Metaphors On Vision

by Stan Brakhage

"Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective ... 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. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green?'" So begins Stan Brakhage's (1933-2003) classic Metaphors on Vision. Originally published in 1963 by Jonas Mekas as a special issue of Film Culture, and designed by George Maciunas, it stands as the major theoretical statement by one of avant-garde cinema's most influential figures, a treatise on mythopoeia and the nature of visual experience written in a style as idiosyncratic as his art. Long out of print, the volume is now available in this definitive edition from Anthology Film Archives and Light Industry, featuring Brakhage's complete text in its distinctive original layout, as well as annotations by scholar P. Adams Sitney.

Genres: Film, Essays, Art, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

James Stanley Brakhage, better known as Stan Brakhage, was an American non-narrative filmmaker. He is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th-century experimental film.

Over the course of five decades, Brakhage created a large and diverse body of work, exploring a variety of formats, approaches and techniques that included handheld camerawork, painting directly onto celluloid, fast cutting, in-camera editing, scratching on film, collage film and the use of multiple exposures. Interested in mythology and inspired by music, poetry, and visual phenomena, Brakhage sought to reveal the universal in the particular, exploring themes of birth, mortality, sexuality and innocence.

Brakhage's films are often noted for their expressiveness and lyricism.

Reviews

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exactly like watching a Brakhage film – and I mean that as both derision and delight.

[Richard Wu · Rating 4 out of 5]

A film reel, say some, of your entire life flashing before you, that is the last thing you see before you die. If so then I would like to petition whoever is in charge of the cinema to replace my reel with an explosion of Brakhagian frames, because really, by that point it's not like I'd have the mental resources to reflect on what's happening or why, so I might as well see pure visuality or whatever most closely resembles it before I gently go.

Once again I express my gratitude towards my friend who is a painter, as without her I would perhaps have never encountered this spellbinding collection of thoughts and letters. Brakhage was if nothing else an erudite man fully conversant with the totality of artistic endeavor that had come before him, and it was, in my estimation, this scholarship which enabled him to conceive art objects of such historic originality. Back then such things were possible. John Cage, whose silent sonata was a zero point of sorts for musicality, was a notable friend and tutor of the young Brakhage, but an unmentioned, still older figure in the form of Marcel Duchamp prefigured even Cage with his (in)famous Fountain acting as a zero point for aesthetic experience itself. However, Brakhage, in a stroke of brilliance that would make even Houdini tremble, escapes even these iron bars by conceptualizing what I call primordial experience, that is to say minimally mediated phenomenology, that is to say the pre-symbolic, and casting its visual correlates onto unexposed strips of celluloid. Now to be perfectly precise, yes, each individual frame carries an imprint of the filmmaker's unconscious, in turn mediated by the whole of his lived experience (of which his conceptual edifice is part), and as such cannot stand for experience qua experience as much as its artist may wish it to (Pollock's action painting being similarly constrained), but the audience should not, in my view, concern itself with that which it cannot discern, and would therefore benefit by accepting the art as such even though it cannot ultimately be.

Regarding the text, I myself am currently experimenting with Joyce's punnilicious prose and was thus delighted by Brakhage's similar indulgence, although, to his detriment, his page presence still falls prey to the sin of being comprehensible. This only further justifies his rightful place: in the reel. That now said, more words from me would be pointless. Do yourself a favor and watch a flick of his or two, see as you once saw, put on your baby eyes, dive deliriously into reams and realms of Brakhage's shamanic theomania.

Favorite Quotes
"Also there was one aspect of childbirth that was very dangerous to me. Again I, still subconsciously carrying the weight of my pitched suicide, and carrying it forward, had the notion that my child might take my place and leave me free to die."

"Oh transparent hallucination, superimposition of image, mirage of movement, heroine of a thousand and one nights (Scheherazade must surely be the muse of this art), you obstruct the light, muddie the pure white beaded screen (it perspires) with your shuffling patterns."

"In the event you didn't know 'magic' is realmed in 'the imaginable,' the moment of it being when that which is imagined dies, is penetrated by mind and known rather than believed in."

"To search for human visual realities, man must, as in all other homo motivation, transcend the original physical restrictions and inherit worlds of eyes."

"All of my experimentation in film has been directed toward the discovery of ways of expression as non-related as possible to other art form expressions. I am after pure film art forms, forms in no way dependent upon imitation of existing arts nor dependent upon the camera used as the eye."

"For a long time right after our marriage, Jane and I used to jokingly refer to my job-self, the man she was sending off to work in the morning, as 'the patron' and my home-self, the man she welcomed at the end of the day, as 'the artist.'"

"…or as if 'Here lies' were to be taken literally as comment upon all tombstone writing."

"It has taken me 10 years of reading poetry and knowing many poets, without trying to write it or having pretensions toward being a poet, to begin to learn what service to language really is, or at least something of what it can be."

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

The new expanded version doesn't seem to have its own profile as of yet. Look for my review of that version in the next issue of Film Comment.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

Often poetic and dense, other times enlightening and entertaining to read how Brakhage sees the world and filmmaking.