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BOOK REVI EW • COM PTE REN DU
TELLING TIME: ESSAYS OF A VISIONARY FILMMAKER
Edited by Bruce McPherson
Kingston, NY: Documentext, McPherson and Company, 2003, 144 pp.
Reviewed by Brett Kashmere
When Stan Brakhage passed away in March 2003, not only did the international
avant-garde lose a groundbreaking artist, magisterial teller of tales, and esteemed
public presence; it also lost an original, audacious and insightful theoretician. The
twenty-six pieces collected in Telling Time: Essays of a Visionary Filmmaker, first
printed in the Toronto quarterly, Musicworks between 1989 and 1999, establish
Brakhage’s place among the most elastic minds of his generation. Similarly at
ease discussing Russian poetry, romantic love, visual perception, child psychology,
human cognition, and religious belief as he is debating aesthetic or cinematic issues,
Brakhage’s essays spark from stream-of-consciousness synapses, sudden insights
culled from a lifetime of voracious reading, attentive reflection, and piercing
observation. The entries in Telling Time comprise Brakhage’s most mature writing,
but they continue to maintain the playful slips of language and leaps of faith
that distinguish earlier works such as Metaphors on Vision (1963), Film Biogra phies
(1977), and Film at Wit’s End (1989). Devoid of footnotes and academic jargon,
but replete with puns, intentional misspellings, humorous asides, conceptual
enjambments, run on sentences and non-sequiturs, his speculative criticism is
akin to a psycho-geographical dérive. Suggesting thought-in-motion (unselfconscious,
deliberate thinking), these freshly buoyant essays express the organic,
uneven “now-ness” of his more intuitive film compositions.
Given his lifelong study of modern classical music, the pronounced, asymmetrical
rhythm of Brakhage’s writing is apt. Music, he says, served as inspiration
for both his “photographic aesthetics” and his “actual editing orders” even
as his “creative philosophies” were becoming “silently oriented.” As Bruce
McPherson points out in his Editor’s Note, Brakhage’s column (titled “Time...on
dit”) arose as an exploration of film and music’s analogous relationship, and was
intended for Musicworks’ specialized readership. As time-based modes of expression,
both music and film depend on rhythm for unity, development and coherence.
“Film and Music are continuity Arts,” he writes. “They share ‘kin senses of
rhythm and tempo,” as well as “corollary aesthetics with respect to ‘tone.’”
But, as McPherson observes, Brakhage quickly departed from his investigation
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of film and music parallels to explore a vast array of cultural, scientific and philosophical
genres, drawing links between poetry, painting, astronomy, aesthetics,
and phenomenology. An unwavering fascination with rhythm, however, permeates
all of these interests. On the first page of the volume’s initial essay, “About
Time,” Brakhage introduces Charles Olson’s famous dictum, “Of rhythm is
image./ Of image is knowing/ And of knowing there is a construct.” These three
lines form a wellspring for many subsequent departures, such as the book’s final,
brief conjecture on vision, memory and perception. By juxtaposing open- and
closed-eye descriptions of falling leaves, Brakhage illustrates how representational
likeness is only one means for recounting a familiar visual scenario. He
argues that we must forget how we are trained to see (i.e. the normative perspective
derived from Renaissance art) in order to arrive at a fuller, more complex
engagement with the natural world. In his example, the intertwined swirl of imagined,
remembered, open-eye and hypnagogic images are inseparable components of
heightened perception. He writes, “The Leaf Ritual paradigm, which began this
essay, can be read, then, as a verbal parable which attempts to explicate the
results of such visual loss as is affiliated with the development of speech, as well as
experienced as a lament composed of rhythms in memoriam.” Here, Brakhage’s
oddly formed, prolix prose unintentionally points up the line dividing perception
and description, while simultaneously confounding figurative associations.
Contradictions between vision and language, between experience and arbitration,
animate Brakhage’s central aesthetic concerns. His cinema attempts to
create an unmediated vision through direct, ecstatic confrontation with the world.
In this sense his filmmaking can be thought of as a performative art subject to
coincidence and chance. But this notion takes for granted the discipline and precision
of his shooting style (in part determined by financial necessity). Like Action
Painting, projective verse, and jazz improvisation, Brakhage concentrates meaning
in the individual spontaneous act, where the artist, free from logistical constraints
and rational conscious thought, is both agent and site of interpretation.
Brakhage’s writing is part of a larger attempt to transgress the limits of language,
to arrive at a form that is purely cinematic and therefore outside of verbal
description. As he claims in Telling Time, “Primarily I write to exhaust language
on a given subject, to drive the mind beyond words, so that I can begin, and
begin again and again where words-leave-off [sic], veer their references into
vision, each verbal connective synapse, to effect that my mind’s eye have full
sway so that I can commence my work: I am a filmmaker.”
To this reader, the most captivating sections of Telling Time recall or
rehearse dialogues with his peers and/or investigate their work. Jim Davis, Phil
Solomon and Bruce Elder are among the filmmakers who receive extended attention
or close analysis. “An Inner Argument” relates a mid-1950s encounter at the New
School for Social Research in New York City in which Brakhage misunderstood
Davis’s claim that cinema had rendered all traditional arts superfluous. Thirty-five
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years later, he offers a posthumous corrective for his brash criticism, and an
appreciation of Davis’s prescient vision. Brakhage upholds Davis’s realization of
film’s formal potential, while pondering the fundamental aesthetic tension in
his work: a desire for pure, unnameable “light-play” on the one hand, and a (culturally
imposed) deference to photographic “likeness” on the other. Brakhage’s
writing on Solomon, a close friend, colleague and collaborator, is embedded
within a two-part essay that unpacks several cultural myths around romantic love.
Applying a psychoanalytic interpretation, Brakhage incisively extracts a subtle
critique of the Romantic representation of children that runs throughout the layered
visual fabric of Solomon’s lush, optically printed films. Finally, in his “argumentative
dance” with Elder, to whom he claims “closer kinship than any other
living filmmaker,” Brakhage’s postulate that thought can exist independently of
language, as felt sensation, is scrutinized.
Elder’s films also receive consideration in the volume’s longest and most
ambitious essay. “Space as Menace in Canadian Aesthetics,” which delineates
common characteristics between the Group of Seven and Canadian avant-garde
film, is a skilful act of comparative analysis, enabling the reader to perceive each
tradition in a new (newly-shared) light. Enlisting the inspiriting treatment of
landscape as a primary point of reference, Brakhage outlines assorted tactics utilized
by Canada’s first wave of cinema experimentalists, including Michael Snow,
Jack Chambers, Keewatin Dewdney, Arthur Lipsett, David Rimmer, and Joyce
Wieland; as well as a second wave comprised of Elder, Rick Hancox, Ellie Epp,
Barbara Sternberg, Richard Kerr, Phil Hoffman, Mike Hoolboom and others.
Brakhage’s penetrating analysis of flattened perspective in Canadian film and
painting validates him as a uniquely attentive and generous critic of Canadian
art. Meanwhile, through his active touring and lecturing, as well as his long-running
Monday night film salons, Brakhage engendered the first stateside recognition of
many of the aforementioned filmmakers. His encouragement and promotion of
daring lesser-known contemporaries remains one of his greatest legacies.
Another noteworthy essay offers a self-reflexive glimpse into Brakhage’s
own artistic method. “Painting Film” imparts the synaptic mental processes that
guide his hand-painted work. The image of a plate of salad atop his kitchen table,
transposed into written words through the prism of his mind’s-eye, reveals (in
both poetic and technical terms) how visual stimuli produced by the interplay of
light, shape, colour, and shifts of perspective are processed and translated onto
strips of clear celluloid. And in “The Lost Films” Brakhage endeavours to understand
the elusive nature of his less-recognized films, such as Nightcats (1956),
Oh Life-A Woe Story-The A Test News (1963), Black Vision (1965) and Nodes
(1981). A body of 400 films is destined to yield overlooked and under-appreciated
gems, not to mention ordinary or routine material. His sensitive consideration
of these “visually ineffable,” “unremarkable,” “ghost films” demonstrate the
evolving clarity an artist acquires about his or her own work over time.
BOOK REVIEW • COMPTE RENDU 103

Throughout this volume Brakhage’s writing is eminently quotable, occasionally
mystifying, and, at times, maddeningly allusive. Readers expecting an anthology
of key articles, essays and statements, or a précis of Brakhage’s theoretical ideas
and aesthetic interests, may be perplexed by the book’s wide-ranging subject matter
as well as the idiosyncrasy and wandering arc of some of its texts. Many of the
ideas presented in Telling Time, such as his notion of the “meat-ineffable,” a pictorial
extreme of human consciousness in direct contrast to “geometric” thought,
challenge accepted modes of behaviour, communication and perception.
Telling Time is an elegant, thoroughly engaging, timely and wide-ranging
work—though the cover image, which features hand-painted frames from
Brakhage’s Dante Quartet (1987), might suggest at first glance a book simply about
his filmmaking. As evidenced by the Chicago Review’s special issue, Stan
Brakhage: Correspondences (Winter 2001/Spring 2002), the DVD entitled By
Brakhage, a two-disc set released by Criterion in 2003, and Brakhage, Jim
Shedden’s 2001 feature documentary, Telling Time arrives at a period of increased
interest in, and dissemination of, the work of this legendary avant-garde filmmaker.
This situation is destined to expand over the coming years: a collection of
essays, photographs, personal statements, and reminiscences about Brakhage,
edited by David James, is already forthcoming, while other DVD plans are currently
in the works. These recent and impending additions to the Brakhage literature
and home video catalogue continue to entrench his legacy as the twentieth
century’s most significant American film artist. Telling Time is an essential book
for anyone interested in Brakhage, theories of visual perception, the relationship
of film to music, and the beats in between.
Concordia University
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