The Man With The X-Ray Eyes

 Tattooing our eyelids with sunbursts and moon-pocks, Stan Brakhage created a mountain of myth out of a handful of dust. In five decades of work, the American avant-garde filmmaker never seemed to move far beyond his own front door; the dirt under his nails can be glimpsed in nearly every movie he made. Legendary for being the cinema's mountain man--a gruff, hairy, foul-smelling alternative to Andy Warhol and his uptown aftershave--Brakhage lived in a shack in the Rocky Mountains with five scraggly kids and a wife with a definite Pioneer Mama look about her. Brakhage commemorated the missus and the brats in one film after another; the mythopoeia of everyday life was the auteur's bread and butter.

Brakhage--who died earlier this year at the age of 70--aspired to the rarefied status of that Trinity of Cosmic Can-Openers: John Cage, Ezra Pound, and, above all, Jackson Pollock. But the fact of the matter is that the filmmaker was more deeply influenced by--and more closely akin to--the Rocky Mountain school of poets as typified by Charles Olson and Robert Creeley. Brakhage made movies--and wrote poems--about the sun and the stars, not TV shows and T-shirt slogans. Like Terrence Malick, he was comfortable noting distinctions among moth wings and leafy green stalks of vegetation. He pointed his Bolex at the big kahuna: "birth, death, sex, family life." There ought to be numerous retrospectives of his work, American Masters documentaries introduced by a dour, Armani-clad Martin Scorsese.

At the moment, alas, there are not. But in February, the Walker Art Center will present Text of Light, a series of Brakhage screenings played to live musical accompaniment by alt-rock hipsters such as Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo. And in the meantime, there's a magnificent new DVD set from the Criterion Collection called By Brakhage, which is simply invaluable. For most American film lovers, this two-disc package of 26 shorts will serve as their introduction to the "landmark," "path-clearing" artist, and it will provide them with some jolting surprises--not least of which will be the shock of discovering Brakhage to have been a deeply committed political filmmaker.

But before we go any further, let's run through that gargantuan checklist: birth, death, sex, family life. In an interview on the Criterion set, Brakhage says, "I wanted to make something you'd feel in your viscera." Indeed, there has never been a movie that you "feel in your viscera" more than Brakhage's "The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes" (1971). Not content to make art at a remove, Brakhage goes for full-body contact with the viewer. In "The Act," he records the process of several autopsies conducted in a grim, old-timey Denver morgue. Like the morticians who lead him gently through the steps, the filmmaker starts small--with the shock of unseeing eyes on a gaunt-faced corpse. Then he works his way up: A beautiful blond woman is sheared and gutted; a human head is scalped, hot-drilled, and removed of its brain--a sad, gray, gloopy mass of unexceptional jelly.

The film is silent, and Brakhage skimps on "telling" details: An assistant grins inappropriately at a moment of deep evisceration; a corpse sheet is laid out in the hasty manner of a college boy making his bed. What makes "The Act" memorable is that there's something as old and primal as the muck we walked out of that tells us to turn away from the movie's images. We're not meant to look at these insides, though we possess them ourselves; the biological impulse that says "Look away!" is planted deep. The sense of our own finitude, the nullity of the human body when the soul has left the scene, the poignancy of a haircut on a corpse--a hint of personality in the absence of life itself--are all delivered straight and plain. As a result, for many viewers, "The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes" is an almost surefire way to a panic attack.

 

Though the artist's embrace may be, finally, an affirmative one, there's no zesty, healthy life force in a Brakhage picture. In its place is horror--as in George Romero, not Jean-Paul Sartre. "Kindering" (1987), a seemingly innocuous home movie of grandchildren at play, distorts the kids' swing-set swivels and backyard circle-runs into a mess of optical smears and aural sludge. Even the artist's "abstract" films--a word J. Hoberman informs us that Brakhage loathed--deliver a shudder. The Pollock-like tangles of paint that Brakhage hand-pressed onto the film stock give the sensation, in their relentless verticality, of a fathomless fall downward. (It is this work for which the filmmaker is best known.) And when those markings aren't inducing vertigo, they often resemble viscera: the inside of an eyeball, Brakhage's ultimate location of nirvana.