The Untutored Vision of Stan Brakhage - The Body as an Approach to Filmmaking in Window Water Baby Moving by Shira Segal (Indiana University, Bloomington)
(This article is presented in APA format.)
Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. -- Stan Brakhage (1963b, 12)
The "untutored" vision promoted by American avant-garde and experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) is a vision that defies logic, Renaissance perspective, and traditional cinematic modes of seeing. It is a vision whose purpose is to capture and illustrate, in Brakhage's words, "…the emotional truth and the spiritual truth" (1994, 145) of perception and being. The unruled eye is open to what Brakhage calls "a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color" (1963b, 12). Whether it is open-eye vision, dream vision, or hypnagogic vision, Brakhage's approach to perception and the depiction of that perception on film is an exploration of emotion, embodiment and the imagination.
The untutored vision of Brakhage's work is achieved through the hand-held camera, the use of silence, image clusters and associative editing as well as scratching and painting onto the film surface itself. Influenced by Eisenstein's notions of montage and plastic editing, Brakhage's unpredictable yet rhythmic editing techniques create an emotionally driven aesthetic that is based on the daily and on the body.
The content of many of Brakhage's early work is filled with the mundane (Latin for 'daily') images of his life - his first wife Jane, their five children, their cabin home, the Colorado mountains, etc. Film scholar Andrew Light calls Brakhage's attention to the mundane "an aesthetics of the 'everyday'" (2003, 55), formulating what will be labeled by Brakhage and others, particularly P. Adams Sitney, as the "dailiness film" (2003, 225). For example, Brakhage filmed all five births of his children with Jane's permission, assistance, and inspiration. Eventually Brakhage's work evolves into an image-less depiction, a vision constituted of painted and scratched film leader or the reflections and refractions of light through a glass ashtray. Whether or not the body's physical form is depicted in the content of the film image, all of Brakhage's work is corporeally based, that is, based on Brakhage's experience of his body through vision.
"For Brakhage," explains filmmaker and scholar Bruce Elder, "a film is ideally a document (that is, a work that possesses energy equivalent to what inspired it) of the filmmaker's experiences of vision… proper to his or her own body" (1998, 447-448). The visual representation of the body's experience through the film medium constitutes Brakhage approach to visionary filmmaking. This involves an acute attention to the body in the act of vision as well as a trenchant perception of the various types of vision occurring. Vision includes not only typical open-eye vision ("what we are directly conscious of" {1993, 11}), but also peripheral and hypnagogic vision in addition to what Brakhage calls "moving visual thinking, dream vision and memory feedback - in short, whatever affects the eyes, the brain and the nervous system" (1993, 11). Because vision is a bodily act, Brakhage's filmmaking is a process of embodiment in an attempt to represent and reproduce the many elements that constitute perception.
Brakhage characteristically varies the intensity, length, speed, and content of each shot, preserving almost none of the parametric values from shot to shot, though in his case parametric variations are not systematic but instead respond to what he feels from moment to moment as he shoots. (1998, 79)
As a result, Brakhage's work disregards chronological time and continuity editing in proper avant-garde style for the purposes of portraying the feeling, rhythm and associations of an experience rather than the straight image of it. For example, Brakhage's later childbirth films (starting with Thigh Line Lyre Triangular {1961}) explore emotion and association by painting on the film surface itself and intercutting seemingly unrelated images in an attempt to recreate colors and images evoked by the birth but not present in the footage. Seemingly the most straightforward of all his birth films, Window Water Baby Moving (1959) is perhaps the most accessible and revealing example in which to explicate Brakhage's theories of vision, their embodiment on film, and the implications of an aesthetic that is emotional, political and corporeal.
Window Water Baby Moving's opening shots are of an angled window, Jane's legs stepping into the frame of the window threshold and her body moving downwards, revealing her pregnant belly and breasts in silhouette as she lowers herself into the bathtub below the window. This movement is fragmented, repeated and broken down, showing the event from many different angles, heights and distances. The process that takes us (first) from the empty window frame to (second) a filled window frame with Jane's pregnant body and then (third) to a medium close-up view of Jane pulling her long hair over her shoulders and settling into the bathtub, is highly complicated and continually interrupted. Actions are repeated, time is confused, and one is presented with a beautifully chaotic collection of images whose structure and lengths are ever-changing in an undetermined duration of content. Spatial and temporal continuity do not exist, nor do elements of straight narrative or typical point of view shots. Momentary seconds of black leader are dispersed between momentary seconds of Jane's body, the bathtub, the window, and the water.
Images of Jane's face are intercut with images of her large, pregnant belly rising above the bathtub water. She dunks under the water, comes up laughing and smiling towards the camera. Many images of her stomach, shot from different angles, are quickly cut together, causing her protruding bellybutton to dance about the screen (depending on where it is placed in the frame for each new shot). There is movement from within, causing her stomach to shift and change, indicating the baby's foot kicking or an elbow. She is either covered in water, recently emerging or floating above. Her hand touches her belly, Brakhage's hand touches her belly, her hands touch his hands. Brakhage looks tenderly towards the bathtub, Brakhage attentively and warmly kisses her. She is laughing and smiling, looking at the camera, looking at her belly, kissing him back. Images of her belly are dispersed and interrupting throughout. Their hands, her stomach, their faces kissing and smiling. A few seconds of black leader separates this bathtub scene and the rest of the film. Jane explains,
By the afternoon of November 12, we had taken some moving pictures of the baby moving and kicking before being born, and that night there were contractions, and we were very happy and took some more film of our happy faces and some of the cat and played games and watched the clock… (1963, 231)
These opening minutes of the film comprise a collection of images that are visually and thematically clustered and yet continually interrupted and interrupting each other. These self-interrupted images are also edited into and throughout the birthing process. Terrifying moments, such as her vulva bulging and opening or her face in what appears to be agony, are intercut with shots of her in the bathtub, at ease and smiling. The result is that moments of remembrance are placed into and within the potentially traumatic and stressful image of a mother-to-be in distress and labor. One is persistently reminded of Jane as she appeared in the film's beginning - happy, expectant, and resting in the bathtub - despite the enormous transformation her body is going through before the camera.
Often Jane is approached by Brakhage's camera through close-ups and quick cutting; she is shot upside-down or through a spinning camera. Other times the camera explores her form through a series of pan shots which appear to be controlled. For example, the camera pans up from the bed to her face and back down into the bed sheets during the early stages of birth. This same camera movement is used later when Jane is having contractions and appears to be in pain. These pans, however, cease to appear once the baby's head begins to crown, and are replaced with shots of Jane's distraught face interrupted.
When the doctor's rubber gloved hands are shown touching Jane, it is quickly followed by a shot of Brakhage's hand on Jane's stomach, visually restoring agency to the couple rather than the doctor. Brakhage's editing is aligned with Jane's narrative description of the filming of the birth which also places emphasis on the union of the parents-to-be rather than the presence of the doctor,
Clickety-clackety-buzz goes the camera. Something tremendous is happening to me. I have entered into a world of beautiful agony - agony of great beauty, joyous agony, unbearable beauty. I roar like a lion. Stan films, clickety-clackety-buzz, his hands are trembling with the camera, but clickety-clackety-buzz anyway. I roar again and pant fast like I had run a mile and roar, and Stan films, and we are so very happy because the baby is coming at last! (1963, 232)
As the baby's head emerges, rubber gloved hands are seen moving the baby by her ears and shoulders, clearing the baby's mouth and nose with a suction device. Brakhage nearly drops the camera in bewilderment as the baby emerges from Jane's body. The resulting image is a shaking swooping depiction of the newly born baby girl moving towards the camera and opening her eyes before being held upside-down by her ankles. As will be discussed, Brakhage's use of the hand-held camera causes the images in Window Water Baby Moving to be inherent to the filmmaker's body and the emotions experienced by his body. This moment in which Brakhage nearly drops the camera provides an acted out example of Brakhage's belief, according to Elder, "that all emotional experiences register in vision, that emotion and seeing are integral to one another" (1998, 448). Brakhage's bewilderment is experienced throughout his body and is extended to the hand-held camera which records it.
What follows is a succession of interruptions and moments of remembrance, cutting back and forth between the newly born baby on her back, screaming and moving all limbs as the cord is cut, and Jane's bathtub belly. This is followed by a quickly cut progression of the events in (more or less) chronological order: Jane's bathtub body (both face and belly), Jane's birthday belly, Jane's body at different stages before the crowning, the baby's head crowning and birth, the cord being cut, and finally Jane delivering the placenta. The camera shakily portrays the cut into and opened placenta being examined by the doctor's now-red rubber gloved hands.
Jane describes the scene in the following way, "Stan is laughing and covered with sweat, and the placenta is born, and the doctor and nurse do this and that to the baby, while I take some pictures of Stan because he is so beautiful, and then they all have a drink, but I am quite drunk..." (1963, 233). Indeed, we then see shots of Brakhage, completely astonished and bewildered, intercut with shots of the baby at Jane's nipple, Jane's face, and Jane's lips. The film ends with Jane looking down at her new baby girl, interspersed with images of the baby suckling. The final three shots progress closer and closer to the baby's head, momentarily interrupted with black leader.
Stylistically, Window Water Baby Moving shares at least three signature elements with most other Brakhage films: the hand-held camera, the use of silence, and the scratched title onto the film surface itself. Each of these aesthetic decisions reflect Brakhage's underlying sentiment that the act of seeing is a physical act and yet also an all-encompassing activity that envelops and symbolizes the other senses. This is in accordance with Elder's understanding of Brakhage's focus on vision above all else, "Brakhage maintains that all changes in one's body affect one's faculties of sight; indeed, he seems to believe that the organ of sight is ultimately the entire body" (1997, 312). This seems to suggest that the body is primarily a seeing apparatus whose features ultimately serve the sense of sight. If, according to Elder, Brakhage believes "that all emotional experiences register in vision" (1998, 448), then it may suggest that the body's primary function is to feel emotion through the eyes rather than the rest of the body. The hand-held camera is perhaps the most immediate example of how this is enacted in Brakhage's approach to filmmaking.
Film scholar Michael O'Pray defines Brakhage's approach to visionary filmmaking as "a celebration of an intense subjectivity in which the camera became an intuitive instrument of expression of the body and eye" (2003, 60). Brakhage's body movements attempt to depict and recreate the action of the eyes, causing his entire body to become a seeing apparatus whose dance is recorded by the hand-held camera. The film product is, in a sense, inseparable from the act of filmmaking itself as well as the filmmaker - Brakhage's body is undeniably evident in the content of the film. Elder likens Brakhage's films to the work of an action painter whose traces of movement comprise the final product, "…his films present a record of individual experience with vision, and the movement of the camera imitates the movement of the eye. In the trace of the movement we see on the cinema screen, the energy, force, and dynamics of the corporeal gesture that produced it are apparent" (1997, 315). Indeed, the body's emotions and reactions are illustrated even further within the rhythmically sporadic editing structure, although Brakhage's hand-held camera seems to serve as the primary recorder of emotion and movement.
"I aspire to a visual music, a 'music' for the eyes" (2001, 211). Brakhage's statement suggests that film, similar to music, has the ability to affect the body and its emotions directly, without the cognitive aid of the brain. The use of silence in Brakhage's work functions to increase the viewer's ability to see and the viewer's ability to add consciousness to the act of seeing. Brakhage proposes that a soundtrack distracts the viewer from their visual experience, therefore interfering with vision itself. Brakhage explains, "If the major consideration of film is really the visual, then the reason sound is a blind alley is that it cuts back sight" (~1970). Inspired by composer John Cage who declared, "There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening which makes a sound" (1961, 191), Brakhage privileges images over sound with the intention to foster a renewal of vision and a renewed awareness of vision.
The goal of adding consciousness to the act of seeing involves drawing attention to the film form itself and its many different apparatuses: the camera, the projector, the screen, the film, the filmmaker and even the audience and the audience's expectations of identification, entertainment and prior notions of vision. The act of scratching titles directly onto the film surface creates within the viewer an increased attention to both the film's physical form and the filmmaker's manipulation of it. Brakhage describes this in the following way,
…from the beginning, the viewer was given the rhythm of the very projector that was going to show them the rest of the film; they were given the sense of the film surface itself; they were given hand writing, even when the titles were printed, they were given some sense of that that we call the signature or the very soul of the maker in writ; that that cannot be counter-fitted is there scratched - etched - onto the film surface… (1996)
An awareness and attention to the film form itself is cultivated while also upholding the notion of an auteur or director whose specific vision is being shared. Brakhage goes on to say, "[It] was intrinsic to me that the work be hands-on, that it show the human being that it had passed through in every conceivable way…" (1996). The etching of the filmmaker's 'signature' directly onto the film surface authenticates the malleable film strip as material that has passed through the filmmaker's hands and has been influenced and manipulated for the sake of the filmmaker's vision.
Scratching on film is a bodily act performed by the filmmaker to manipulate the surface of the film itself. By scratching out parts of black leader, the filmmaker determines where light will shine through, how often and to what effect. Brakhage asks, "What is a film, after all, but rhythmed light?" (1993, 15). The choice to create letters and words further involves a complex system of signs which the filmmaker is asking the audience to participate in. However, the viewer is forced to acknowledge these words and signifiers as constructed and produced, for the very constructedness of these words are emphasized in their form. Additionally, the words that are chosen often seem unrelated to each other, forming miniature poems and evoking unusual combinations of images. In addition to Window Water Baby Moving, some titles that do this include Thigh Line Lyre Triangular (1961), Dog Star Man (1961-1964), The Horseman, the Woman and the Moth (1968), as well as Weir Falcon Saga (1970), Star Garden (1974) and Mothlight (1963). These unique word combinations and the images they evoke are also ways in which Brakhage attempts to 'untutor' vision.
"The problem," Brakhage declares, "is that most people can't see. Children can - they have a much wider range of visual awareness - because their eyes haven't been tutored to death by man-made laws of perspective or compositional logic" (1993, 11). Through an approach of "innocence in relation to nature and the world," the untutored eye, according to O'Pray, allows "a return to a vision untrammeled by ideological, cultural, even conceptual baggage" (2003, 60). Brakhage's films resist the social construction of vision and society's attempt to homogenize both vision and body. Elder describes this in the following way,
Though social existence renders an individual's way of seeing less intense and more like others' ways of seeing, at their origin and in their essence each person's visual experiences are unique precisely because each person's body is unique and seeing is a bodily act. The film artist, Brakhage suggests, recovers (in some form and in some measure) the experiences of vision proper to his or her body. (1997, 312)
This notion of recovering vision proper to the body is precisely Brakhage's aim and is achieved through the hand-held camera, the use of silence, the scratching of titles onto the film surface and the titles themselves, as well as through the complicated and rhythmically varied editing structure. All of these stylistic devices and aesthetic choices reflect Brakhage's desire to share a renewal of vision that is inextricably tied to corporeality. The body is not only evident in Brakhage's approach to filmmaking and specific filmmaking techniques but also serves as the primary subject matter of Window Water Baby Moving.
Hospital policies of the 1950s prohibited husbands from attending the birth event. Even after arranging a homebirth which would permit Brakhage to film, the film processing laboratory threatened to confiscate the footage due to its so-called obscene content. The film lab only returned the footage to the filmmaker when the doctor declared it was for medical instructional purposes (1999). In an interview with film scholar Suranjan Ganguly, Brakhage discusses the balance between politically concerned and aesthetically driven filmmaking practices,
It was appalling to me that childbirth was a taboo subject, excluded from human vision, and that women were often barbarously treated in child-bearing and ignored as mothers within this culture. So there were political motivations that led me to make the five childbirth films. At the same time, I would add that if in these films I had tried in some conscious way to present a political alternative, I would have falsified the art process. (1993, 17)
There are two major ideas expressed in this statement. On the one hand, Brakhage's childbirth films are politically relevant not only by providing a representation of laboring motherhood otherwise absent in the culture and denied to husbands and father-to-be but also by complicating the discourse of the gaze. Brakhage states, "I don't think there has ever been a film that I wished to make that wasn't political in the broadest sense of the term, that wasn't about what I could feel or sense for better or worse from the conditionings of my times and from my rebellions against those conditionings" (1993, 17). Some questions this raises are: Who has access to this vision and for what purpose? How do childbirth films extend the culturally sanctioned gaze of the doctor beyond the medicalization of childbirth and back into the relationship between a man and a woman in their vital transition to parenthood? What are the implications of making this occasion available to fathers and husbands as well as the public? Although the answers to these questions lie beyond the scope of this essay, it is valuable to note that a typical response to Brakhage's childbirth films such as Window Water Baby Moving was outrage, even within the New York avant-garde film circle. Brakhage states, "It was Maya Deren's contention that the film was a blasphemy… because it permitted men to see what they're not supposed to see" (1996). Brakhage explains this reaction further, "Maya was outraged at Window Water Baby Moving when I first showed it in New York because she thought I was intruding, exposing feminine mysteries that were inviolate, etc. I had not intended to do any such thing" (1994, 146). Although Deren exhibits some of the same unconventional filmmaking practices in her own work, the goal of providing a radically different act of seeing from the vision articulated and promoted by traditional Renaissance perspective and Hollywood cinematic language is extended to the subject matter of Window Water Baby Moving.
On the other hand, Brakhage's statement concerning political aims versus what he calls "aesthetic economy" (1993, 17) draws attention to his primary concern to visually portray the emotional experience of the event. While the act of filming can be a political act, it seems that in Brakhage's case it was primarily a personal one. Not only is filming the birth his permission slip to be present, but his sense of being present is inextricably tied to filming, "…I was in the room during the birth at Jane's insistence that I be present and be true to myself, and I could only be true to myself while working, i.e., filming the birth" (1994, 146-147). Additionally, his ability to watch the birth was enabled by the camera in a multitude of ways and his act of seeing would have been personally impossible for him to sustain without the filming device, "I literally could not have watched that birth if I had not been working. I 'm sure I would have passed out, but since I was working and intensively involved with my own concerns, Jane and I could be together in the most clear sense" (1963a, 209). Brakhage describes the correlation between surviving in the world and seeing/filming it,
I'm not so constituted to be able to take an experience like that, at least the first time, without camera in hand. Which is the major reason why I have a camera in hand, what my life's work is. In fact, there's very little that's understandable to me about life, or even bearable, except the seeing of it. I have managed my whole sight by making films. (1973a, 196)
Indeed, Brakhage nearly drops the camera at the moment of the baby's full emergence, but he does not lose consciousness (or sight).
While some theorists, such as Susan Sontag (On Photography, 1977) and Laura Mulvey ("Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," 1975), argue that the construction and production of the gaze in still photography (Sontag) and Hollywood film (Mulvey) are reliant upon a male, dominating perspective, these theorists fail to take into account avant-garde filmmaking practices whose purpose is to untutor the eye from such cinematically traditional modes of seeing. It is precisely what Annette Michelson calls the "radical aspiration" (2000) of avant-garde cinema to resist and deny dominant ideology through unusual cinematic language and experimental filmmaking techniques.
It may be surprising to learn that 'avant-garde' was originally a military term, as noted by O'Pray, referring to "an advanced group forging an assault on the enemy ahead of the main army" (2003, 3). Lauren Rabinovitz states that "the words themselves transparently signify that the avant-garde has a fundamental charge to oppose and even to overthrow existing art practices" (2003, 14). Indeed, in the avant-garde cinema of Brakhage, the renewal of vision must involve both a resistance to dominant modes of seeing (such as traditional narrative cinema and Mulvey's notion of the male gaze within it) and a denial towards typical methods of the production of vision (such as Sontag's argument that "the act of taking pictures is a semblance of appropriation, a semblance of rape" {1977, 24}). This resistance and denial is evident in Brakhage's treatment of Jane on film. He continually restores her subjecthood by filming her as an ever-changing human being rather than an appropriated object. This is verbally articulated by Brakhage,
I have a tremendous necessity to keep re-seeing Jane, and all my many ways of seeing are engaged with her continually. And of course some of them have never been used. And some of them are very habit-bound. And I shudder at the thought of those artists who continue to paint and repaint their loved ones in the same fashion, in the same situation… To hold to the original vision. (1973b, 183)
Furthermore, Jane is not limited to her position as a filmed subject, for Brakhage hands her the camera. The gaze and the construction of the gaze are extended to Jane in Window Water Baby Moving as well as in many of Brakhage's early work (Wedlock House: An Intercourse {1959} and Dog Star Man {1961-1964} being just two examples). Additionally, Brakahge involved her in the creative process by inviting her "to look at the first edits and try to include her point of view in what I was making" (1994, 143). Brakhage goes on to say that he "…tried to represent her in ways she would recognize as being herself, and the first film that succeeded in doing this was Hymn to Her (1974)" (1994, 143). Jane participates not only as a filmed subject but also as a co-filmmaker. In fact, Brakhage's description of the moments after the childbirth when Jane films him exhibits his bewilderment at Jane's strength and acknowledgment of her agency,
She had said a long time before, 'I want a picture of you then, too' (we had pictures of me from before the childbirth, of Jane and I kissing, of my hand) and 'don't you want a picture of yourself? You must have it.' And I said, 'Well, who will take it?' She said, 'I will.' So I said, 'All right,' but I never expected that she'd have the strength. Sure enough, it was the first thing she thought of after Myrrena was born. She said, 'Give me the camera.' I, hardly knowing what I was doing, just handed it to her. She photographed all those images of my face. I grew prouder and prouder of her, of the baby, of having made it; I was out of my head. And she, just having given birth to the child, was recording my face. Do you see what the process was there? (1963a, 210)
This dynamic relates to both the political vision and aesthetic vision of Window Water Baby Moving. The unique position of Jane as both filmed subject and filmmaker complicates both the content and the form of the film. Marjorie Keller observes that the focus of Brakhage's childbirth films is not the child being born but "…is usually either Jane or both Brakhage and Jane. Their child is their product and sometimes their witness" (1986, 228). Brakhage describes this childbirth film as "an extraordinary sense of collaboration" (1996). Similarly, Jane's description of being filmed during their first childbirth experience upholds this notion of collaboration, "…we are both very happy, and it is like we are doing something together each with his own task, and each task is so great and wondering beyond telling…" (1963, 232). In addition to Brakhage's intention to continually 're-see' Jane and reflect this ever-changing vision of her in his approach to filming, Jane's involvement in the filming process as co-filmmaker places Brakhage on both sides of the camera.
"How does meaning enter the image? Where does meaning end? What is there beyond?" (1978, 5). The crucial question of how meaning enters an image, as posed by Maureen Cheryn Turim, has been a driving force of this analysis. Patricia Mellencamp argues that avant-garde films deny and challenge dominant cinematic practices and ideology by the "undermining of conventional representation, including continuity editing, point-of-view structures, and emphasis on the human figure" (1990, 73). As a result, "The spectator," according to film scholar Sonya Michel, "is forced to play an active role not only in interpreting the film but in constructing its very meaning by piecing together disparate, incomplete, incongruous, or contradictory images and sounds" (1990, 239-240). Mellencamp outlines five major characteristics of avant-garde and experimental film in the United States:
the privileging of the personal... the restructuring of conventions of visual pleasure... the critique of temporality and expectation... an assault on the dominance and hold over the spectator of chronological, cause-effect logic by unraveling narrative time as well as disrupting narrative space... [and] the realization that the narrative had become a profitable commodity, a set of constraints. (1990, xvii)
Brakhage's Window Water Baby Moving exhibits and fulfills each of these characteristics. These elements provide opportunities for meaning to enter an image and for untutored vision to take form. Film scholar Scott MacDonald describes Brakhage's films as "direct assaults on conventionalized vision and on the camera, which Brakhage redirects in the service of unconditioned sight" (1993, 6-7). Brakhage affirms the defiant vision promoted in his films, "…all my life I've been trying to pry film loose from all forms of usage, whether it's drama, illustration, propaganda, or modes of visual thinking" (1994, 150). By engaging new ways of seeing, the avant-garde film movement - Brakhage being an innovative and prominent example - encourages a renewal of vision and a renewed awareness of vision.
One is reminded throughout the viewing of Window Water Baby Moving of Gertrude Stein's use of repetition in her literature, and her famous assertion that there is no such thing as repetition, only insistence (1919). Indeed, Brakhage's work is heavily influenced by Stein's idea that repetition is, in fact, impossible. The continually repeated image clusters of Jane's pregnant belly and smiling face, which are reiterated and intercut throughout the film, serve to 'show again' rather than duplicate. Due to the always-changing nature of the viewer (and filmed subject), one is unable to see the same image in the same way; this is caused by the fact that the viewer has changed since the initial perception. This reasoning is similar to Brakhage's argument that no two people can ever say the same word twice and mean exactly the same thing (1999) due to the changing contexts of situation, sentence structure, and even changing human bodies and associated meanings. Hence, meaning is always up for reinterpretation, vision is always changing, and perception is malleable and depending.
This insistence on the changing nature of being, words and images (and the impossibility of repetition embedded in Stein's notions insistence) perhaps serves as the foundation for Brakhage's personal style of filmmaking. His body, and the bodies of those whom he films, are primarily recognized as changing subjects. Brakhage's hand-held camera and unique style of editing create a visual document that attempt to accurately portray the varying emotional quality of the experience. Filmmaker Germaine Dulac calls this emotional quality "emotional chords" in her description of avant-garde cinema, "…any film whose technique, employed with a view to a renewed expressiveness of image and sound, breaks with established traditions to search out, in the strictly visual and auditory realm, new emotional chords" (1978, 43). This is precisely Brakhage's aim in Window Water Baby Moving as well as in his other work. Brakhage's later work departs from the depiction of the daily life around him in order to achieve these 'new emotional chords.' He explains the reasoning for this aesthetic transition, "Film should not refer to anything in the world, it should be a thing in itself. And my new hand-painted work tries to achieve this" (1994, 150). Thus, Brakhage's work moves further from the depiction of nameable objects and more towards the emotional quality of all the different types of visual experience.
Brakhage declares, "I wanted to share a sight. That's not the same as telling 'them' [the audience] about that sight. My primary necessity was not that they understand me, or obviously I'd never have become an artist. My primary need was that, at some point, I share a sight with them. Is that fair and clear?" (1973b, 186). French theorist Georges Gusdorf notes, "Every work of art is a projection from the interior realm into exterior space where in becoming incarnated it achieves consciousness of itself" (1980, 44). All of Brakhage's filmmaking techniques and approaches to the depiction of perception and emotion on film, as discussed in this essay as corporeally based, are ways in which Brakhage projects 'the interior realm into exterior space' with the goal of achieving 'consciousness.' Brakhage describes filmmaking's attempts to portray both the interior and the exterior simultaneously, "What it's trying to do is include both the inside and the outside of something" (1996). Adding - or achieving - consciousness to the act of seeing is the ultimate indicator of untutored vision at work, and is undeniably evident in Window Water Baby Moving, the first of Brakhage's five childbirth films. To borrow Brakhage's wording from his 1963 declaration quoted in the very beginning of this essay, Window Water Baby Moving shares with us an untutored vision that is "unruled by man-made laws of perspective," a vision "unprejudiced by compositional logic," a vision that "encounter[s] life through an adventure of perception" (1963b, 12).
Works Cited
Brakhage, Jane. "The Birth Film." Film Culture Reader. Ed. P. Adams Sitney. No. 31, Winter, 1963-64. New York: Cooper Square Press, 1970.
Brakhage, Stan. "All That Is Light - Brakhage at Sixty," Interview with Suranjan Ganguly (October 1993). American Independent Cinema - A Sight and Sound Reader. Ed. Jim Hillier. London: British Film Institute, 2001. 10-18.
Brakhage, Stan. "Brakhage on Brakhage." Interview with Colin Still, October 1996 & February 1997. By Brakhage - An Anthology. US: Criterion Collection, 2003. dvd.
Brakhage, Stan. Essential Brakhage - Selected Writings on Filmmaking by Stan Brakhage. Ed. Bruce R. McPherson. New York: Documentext, 2001.
Brakhage, Stan. "Interview with Richard Grossinger." Io 14, 1973. Brakhage Scrapbook - Collected Writings 1964-1980. Ed. Robert A. Haller. New York: Documentext, 1982. 190-200.
Brakhage, Stan. "Interview with Stan Brakhage" by P. Adams Sitney. Film Culture Reader. Ed. P. Adams Sitney. No. 30, Fall, 1963. New York: Cooper Square Press, 1970. 201-229.
Brakhage, Stan. Film at Wit's End -- Eight Avant-Garde Filmmakers. New York: Mcpherson, 1989.
Brakhage, Stan. Lecture at the University of Colorado at Boulder (unpublished). 1999.
Brakhage, Stan. "Legendary Epics, Yarns and Fables: Stan Brakhage" (~1970). Dir. Steve Gebhardt and Robert Fries. Brakhage - A Film by Jim Shedden. Dir. Jim Shedden. US: Zeitgeist Video, 2004.
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