Moth grass film living: on watching Stan Brakhage's cinema bizarro

“Alternate cinema” or “experimental cinema” are conditional terms, one man’s “alternate” often being another man’s “practically mainstream”. (Some feedback I got for this story said that the people profiled weren't non-mainstream enough.) But there are some filmmakers whose position on the scale is beyond argument, and one of them is the American Stan Brakhage, whose work I have recently been watching with a mix of trepidation, fascination and (on occasion) despair.

Brakhage, who made well over 300 films (most of them under 10 minutes long), is routinely described as an avant-garde, non-narrative director, but that doesn’t begin to convey some of the things he did – how he set out to overturn conventional ideas about how a film should be watched, and even what a film is. To take just one example, his three-minute-long “Mothlight” was not made by recording things with a camera; it was created by manually sticking grass, stems, petals and dozens of moth wings (from insects that had burnt to death by flying towards candles) between two strips of clear film and then running the thing through an optical printer. That may seem a random, self-indulgent thing to do (and indeed, “self-indulgent” is a lazily accurate way of describing much of Brakhage’s work), but he put into the process all the care and thought of a painter adorning an immensely long canvas – he wanted a very specific effect on the screen when the film would be projected at 24 frames per second.

I settled down to watch “Mothlight” (and a few other Brakhage films, including the similarly constructed “The Garden of Earthly Delights”) with only very basic background information, but I did read Fred Camper’s notes on how to ideally watch a Brakhage film. “Try to approximate the conditions of a cinema as much as possible,” Camper writes, “One should sit fairly close to, and perhaps at eye level with or even lower than, the screen. The projected film image has, in its clarity and colours and light, a kind of iconic power that is key to Brakhage’s work, and it’s important to try to see whatever monitor one is viewing these films on in a similar way.” He points out that Brakhage made most of his films silent because “visual rhythms are crucial to his work” – and so, it’s important, while viewing them, not to be interrupted by talk, the phone ringing, and other distracting sounds nearby.

Feeling very much like a student going through pre-examination rituals, I darkened my room, sat on the ground at a distance of around three feet from my 36-inch plasma screen and reached for my notebook – before realising how idiotic it is to try and scribble notes while watching a three-minute movie made up of hundreds of subliminal images, none of which is on screen for more than a fraction of a second. (You have to see the whole thing through, then try – with hindsight – to make sense of the experience in words. Perhaps see it a second and third time. And resist the impulse to keep pausing frames.)

Watching, it became obvious why this eerie, hypnotic film would lose much of its effect if seen on (say) a computer screen with many visual and aural distractions around. Trying to describe the experience is daunting. The first images are extreme close-ups of translucent brown objects: if you know the back-story, you can tell that these are moth wings, but even with no prior information it is soon possible to guess that the many dark shapes flickering on and off the screen represent insect forms and motifs. Shades of brown give way to splotches of green - for the odd second or two you can see reasonably vivid images of stems and grass, their green almost filling the screen. The rhythms of the images change constantly: at times they rush by (appearing to race at the camera, like moths hurtling towards a light) so fast you feel breathless and disoriented; at other times you can make out identifiable patterns (mainly leaves) that merge into each other, and this can be reassuring.

What is the purpose of all this? Some viewers might say it is a form of visual gibberish. After a first viewing I felt that way too, but watching the film a further three or four times – having become more accustomed to its weirdness of form – I found it strangely moving. Unfolding on the screen is an impression of relentless organic activity (and it is identifiably organic, even though there isn’t a single held shot of a whole insect or plant). “Mothlight” may be constructed entirely of dead matter coldly pressed between film strips, but the projection and the speed gives these elements a dazzling, otherworldly life, and the extreme close-ups can even create the illusion that the veins in the insects' wings are pulsing with blood. Besides, if the human mind is incapable of making precise, ordered sense of what is happening on the screen, well, that’s only appropriate: how many of us know what a moth’s life or a leaf's life is like?

(Yes, that probably sounds like a cop-out - in the sense that one can probably make a similar observation about ANY random jumble of images - but I'm being honest about my impressions and how they changed over a few viewings. And I have no problem admitting that I found at least a couple of Brakhage's other films utterly incomprehensible or boring or both.)

Another of Brakhage’s best-known works, “Window Water Baby Moving” – an 11-minute filming of the birth of his first child – is more explicitly about the creation and emergence of life; it’s a lush, lyrical film, and more narrative-driven. (The plot being: “A baby is born.”) But I thought “Mothlight” was equally poignant in its own way. When the dead moths and the dead flora dance on the screen for those few minutes, it is a testament to the regenerating power of film (very old movies are, after all, made up of long-dead people brought achingly alive in front of our eyes). I was also  reminded of those beautiful six or seven seconds in Chris Marker’s short film La jetée (made almost entirely of still images) when we see movement for the only time: a woman waking and looking straight at the camera, “coming alive” for a few precious moments.

[Will be watching a few more Brakhage films soon - but not TOO soon. First, Ek tha Tiger and Khiladi 786]