Death and Transfiguration
Francisco Rojas • 02.06.2023
In a letter directed to Amos Vogel in 1957 Stan Brakhage tells him about his new work, his ‘’first feature length film’’, that once made ‘’... I won’t be able to talk about it because everything I have to say will have been said visually and done with”. A year later, by 1958, Brakhage had amassed an acceptable yet small reputation thanks to films like Desistfilm, Loving and The Wonder Ring as well as his connections with Marie Menken and Maya Deren, but even with these credentials, Brakhage viewed his works as a failure. He was stuck in small circles and living in poverty under hard conditions. During this time his friendship with Amos Vogel was of great importance to him. Vogel was screening many of his works at Cinema 16 during this period. What Brakhage didn’t explain clearly in his letter to Vogel was the fact that he “won’t be able to talk” about his new film not only because of what the film would be able to express, but because he simply wouldn’t be able to talk about anything else, anything at all. Stan Brakhage had committed to the idea of killing himself by the end of his new film, Anticipation of the Night. However, more than a few things changed after that letter was sent.
Not only did Brakhage not commit suicide (though he did almost accidentally kill himself while filming the final shot of Anticipation of the Night), he also got married, to the surprise of his friends and peers, to Jane Wodening, the muse of most of his filmography from 1959 up until their divorce in 1987. And as Brakhage remained alive, he was able to defend his latest work of art. Most of Brakhage’s previous works were psychodramas in the vein of Gregory Markopoulos and Maya Deren. These films, made with actors and a blurred narrative, were received with some hostility and even his (now internationally acclaimed) Desistfilm was, in Brakhage’s own words “misunderstood by everybody but Cassavetes”. Nevertheless his peers like Menken, Deren, film programmers as well as critics such as Jonas Mekas, Amos Vogel and Parker Tyler (the critic most associated with Brakhage at the time) defended his work.
But Anticipation of the Night was different. It was a film without a character in the most traditional sense of the word. Only visible in shadow and in a couple of subjective shots, the character essentially was the camera itself. The film also did not have a soundtrack and was almost completely structured around the expressiveness of the camera's movements and its rhythmically edited nature. The film contains many images that can be considered as “representational”, even as metaphorical, but the film itself does not have a clear cut narrative. It deals with visual events that carry a great emotional weight for the artist that made it. The inside of a house, reflections and shadows on the walls, sunlight, interior light, artificial light, sometimes as if it was playing, the camera’s movements create patterns and impossible figures, the motion of the apparatus itself finds an ineffable beauty in the droplets of water over the grass or the trees seen rapidly passing by our vision. Night and day seem interchangeable. A baby crawls and watches the world with eyes wide open. Brakhage is searching for light that can be molded by speed and time, a way of filming that seems much inspired by the craft of Jim Davis and his play of shapes of light, but the rhythmic and abstract quality of Brakhage’s technique very well may find its truth in the primary and primitive works of Viking Eggeling.
During its central section, the film stays for a while with a group of children in an amusement park. The images are shot in a way, as if trying to catch up with the enthusiasm seen in the children’s innocent faces.While nearing the end of the central section, sunlight disappears almost completely, as if nearing the end of the film, and then suddenly, we see babies again, sleeping, illuminated by artificial light. Crosscutting with those images we see animals from a Zoo. There is a heron appearing and reappearing constantly; the cuts between the bird and the babies evoking in a way, the birth myth of the stork, a fantasy story that every child seems to be aware of. Other animals barely let themselves be visible. Some buildings stand out of the darkness. The branches of trees no longer having any leaves. The film returns to the day only to end with the promise of Brakhage’s own death. The figure that captured all of the images we have just seen hangs himself, filming his own suicide.
In his book Metaphors on Vision Brakhage imagines “an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic”. Metaphors on Vision was published while Brakhage was still finishing his film Dog Star Man, his magnum opus, a work containing a multitude of different ways of filming, editing, expressing and illuminating the cinematic image, yet Brakhage still recalls Anticipation of the Night when he writes: “How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘’Green’’ ?”. The search for a new language, a new capacity for visual expression, a new possibility for the art of film started with Anticipation of the Night. The entire film is a sincere gesture of capturing the beauty of vision, being a purely visual experience, and simultaneously it is also a desperate work that seems unable to reach the truth of the experience of sight. The children and the babies, they carry the vision that Brakhage wants to recover but it is one simply impossible to get back; he has to settle with getting near to it, approach it. There’s also lamentation for the mere fact of being born; Brakhage developed much of his subsequent work around his family and children, the idealization of the nuclear family came out of his own pain of being and adopted child, an unwanted baby, a boy without a name. The images of the heron cutting in while the babies are sleeping take the form of a weeping against that fantasy, a story that fades away with growing up, one completely disappeared by adulthood. A child that never was supposed to be turned into a man can only return to that innocence and fantasy through vision.
Brakhage summarized the reception to Anticipation of the Night as something like this: “Okay, that’s it, Brakhage has gone completely crazy and this is just degenerate work (not degenerate because of subject matter but formally)”. Parker Tyler rejected the work entirely and Amos Vogel feared that a film like Anticipation of the Night could start a riot.
Vogel had a regular audience of around 5000 people and would present them with films in Cinema 16, that were otherwise inaccessible through other means and venues. Brakhage and many others considered him to be “the one hope”, but Brakhage also noted later on that his films, and the work of many other great independent filmmakers from the era were being presented in a “freak show environment”. Vogel would mix avant-garde films with medical documentaries or other works with “scandalous” material in them. He had great success bringing people to see the films, but never really cared about helping create an audience that was aware of the possibility of the art of film. After every screening, Vogel would do polls with the audience members and the results showed they wanted more shock value documentaries. and less independent cinema. Vogel, however, wouldn’t follow that path either.
Ultimately Vogel was right about one thing: Anticipation of the Night did in fact start riots. During its first screening at the Brussels World Fair in 1958, the film was received with hostility to say the least. Vogel had the following notes written down during the screening to summarize the event: “silence, silence”, “movement never stops”, “terrible for eyes”, “show only as wild experiment”, “bad audience”; “lots people leave”; the worst was yet to come. Some people from the audience tried to hurt the projectionist and wanted to destroy the film, this was something that became a recurring event at future screenings of the film (as well as during other future Brakhage film screenings).
Vogel became adamant about no longer screening Anticipation of the Night, leading Brakhage to distance himself from Vogel until he would change his mind and start showing his films again, which ultimately never happen. Nevertheless, Brakhage would years later in an interview with Scott MacDonald express that there is no bitterness towards Vogel: “He simply couldn’t see it. His view was that the film would destroy my reputation. I didn’t see that I was having any kind of reputation anyway, but in any case, Anticipation was the end for Amos. But, again in fairness to Amos, it was also the end for Parker Tyler and many other people.”
After the riots and controversies surrounding his films, Brakhage and Jane (Wodening) opted to travel to New York in the early sixties and distribute his films themselves. The timing was great, as it coincided with the efforts of Adolfas Mekas and Jonas Mekas, to launch the Film-Maker’s Cooperative. Over time, the Mekas’ would also take over the Cinema 16 offices from Amos Vogel and his wife, Marcia. This ultimately had bitter repercussions for all the people involved. The discourse being that Amos Vogel was essentially uninterested in the art of cinema and he was not prepared to take it a step further. Considering that Jonas Mekas had been arrested for showing Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures de Jack Smith, only to screen it again once he was released, they were probably right about that. Mekas even regularly responded in his own columns at Film Culture to his colleague and friend (and notable detractor of the New American Cinema) Andrew Sarris; “I have to confess that very often I pity Andrew Sarris, my good friend - and I pity all other theorists of the auteur cinema who remain blind to some of the greatest film authors alive. Something must be and is completely wrong, totally wrong with our movie theatre system, with our distribution of works of art - that's where the trouble lies. The balance must be restored. There should be three or four theatre on Times Square playing Normal Love, Brakhage, Markopoulos, Harry Smith, Ken Jacobs, Anger." Sadly, little has changed since the time these words were written.
It would still take some time until Brakhage eventually built a reputation that was too hard to ignore, even for himself. His place in the avant-garde was secured with the release of Mothlight and Dog Star Man throughout the early sixties, and Brakhage would go on to inspire future names from that same discipline such as Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr, as well as many others. Most of these artists also encountered the same episodes of violent crowds during some of their screenings. Vogel, on the other hand, would lead the New York Film Festival for a few years before resigning; he remained an important figure for American independent cinema, despite the fact that his refusal to show Anticipation of the Night was indeed one of his most (in)famous anecdotes. Vogel himself recognized that maybe he was a gatekeeper to be overthrown to make way for a new cinema.
Evidently, even at the start of his career having already made some works of significance, Brakhage was willing to keep living in less than ideal, even dreadful conditions, if that meant still being able to make films. He would continue working on films for the next 45 years, until his death in 2003. By the time Brakhage had established an illustrious reputation, he went on to make works that were even more abstract, and during his last 25 years he mainly concentrated on hand painted films, working with dyes containing chemicals that eventually caused him to get cancer. Brakhage continued to work, even when he was bedridden; albeit with different dyes once the cancer took his bladder away. There would be many more nights and many more crises for Stan Brakhage to go through, but he never stopped creating. Making films became his life and he clinged on to his work until his death. A body of work worth living for, is a body of work worth dying for.
