored egg-likenesses." - Stan Brakhage