From hating to loving Stan Brakhage
- Sharmistha Chakrabartty
- May 27, 2024
- 4 min read
Favorite Artist 1 : Stan Brakhage; and this is how I went from hating to Loving Stan Brakhage.
There are a couple of hundred films that I dislike, at least fifty that I passionately hate. There are uncountable films that have bored, annoyed, and even frustrated me. A few that made me passionately angry, but none other than "Mothlight" and "Window Water Baby Moving" that had made me so violently furious. I had to watch them in my 2nd year of undergraduation, and I was enraged.
"I really want to kill Stan Brakhage." Unintentionally, I was loud. Two elderly men sitting in front of us in the bus looked back at me. They stared at me (and my classmate who was sitting beside me) unblinking for a few minutes. My classmate looked at me and said, "I am never traveling with you again." I had never felt this furious about any filmmaker, and I couldn't articulate what I hated about his work. I just kept asking, "Why? Why does he make these?"
Now, there are many filmmakers that I passionately hate, for example, Nolan. It seems he tries too hard to make an otherwise straightforward narrative complicated so that he can come off as 'intellectual' and smart, and his young adult fanboys (who consider Nolan to be the ultimate God of filmmaking) could brag to everyone how smart they are for being able to understand those films. That is annoying. I hate Nolan because I hate his fanboys. Now, I know this is not a very rational argument, but at least I had 'my' reason. But in the case of Brakhage, NOTHING! I don't know why, but I hated him.
Could it be because his works made me uncomfortable? Were those imageries evoking a sensation, an emotion that I was not prepared to deal with? Was calling it "pointless" my defense mechanism? Was I trying too hard to 'understand it', to somehow associate a meaning to it?
If I could give it a meaning, then I could understand it. Once I understand it, I can judge and label it. Maybe I could not fathom how his works could be free from the burden of narrativity. He was unbounded by any rules, and I was trying to learn the rules, the magic formula which will help everything make sense; not only in art but in life. His eyes were untutored and mine, tainted.
I will not delve into the life or filmography of Stan Brakhage. For those who are unfamiliar with him, I am linking a video below that will provide you with basic information about him. I am also adding links to some of his popular works for you all to see
The question is why and how did my mind change? Simply put, I kept remembering images from his films. I couldn't get them out of my mind since I had watched them for the first time. I forgot the titles, I couldn't even differentiate one from the other but the images haunted me. Never before has any work evoked such a visceral reaction in me.
As time passed, I developed an apathy towards very structured narratives. My own mental agony seemed too much to be conveyed in words or told through a three or five-act narrative structure. Words seemed meaningless, and things stopped making sense to me. But these images were a direct translation of the disturbance I was feeling under my skin. Sensations of fluttering movement, traveling through my veins and seeking an escape. A maddening restless energy that wants to tear my skin and come out. I saw the same madness in Mothlight (and so many of his other films). The Dante Quartet reminded me of moments when, as a child, I would look at the sun and close my eyes. I still see such flashes at the brink of sleep. Window Water Baby Moving evoked my deep-seated fear regarding pregnancy. A friend of mine commented after the screening that it was a great advert against pregnancy. We all laughed. However, we can't deny the eeriness and discomfort the edit evokes. The images, tender in their own right through framing and editing, create an inarticulated uneasiness. His films had the same suffocation I feel day in and day out; and maybe that is why I reacted against his films on first viewing.
When I watched them for the second time, I didn't question, "What does this mean? What is it saying? Where is the narrative?" All of that was inconsequential. I saw a physical sensation I feel (and want to rid myself of) replicated on screen.
I am sure he has his own philosophy and a 'story' behind these films (we were taught a bit about it in our classes). I don't care what they are. Not anymore. Slowly, I have stopped caring about what the 'creator' wants to say. It is irrelevant. Eventually, we all understand what we are capable of understanding.
Be it art or ideology, our choices are often not logical; they are always directed by emotions and feelings; an unexplainable connection we feel with it. At the core of our feelings lies a physical sensation. Experiencing art that resonates with this physical sensation is profound, once we can unburden ourselves from "What is it!?"
Stan Brakhage is one of the artists who has tried to free the audiovisual medium from the burden of narrative, and that is why I love him. I am inspired by his works and hope I could create something similar one day.
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