Event and Time
Of all the material covered thus far, the most fundamental statements regarding the nature of antactic structure are undoubtedly those of Mondrian, gathered together in the section of the essay "Mondrian and the Dialectic of Essence" (see above) entitled "A Dialectic of Form and Space." Mondrian's thought, as rigorous as his artistic practice, reduces his theory to two basic elements: form and space. In order to apply his analysis to film, we must find an appropriate equivalent in time for the notion of form.
The closest we can come to a term which must thus convey the idea of a temporal gestalt is probably "event." This term will suffice provided we are willing to apply it in a somewhat restricted sense. We must regard an event, like a form, as limited; thus having a beginning and ending; thus "figural" with respect to a temporal "ground." Substituting the term in this sense for the word "form" and the word "time" for "space," we may alter most of Mondrian's form-space dialectic in a manner that can be applied directly to negative montage. For example:
Nature reveals [events] in [time] ...[events] are part of [time] and ...the [time] between them appears as [an event] a fact which evidences the unity of [events] and [time] ...[An event] is limited [time] concrete only through its determination. Art has to determine [time] as well as [events] and to create the equivalence of these two factors ...Annihilation of the Event
In relation to the environment, simple [events] show a static balance ...In order to establish universal unity, their proper unity has to be destroyed: their particular expression has to be annihilated ...
Non-figurative art is created by establishing a dynamic rhythm of determinate mutual relations which excludes the formation of any particular [event].1
Fully in the spirit of Mondrian's "annihilation" of form, filmmaker Stan Brakhage consistently disrupts the "event." A relatively simple instance can be found at the very beginning of his film Window Water Baby Moving (WWBM):
The original footage, before editing, evidently "documented" a straightforward enough event: Brakhage's pregnant wife, Jane, taking a bath. In the final version the bath in question is thoroughly disassembled to the extent that it no longer is readable as a unified, coherent gestalt.
Brakhage's remarkable approach to montage is evidenced in his treatment of the three main elements of the opening sequence: the window, Jane's body, the bath water. Normally, shots of window and water would simply be "inserted" to condense time and mask discontinuities. These essentially static elements would thus form part of the (static) temporal "background" against which Jane's activities would be perceived. Brakhage deliberately organizes both montage and mise-en-scene to thwart this effect.
At the very beginning, we see two brief shots of the window punctuated and accordingly emphasized by two longer segmerts of black leader. Shots 5, 6 and 11 involve strong interactions between Jane's body and the window, filmed in such a way that the window light (sunlight) plays an active role. Especially important is Brakhage's treatment of the window frame, with its cross configuration. Window and water are linked and emphasized in shots 8 and 10 by the presence of this cross as a shadow, a presence underlined by the positional match with the window in the preceding shots. Later the same shadow appears centered on Jane's swollen belly as she lies in the tub.
While thus disrupting the temporal figure-ground by activating static "background" elements, Brakhage also breaks up and reassembles Jane's activities so as to weaken their event-value. For example, cuts 5-6, 6-7, 10-11 of the opening sequence are jump cuts involving abrupt discontinuities in the position of her body to the extent that we are unable to discern a coherent temporal sequence. Indeed, shot 7 seems to be taken from the latter part of shot 6, the missing intervening segment appearing later as shot 11.
An Overview
In its relative legibility, WWBM is comparatively restrained, similar to a work like Mondrian's Gray Tree of 1911. Most of Brakhage's mature films are closer to the more extreme late tree paintings of 1912-13, works grounded in the closest scrutiny of nature which, paradoxically, hover at the edge of total abstraction. In order to deal with films of such complexity, we must probe more deeply into the framework we have derived from Mondrian.
The "dialectic of form and space" may be broken down into three basic segments or "steps": 1. neutralization; 2. opening; 3. field-determination. According to Mondrian, the "expression of relations" necessary to the breakup of form is "veiled" by "natural appearance" which must therefore be neutralized. "Abstract forms or dislocated parts of forms can be relatively neutral." Any form, however, even the most abstract, remains a "limited form," exhibiting "static balance." As the "particular expression of any form," however neutralized, "has to be annihilated," limited form must therefore be opened to the surrounding space. As is apparent in Mondrian's tree paintings, the early stages of the opening of form are intimately connected with the use of passage, which literally opens each facet.
Ultimately, however, it is not only passage (which is, after all, present in many Futurist paintings) but the particular placement and design of the facet itself which determines the perceptual field in such a way as to thoroughly open form to space. When the facets enlarge to rectangular planes in the later works, it is their proportions, "the proportions within which the plastic means are placed," which create that "dynamic rhythm of determinate mutual relations" which is "dynamic equilibrium."
It is in terms of these three fundamentals of negative syntax, neutralization, opening, field-determination, that we may more fully treat Brakhage's annihilation of the event.
Neutralization 1-- The Image
Perhaps the simplest and most straightforward aspect of Brakhage's work are the various techniques he uses to weaken the "natural appearance" of the photographic image. Among these devices, some of the most common are: soft-focus or non-focus (the film Pasht, which records the birth of kittens is rendered completely abstract as a result of non-focus filming); extreme close-up (in the opening sequence of Cat's Cradle, for example, all shots of the Cat); extreme motion, often of the camera itself, resulting in a blur (as in the shots of swirling lights in the opening sequence of Anticipation of the Night); scratching or painting of the film strip; over or under exposure; superimposition (the Prelude and Parts 2, 3, and 4 of Dog Star Man are based on double, triple and quadruple exposure); the use of imageless film, i.e., clear, black, or colored leader. All of the above devices facilitate the "expression of relations" by tending to obliterate content. The great frequency with which they appear in Brakhage's work is, in itself, a measure of the intensity of his attack on signification.
Neutralization 2 -- Screen Space
There is a direct parallel between Brakhage's image neutralizations and Mondrian's efforts, in the late tree paintings, for example, to neutralize the representational aspect of the image through "use of abstract forms or dislocated parts of forms." But as we have consistently argued, the primary field of film is time, not space. The neutralization of naturalistic forms can only be a secondary consideration with respect to disruption of the event. To this end, it is screen-space itself, abstract or naturalistic, that must be neutralized in favor of an essentially temporal determination.
Much has been made of Brakhage's flattening of space, an effect produced through shot-composition and an emphasis on surfaces and shadows. Undeniably, all of the image-neutralizing devices cited above also tend to contribute to the neutralization of space through the production of a flattening effect. But the attack on spatial depth remains an essentially pictorial strategy for intensifying two-dimensional space, which must be neutralized as well. The special nature of cinema demands that we go beyond the limits of pictorialism.
The closest analogy to the remarkable interplay of space and time in film can be found in that other doubly-"dimensional" art: music. While organization of the musical "pitch-field" is far simpler than that of cinematic screen-space, both play a similar formal role. At any given moment in a piece of music we are hearing a particular determination of the pitch-field, i.e., usually what is called a "chord" or, more generally a "sound." At any given moment in a film, we are seeing a particular determination of screen-space, i.e., what is called an image." Time confers on the elements of sound or image what is, in both cases, called "motion." On a larger scale, temporal determination is equivalent to structure itself.
As the strong formal analogy between pitch and image suggests, Brakhage's neutralizations of screen-space may be understood in the light of those neutralizations of the pitch-field so characteristic of musical modernism. The powerfully centric pull of tonality was resisted in two superficially different but fundamentally similar ways: the "bi-tonality" of Stravinsky and the "atonality" of Schönberg and Webern. Serialism is essentially a methodical generalization of the latter approach.
As bi-tonality sets up bi-polar oppositions between two mutually negating keys, so certain Brakhage films are polarized between spatial extremes. An especially consistent example is the film, Cat's Cradle (CC).
Early in the film, the face of a woman -- Brakhage's wife, Jane -- is consistently shown on screen left. Suddenly we see a male head in shadow on the lower right. At one point there is a rapid cut from the male figure to an equally shadowy female figure, also on the right. Through plastic cutting the two seem to merge. There is an immediate cut back to Jane, "isolated" on screen left.
Later in the film, the polarities are reversed. We see rapidly alternating shots of Jane, on the right, Brakhage himself on the left. Still later, the two women are consistently shown on screen left, the two men on screen right. Spatial opposition is at its strongest toward the end of this sequence, when Brakhage turns his head toward screen right, followed by Jane turning left; the other man then appears, immediately moving to the right--shots of him alternate with those of a vaguely defined figure moving to the left.
If the relatively simple, largely static oppositions of CC may be compared with bi-tonality, the far more complex, dynamic oppositions of a film like Anticipation of the Night (AON) recall the multi-polarities of atonality. (Sorry, no video of this film is available online.) The key to this aspect of AON is to be found in six pages of handwritten notes for the film, reproduced in Brakhage's book, Metaphor's on Vision. A peculiar feature of these notes is the mysterious arrow-notations which pervade them, as in the following excerpt:
As should be clear to anyone familiar with the completed film, these notations must be interpreted as vectors (arrows indicating direction of motion). As Schoenbergian pitch-space is thoroughly polarized by the mutual repulsions of the twelve tones, Brakhage's screen-space is similarly polarized by the systematic opposition of ten vectors:
Much in AON involves vector oppositions of an extremely violent kind, the effect of which is to thwart any attempts on the part of viewers to orient themselves in space. The film begins, however, with a particularly interesting organization of milder oppositions. In the first shot of the film, we see a patch of light oriented on a left-lower to right-upper diagonal. Within this rhomboid, a shadow moves along the opposite diagonal, first up from the bottom, then back down to the center. The shot may be diagrammed as follows:
Vector 1 Vector 2
While shot 2, swirls of moving lights, has no relation to shot 1 in terms of content, its treatment of space presents a meaningful continuation. The shot begins with motion along the same diagonal as the patch of light, from right upper to left lower. The lights then swirl in the opposite direction, clockwise:
Table I
All the vectors are aligned on the diagonal opposite to that of the light patch. Each vector is opposed to those before and after it on at least one directional axis: rignt-left or up-down. Within each shot, the vectors are in 180 degree opposition. The diagram also reveals a strong parallel with some fundamental procedures of the twelve-tone method. Shot 3 inverts the relationships of shot 1; shot 13 reverses the direction of the vectors of shot 1; shot 15, minus the extension, is to 13 as 3 is to 1, that is, an inversion. Thus shot 1 may be compared to the "original form" of a tone-row; 3, to the inversion; 13, to the retrograde; 15, to the retrograde-inversion. Shot 15, with its extension, dovetails two forms of the "row" in a manner consistent with serial practice. Most interesting, perhaps, is the manner in which the tilt of the light patch remains invariant between original form and retrograde, inversion and retrograde-inversion, in a manner recalling standard serial procedures.
While we could be making too much of a fortuitous parallel, we can hardly ignore Brakhage's own statement that AON was "specifically inspired by the relationships I heard between the music of J. S. Bach and Anton Webern."3 If the film as a whole lacks the thoroughgoing systemizations of Schönberg, Webern, even Bach, the above example reveals Brakhage's awareness of and interest in the possibilities of systematic planning along such lines.
Opening 1 -- Neutralization of Motion
AON begins by emphasizing the contrast between the rapid, inchoate motions of the swirling lights and the quiet, measured movements of the shadow-protagonist. As the film progresses, the motion becomes consistently more intense, the vector oppositions more violent. In one sequence, we see phalanxes of huge trees, photographed from a moving automobile or train. In shot after shot, motion vectors oppose one another head-on to the point that our vision becomes vertiginous: a procession of trees seems magically set in motion across a space thoroughly drained of depth, so unstable and disorienting that we hardly know where on the screen to place our attention from moment to moment.
In sequences like this, space is literally dissolved by motion. But motion itself is threatened by its own violent contradictions. In the midst of the tree-processions, we are suddenly thrust back into the interior of a house. The trees are now seen through a window which is itself placed into a rightward motion, apparently the result of a camera pan to the left. In the next shot, the camera appears to pan in the opposite direction, right, moving the window back toward screen left. So strong is the sense of right-motion from the previous shot, that the viewer is half inclined to pick up the implied rightward motion of the invisible camera as a continuation of the preceding literal motion of the window. Yet the window is now moving right-left. Such a shot, in which two vectors appear to cancel one another, is strongly analogous to the Cubist facet described in "A Visual Paradox," from the essay "Passage from Realism to Cubism" (see above), which must be read as receding in two contradictory directions at once.
This kind of situation, not at all rare in Brakhage, must be understood in the light of our earlier discussion in the segment titled "Negative Motion," from the essay "The Cinematic Denial of Difference," (see above). Strong vector contradictions of this sort tend to destroy our sense of motion figure-ground. The event, defined as a figure of motion, opens out to time as stasis, the ground of motion. Thus the neutralization of screen-space, in its most extreme form, is also an important tool in the opening of the limited event to time.
Opening 2 -- Plastic Cutting
By far the most pervasive and potent tool for the opening of pictorial form is Cubist passage. As has already been demonstrated, Brakhage's complex and varied use of what he has called "plastic cutting" has an essentially equivalent effect--cinematic events and sub-events (shots) are opened to one another (and thus the temporal field generally) through smooth transitions on the "temporal surface." Plastic cutting is extremely common in films like AON and Dog Star Man (DSM). The opening sequence of AON contains several such cuts, linking shots 1-2, 2-3, 3-4, 13-14, 14-15, which all begin and end in darkness. Shot 5, beginning in total darkness and ending brightly, can itself be regarded as a passage from shot 4 to 6. Later in the same film a baby's head "becomes" a blob of light through a carefully executed match of shape and position.
More extreme continuities permeate much of Dog Star Man.
In the opening segments, highly neutralized, inchoate images merge to the extent that resolution into individual shots is all but impossible. In sequences of this kind, with images, spaces, motions in a constant state of "becoming" (i.e., mutual negation), the viewer's perception opens to the temporal surface where the "limited event" is thoroughly dissolved.
Field Determination 1-Rhythm
While neutralization and opening are necessary elements of negative syntax, they are insufficient. As in so many Futurist works, neutralized, fragmented forms can all too easily fall under the sway of higher level positive structures. In the process, not only the form, but the contingent, concrete elements which give it life, will be engulfed and absorbed. Negative syntax paradoxically annihilates the particular form or event in order to promote such elements, the particular traces or details hidden therein.4 This, at least, is its initial thrust. Ultimately, as in Mondrian's abstractions, the life-giving principle behind our awareness of contingent, concrete detail is all that remains.
The key to this principle, which Mondrian calls "dynamic equilibrium," is a certain kind of fundamentally disjunctive rhythm or proportion. While Mondrian uses both terms interchangeably, the former would seem most appropriate in the late tree paintings and other works of the same period, where great stress is laid upon open, disjunct linear accents. In the later abstractions, where the lines join to form relatively stable rectangular planes, we may more readily speak of "proportions." With respect to the time-field, a similar distinction is made in our discussion of music (see "A Field Theory of Music Semiosis - Part 2," below), where rhythm has traditionally been expressed in terms of "attack-points." Stravinsky and the early Webern employed heavily accented, "syncopated" attacks to break up the traditional symmetries, disrupt the rhythmic flow and stress particulars. The later Webern generalized this process into a measured determination of true durations with a "planar" weight (as opposed to attack-points), an approach which led, via Cage and Stockhausen, to Moment Form.
Brakhage, who studied with Cage, and has more than once acknowledged the strong influence of Webern, Messiaen and the post-Webernians, has developed his own approach to both strategies. In many films, he employs a variety of devices to create disjunct rhythm through use of visual accent: sudden hard cuts introduced into a context dominated by plastic cutting; sudden contrasts from light to dark and vice-versa; sudden joltings of the camera, etc.
An especially important source of rhythmic activity are subject-motions occurring within a single shot. Some can be extraordinarily subtle, such as the drift of a falling snowflake. Others, the sudden turn of a head, the clenching of a fist, even an eye-blink, produce distinct beats which, when reinforced by other beats, can play an active rhythmic role. Most forceful of all in-shot motions are those which interact strongly with the frame-line, producing a distinct accent at the moment of contact.
The interplay of three types of accent is illustrated in a remarkable sequence from AON. The second shot of the sequence is subdivided by a strong in-shot accent produced when the camera suddenly stops. This is followed by a hard cut to black, punctuated by the appearance of light sparks. Shots 4 and 6, like 2, contain accents created by sudden camera movement. Shot 5, like 3, is black with bright accents. All combine to create the following characteristically rapid and irregular rhythm (the basic unit being the 1/24 second duration of the frame):
Shot 2 [20-21] Shot 3 [ 6-2-1-1-1-9] Shot 3 [9-15-15] Shot 4 [2-4-2-7-3] Shot 5 [15-5]
Note how in-shot accents become incorporated into the montage. The sudden arrest of the camera is placed at the midpoint of shot 2. The 9 black frames at the end of shot 3 are followed by 9 frames of stability at the beginning of shot 4. The 15 frames of camera motion which immediately follow are similarly balanced by 15 frames of stability before the shot is cut. Here we have the cinematic equivalent of those "units which articulate themselves by means of reciprocal effect" that Pousseur found in early Webern. In a situation such as this, with temporal flow continually interrupted by unpredictable accents, with each moment continually responding to and balancing its immediate neighbor, the most indistinct and ephemeral details-a slight discoloration of grass (AON, sequence 3, shot 2), the delicate opening of a baby's hand (AON, sequence 4, shot 2) move into the foreground of the viewer's awareness.
Field Determination 2--Proportion
The numbers provided in the rhythmic breakdown presented above stand not only for intervals between attack-points, as in traditional music, where such intervals are passive, but also for ratios between those static durations made perceptually active by the disruptive power of the attacks. More in line with the practice of the later Webern, Brakhage also employs more purely durational relations, where accent is subordinated to a proportional tension between shot lengths. This approach, found most often when (literally) static shots must be related, is especially revealing for the insights it provides into Brakhage's treatment of the temporal field.
Let us look again at the very beginning of WWBM:
The first four shots, lacking any motion, thus any internal rhythmic cues, have clearly been provided with "externally" determined durations (in number of frames): 11, 31, 10, 31. The close approximation to the ratio 1:3:1:3 cannot be ignored. Sequence 2, consisting exclusively of essentially static shots, exhibits the following durations: 10, 81, 10, 19, 40, 20, 20, 10, 20, 10, 10, 10, 120, 30. There can be no doubt that simple ratios are intended.
More consistent evidence for Brakhage's concern with the precise determination of temporal proportions on a shot to shot basis is provided by a film remarkable for its combination of in-shot staticism and rapid cutting: Cat's Cradle (CC).
The film begins with a shot of hands clapping. The claps, dividing the shot into three parts, of 4, 8 and 4 frames respectively, seem to be setting a tempo for the rest of the film. The second shot, an extreme close-up of cat's fur, lasts 24 frames, exactly 3:2 in relation to the 16 frame initial shot. Shot 3 is 8 frames long, 1/3 the length of its predecessor.
Unlike WWBM, CC continues to present consistently rational proportions, as illustrated, for the first 50 shots, in Table II. (See Dan Clark, Brakhage, Filmmaker's Cinemateque, 1966):
The ratio underlying each pair of shot length numbers appears immediately below them. Aside from three slight discrepancies, apparently errors or slight adjustments, all pairs reduce to simple ratios, most to 1:1, 1:2, 2:3, 3:4, 3:1 (or the same reversed). Somewhat later into the film, a new pattern emerges. By shot 95, simple proportions based largely on ratios such as 3:5 and 5:7 dominate. Here, for example, are the shot-lengths for shots 117-134: 5, 5, 5, 7, 3, 5, 5, 3, 7, 15, 3, 7, 5, 5, 7, 3, 15, 10. The fascinating combination of simple shot to shot ratios and complex, unpredictable higher level relationships, exhibited above as well as in Table II, recalls Henri Pousseur's comment on the later Webern's"attempt to regulate the proportion of regularity which must exist within any irregularity."6
As with the purely ad hoc rhythms of AON, discussed in the previous section, the disjunct proportions of CC tend to disrupt the temporal flow, placing a strong perceptual weight on each shot, no matter how brief or apparently inconsequential. To better understand this remarkable process of temporal analysis which posits, in the words of Annette Michelson, "the sense of a continuous present, of a filmic time which devours memory and expectation in the presentation of presentness,"7 we must continue to explore our musical analogy.
Moment Form and Negative Montage
A key event in the musical evolution we have traced (see "A Field Theory of Music Semiosis," below) is John Cage's effort to let "the sounds enter the time-space centered within themselves"8 by dissolving the "glue" of musical continuity through use of chance operations. That Brakhage, who studied with Cage, was unquestionably affected by such ideas, is most obviously apparent in his (Brakhage's) account of the origins of the DSM Prelude. One of the two superimposed film rolls of this work was, in its original form at least, generated largely by random methods derived from those of Cage.9
Less obvious, but far more pervasive in Brakhage's work generally, is the impact of Cage's absorbtion in the contingent, concrete "sound-object." The notion of such an object, isolated yet open to its spatio-temporal surroundings, gives rise, ultimately, to Stockhausen's moment form. As sound-objects or moments can consist of almost anything, from isolated tones to dissonant chords to noises, electronic sounds, tape recorded sound effects, even traditional tonal passages, so Brakhage's neutralized "light objects" are drawn from a wide variety of sources: solid colors, black or clear leader, densely painted or scratched film, photographic images distorted by odd lenses, close-up, superimposition, etc., and also the most conventional imagery, neutralized simply by virtue of its placement within a negative structure.
A moment-form moment "is not merely regarded as the consequence of the previous one and the prelude to the coming one, but as something individual, independent,and centered in itself ... "10 Unlike the limited, closed event, however, the moment is defined as fully open to the temporal field. While an event must begin and end as a function of that gestalt closure which will set it off from surrounding events, a moment, fully open to what is around it, need simply start and stop.
For musicologist Jonathan Kramer, the moment-centeredness of moment form is intimately connected with the destruction of traditional musical continuity, what he calls the "metaphor of musical motion." Time, traditionally defined by goal directed motions ("movements") perceived psychologically in terms of affect, is redefined by certain modernist composers as a set of static durations ("moments") perceived materially in terms of an objectively measurable proportional determination. With the breakdown of continuity, each moment can more easily be apprehended as an entity in itself rather than as a part of some hierarchically ordered progress.
Something quite similar is at work in Brakhage. We do not need to evoke the most extreme effects of "negative motion" in order to appreciate the vital role of staticism in so much of his work. Everything already said regarding image neutralization, from non-focus to use of imageless film, can also relate to the weakening of motion. Paradoxically, where motion seems strongest, as in AON, Brakhage's tendency is to pit it against itself through the use of strong vector oppositions and disjunctive accents, thus promoting stasis. Certain films, such as CC, consist largely of static, if extremely brief, shots. As in moment-form, the static quality of individual shots gives them a durational weight in direct relation to their measurable length, thus promoting a proportional determination of the temporal "surface" potentially equivalent to Mondrian's treatment of space. The high degree of consistency in the choice of shot lengths for a film like CC does indeed point to a conscious effort at the determination of temporal proportions essentially in accord with Kramer's view of moment-form (see "A Field Theory of Musical Semiosis -- Part 2," below).
While much in Brakhage's treatment of the temporal field is actually closer to Webern or Cage than to moment-form per se, Kramer's analysis does help us understand certain basics. Each temporal detail in Brakhage, like each moment-form moment, is open to details, shots, "moments" before and after it. Each film, like a moment-form work, is, as a whole, open to its temporal surroundings, not requiring any particular beginning or ending trappings, simply starting and stopping. Nevertheless, despite such openness, each brief shot, gesture, trace, is, like a moment-form moment, "individual, independent, centered in itself."
The Determinational Basis
While Kramer places great stress on the proportional relationships of moment-form, he has little to say about the manner in which such relationships are to be determined. There is good reason for this. All attempts to reduce such determination to a system, from Post-Webernian serialism to the use of chance operations, have left much to be desired.
While Brakhage has flirted with procedures close to both serialism and Cageian indeterminacy, neither has been more than a point of departure for what is, fundamentally, an intuitive process. For example, the ultimate value of Cage's methods to the creation of the DSM Prelude was that they helped to thwart, in Brakhage's words, "all brain dominance," so that a "hyperconscious" state might more easily emerge. As Brakhage has often stressed12, such a hyperconsciousness, bordering on trance, the antithesis of logic or system, is the ultimate arbiter of that which is best in his work.
Our analysis of Mondrian has already alerted us to the danger of equating such a state with something so vague as "subjectivity." In fact, as we have learned, there are good reasons for assuming that for Brakhage, as for Mondrian, such states originate in highly objective experience -- the intense observation of and reaction to external contingencies. This experience, certainly as potent as indeterminacy in thwarting "brain dominance," leads, finally, to the emergence of that "axiomatic" operation of an autonomous perceptual intuition which we have found at the heart of Mondiran's radical evolution. If Brakhage's field determinations, like those of Mondrian, ultimately resist explication of either a rational (systematic) or irrational (random) nature, their precisions are nevertheless apparent -- to the eye.
Toward the Cinematic Essence
The intensity with which, so often, Brakhage attacks the image, coupled with his undoubted concern for the establishment of precise temporal relationships, might lead us to conclude that, ultimately, his imagery exists simply for the purpose of articulating temporal structure. While there may well be a grain of truth in such a hypothesis, it is clear that Brakhage has never followed Mondrian from the referential complexities of the late tree paintings to the pure field determinations of the subsequent abstractions.
There has, of course, been no lack of pure abstractionism in the long history of the film avant-garde, from the first experiments of Eggeling and Richter to the computer grapnics of the Whitney Brothers and Vanderbeek. Despite the many very real excellences to be found in such work, however, we will search in vain among the abstractionists for signs of a highly developed, consistently disjunctive, negative treatment of the temporal field. There would, in fact, among the more widely known film makers, seem to be only one formally comparable with Brakhage in any rigorous sense: the Austrian, Peter Kubelka. As Kubelka's strategies simplify and clarify certain structural themes in a manner recalling the reductiveness of Mondrian, a brief consideration of his work will complete our analysis.
Kubelka's Adebar dates from 1957 (one year, in fact, before the completion of AON).
This film, which critic P. Adams Sitney has compared with "Webern's densest compositions,"13 is about one and a half minutes in length. Adebar is based on a motif of pygmy music, exactly 26 frames long, which recurs continually on the soundtrack. Every shot is either that length, half that length or twice that length. The basis for the montage of this film is a scheme involving the permutation of five basic shots, each of which can be presented in either positive or negative. As every positive shot is preceded and followed by a negative one, and vice versa, every cut in this black and white film is maximally disjunctive.
Schwechater (1958) is also based on the permutation of a limited number of basic elements. Each shot can be only one, two, four, eight or sixteen frames long. In this case, each shot is preceded and followed by a stretch of imageless film, either black or clear leader.14 (NB: this youtube video begins with a long stretch of irrelevant leader.)
Adebar and Schwechater, in their extraordinary interplay of rapid cutting and shot to shot disjunction, their precise calibration of temporal proportion, and their intense celebration of ephemerality as vividness, are comparable only with films like AON or CC (though there can be no question of influence in either direction). If the Brakhage films can, however, best be understood in relation to the late Analytic Cubism of Picasso in 1911, or Mondrian in 1913, those of Kubelka are closer to that subsequent trend toward simplification known as Synthetic Cubism.
The strong contrasts and hard cuts of Adebar and Schwechater recall similar contrasts and hard edges in Picasso and Braque beginning in 1912, as passage begins to give way to clearly defined proportional determination. The use of banal imagery that is nevertheless visually striking, functioning as empty signs, is of course a hallmark of later Cubism. The imageless black and white leader of Schwechater recalls the equally imageless planes of solid color so common in Cubist collage. Simplification of proportional relationships in connection with the use of predetermined schemes is especially important in the Synthetic Cubism of both Léger and Gris.
If Adebar and Schwechater radically reduce the filmic medium to a few basic elements, Kubelka's next film, Arnulf Rainer (1960), goes even farther.
This work, a response to his first viewing of a Brakhage film (AON), represents its author's desire to "get to the absolute basis of my medium, and to handle it as purely as was possible."15 In Arnulf Rainer, as in the mature works of Mondrian, there is a calculated reduction to those materials best suited to the clearest possible articulation of proportion. Kubelka uses only clear leader, black leader and, for the soundtrack, white noise or silence.
A certain amount of confusion has arisen from the association of Arnulf Rainer with certain later, similarly reductive American works known as "flicker films." While Kubleka's film does, indeed, employ powerfully stroboscopic passages which induce the "flicker" effect, such passages are always balanced by stretches of stable black or white and often counterpointed by the sound track. Like Brakhage, Kubelka has no interest in inducing the sustained hypnotic effects which are, of course, of the essence in true "flicker" films.
If works like Tony Conrad's The Flicker or Paul Sharits' N:o:t:h:i:n:g are best compared with similarly hallucinatory paintings by Bridget Riley or Victor Vasarely, Arnulf Rainer belongs with the precisely differentiated clarities of Mondrian. The film's stark contrast of black and white clearly recalls the look of a typical Mondrian, dominated by white rectangles and thick black lines.
More basic, however, the abrupt juxtapositions of black and white are equivalent, as fundamental oppositions, to the oppositions of horizontal and vertical in Mondrian. This collapse of color contrast and dimensional opposition into a single category is especially significant. By reducing the ground from the two-dimensional picture plane to the one-dimersional film strip without sacrificing the possiblity of richness or scope (as, for example, in minimal or conceptual art), Kubelka has significantly intensified the reductive process beyond the point reached by Mondrian. Finally, the total neutralization of both image and motion brings the proportional relationships of Arnulf Rainer completely into the foreground of the viewer's awareness. As in Mondrian, the determination of equilibrated proportions is essentially equivalent to composition itself.
Less obvious, but equally significant to its affinity with Mondrian, is the manner in which the "pure" elements of Arnulf Rainer reveal a truly musical plasticity. In this respect, the achievements of Schönberg, Webern and their followers become relevant. With the reduction of film to completely abstract, neutral elements, lending themselves easily to notation and manipulation, the application of powerful serial procedures to the determination of the cinematic time field becomes an intriguing possibility.16
1. Cf. "Dialectic of Form and Space" in "Mondrian and the Dialectic of Essance," above.
2. Brakhage, op. cit. [unpaginated]
3. Stan Brakhage, "Letter to Ronna Page," in The Avant-Garde Film, op. cit. p. 134. Brakhage's musical background and interests have never been sufficiently appreciated. He studied with John Cage and has written of his strong debt, not only to Bach and Webern, but Boulez, Pousseur, Stockhausen and Messiaen. See "Letter ..." p. 136 and Sitney, "Autobiography ..." op. cit. p. 210.
4. The reader should of course recognize that the word "event" is now being used in a much more limited sense than before. In applying earlier discussions to the present context, it would be necessary to substitute event-trace or detail, in most cases, for event.
5. The breakdown of image content and shot length in CC is based on the shot list appearing in Dan Clark, Brakhage (New York:Film Makers Cinematheque, 1966) pp. 44-46. The proportional analysis is my own.
6. See note 11, "A Field Theory of Musical Semiosis -- part 2", above.
7. "Camera Lucida ..." op. cit. p. 37.
8. See note 16, "A Field Theory of Musical Semiosis -- part 2", above.
9. see P. Adams Sitney, "Interview With Stan Brakhage,", (1963) in Film Culture Reader, ed. Sitney (New York:Praeger, 1970) pp. 222-224.
10. See note 20, "A Field Theory of Musical Semiosis -- part 2", above.
11. Sitney, "Interview ..." op. cit. pp. 223, 228.
12. See, for example, Ibid. pp. 214-215, 223-224, 227-228.
13. Visionary Film, op. cit. p. 333.
14. Information on both films is drawn from Peter Kubelka, "The Theory of Metrical Film," in The Avant-Garde Film, op. cit. pp. 148, 154, 155.
15. Ibid. p. 156.
16. An attempt of this sort is the basis for an ongoing project of my own. See the final essay in this series, "A Theory of Pure Film," first published in Field of Vision 3 (Winter, 1978).
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