Finally watched Dog Star Man the other night. (Thanks again to Criterion Collection). The DVD comes loaded with interviews with Stan Brakhage, to which I can only the offer the advice not to listen to it and just watch the films. Either he reduces complex films to simplistic, even cheesy, meanings, or else he spouts nonsense posing as film theory… I won’t take anyone seriously who claims one has to have a tactile relation to the film itself in order for the work to be art.
Fortunately, the film’s superb. I was impressed with how well Dog Star Man stands up, and how immediate and accessible it is for an avant-garde film. Even as he’s taking the manipulation of the cinematic medium as his start, he’s not an analytical filmmaker like the structural-materialists or like Gregory Markopoulos. As cinematic project, Brakhage’s work is dated, but amazingly, despite a couple of exceptions (e.g. fondness of anamorphic lenses, hippie iconography), its look and structure seems current for what’s going on in the visual arts. Brakhage simply has an eye for beautiful, not-fully saturated colors, for making the familiar strange, and for the proper pace in editing. Of course not everyone is going to like nonnarrative, nondocumentary filmmaking, but I’d wholeheartedly recommend this one as a good introduction to neophytes.
Of course, there’s the other issue that Brakhage is the only major avant-garde filmmaker I can think of between 1945 and 1990 to have a DVD release. Not many have VHS releases. (I’d welcome corrections on this, as well as recommendations for viewing). I can see some obvious reasons for this. The audience for such esoteric work is admittedly small, smaller than for obscure narrative films. The academic market might be a niche to serve, but even stalwart film studies programs don’t teach these films nearly as much as they used to. On top of this, there’s the prejudice that avant-garde filmmakers have for 16mm/8mm projection over video. It’s an understandable one, sometimes a necessary one: certain films absolutely need a darkened room with a film projector. Structural-materialist films in particular play with the apparatus of cinema, and something like Michael Snow’s So Is This would make no sense on video.
But beyond these reasons, at some point the model on which the Filmmakers Cooperative rests, a rights-retained depository of avant-garde films for distribution, may have to give way to a realization that the 20th century filmmakers are dying off and are becoming historical figures instead. I’d certainly welcome the opportunity to see more.
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