Prelude: Dog Star Man

This review refers to the entire film DOG STAR MAN, the Prelude and the four Parts, which I saw several hours ago in the cinema of the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna.

IMDb should condense the five separate units into ONE film item, since this is clearly how the filmmaker intended his work to be viewed. I compose music and after about ten minutes it was clear to me that this work should be experienced and felt as VISUAL MUSIC, a symphony in five movements comparable in length to those of Bruckner or Mahler. I wouldn't have any problem closing my eyes during a 74-minute-long symphony and I had no problem turning off my ears as Stan Brakhage's stunning silent images flooded the screen.

The "visual composer" Brakhage showed himself to be a master in the incredible density of his phrases / images, in their imaginative and suggestive juxtapositions, and in the creation of a clearly imagined and personally experienced global form in five movements, whereby "themes" are introduced, developed, reintroduced and redeveloped in a convincing and existentially rooted manner. And there were SO many memorable images ... right now I'm recalling the man's vertical ascent at the end of Part One, and the introduction of the baby at the beginning of Part Two. The often fluttering editing of the winter scenes in the Colorado Rockies was so sensually intense that I could almost SMELL the surroundings-- an incredible feat for a silent film. The rough spots in the editing were like ... the rough spots in life.

I have seen several other films by Brakhage and admire his existentially demanding films abut birth and autopsy, but DOG STAR MAN tops it all.

My sincere posthumous thanks to Stan Brakhage for the 74 challenging, rewarding, and fulfilling minutes that I spent with this work.

I sat through the complete Dog Star Man (4+ hours) in a museum in 1974. I dozed off quite frequently, but only for a couple seconds at a time. There didn't seem to be much sense trying to think the movie through, so I just sort of let it happen. When the lights came on, I decided this much-heralded avant-garde film wasn't anything special, only a little overlong.

I had to walk a mile back home, and it was midnight. In the twenty minutes it took to make this journey, the entire film ran through my head again, at lightning speed. I wasn't doing any drugs - yet the whole street around me seemed shot through with flickering light and overlapping images from this movie.

Back around 1960, neurobiologists had begun speculating that the human brain actually remembers every sensation we experience. Brackhage seems to have taken this seriously. Some of the images in DSM are only a single frame; but despite the "24 frames per second" rule of film-perception theory, one notes these single-frame images and remembers them anyway.

The bad news is that this is probably an historical footnote. The likelihood of seeing DSM in a theatrical setting grows dimmer every day. But there's absolutely no point of watching this in any video format whatsoever. In even the highest definition video format, a "frame" is constituted by overlapping runs of pixels in the process of moving from one image to the next. The presentation of a single-frame image such as I have noted above is physically impossible in video.

There are many other reasons why no video format could possible present this film adequately, but this is definitive. DSM works because light reflected from a screen can imprint a single image, however fleeting, onto our neurons. Video cannot do this, I'm sorry.

However, because Brakhage was a visual artist - not a dramatist, not a storyteller, but really the maker of paintings-in-motion - art museums will likely preserve this film - as film - for future generations. Some of these have quite adequate theaters for film projection. If you can make your way to one when this film is shown there, do so. Even if you hate it, you will not regret it. And you will certainly learn something new about the universe.

Stan Brakhage may,or may not have been a visionary with his view on cinema (there were other early experimental film makers that implemented various experiments on film,i.e. painting on the film,abstract editing,etc.),but he was one of the most well known,as his films were getting attention about the same time as his contemporaries,such as Jonas Mekas,Andy Warhol,Jack Smith,and others (plus Mekas had his cinema in the East Village that screened those experimental/underground films in the early to late 1960's/early 1970's). Brakhage's 'Prelude:Dog Star Man',as well as the subsequent segments over the next few years is a film to be experienced (preferably in it's entirety,in one screening). It is a series of abstract images,that convey a lyrical feel to them. I had the rare open window of opportunity a few years back to see it,all together in one screening,with a live sound track by an ensemble of musicians (including Lee Renaldo,from Sonic Youth,and master percussionist William Hooker)at Real Art Ways,in Hartford,Connecticut a few years back,and was blown out of my shoes by it. Don't try to make any kind of sense out of it (just sit back & be dazzled by it's use of random images). Obviously not rated by the MPAA,but does contain a few images that could be unsettling to some.

I should note right at the top that it seems unfair to give this a rating or a vote based on anything to do with story. My praise for this piece of art film - and that is what it is, no ifs ands or buts about that - comes from the cinematography, the special lighting effects, and naturally the editing. This is so far beyond the scope of what many in the world seek out to watch as this is the definition of 'experimental' in cinema, and yet for those who find it or somehow it comes to them (via a small revival house or from the Criterion collection set) it's a wonder to behold.

Funny though to think that, not intentionally I assume, when the "MTV Generation" of directors would make their videos (and still do, but I mean when they were regularly shown on TV) they were decried by critics for being cut too fast. This really goes back to Brakhage here, though of course his intentions were not to promote some band with the rapid-fire cuts and the stream-of-consciousness flow of images and colors and warped contours folding into one another. That's why it's kind of hard to write any kind of appraisal of this aside from 'well, watch it for yourself, and if you make it past the first few minutes there's... more of these wonders to behold!'

I think because of the way my mind works I watch something like the Prelude to Dog Star Man (the whole "film" is in four parts), and I do try to find some semblance of a story. My mind is still on the experimental, transgression and consciousness-expanding wavelength, but I think that if you look for at least some kind of scenario there's the slightest, most subtle touches going on. You can see the shots of the sun, which are shot via help from an observatory, and also a naked woman (her breasts and public hair are there to see), but unlike Brakhage's Window Water Baby Moving you don't get a clear sense of a woman giving birth.

There IS a sexual component, however, something to do with the flesh and lots of moving parts with it and blood that flows underneath - red is always a potent color, the kind that vibrates and you (or I at least) can feel something that has to do with blood, life force, something that goes back to a time before we can remember. Or... maybe it's all simply a bunch of images meant to conjure in the viewer anything he or she is looking for or identifies with. It's an adventure in... stuff, in colors, in mountains, in driving on a road, in a bearded guy playing with a kid, with things that are happening and in motion (and, at times, kind of akin to what we see if we close our eyes in dreams).

No other filmmaker has made or will make a work quite like this, and even at 25 minutes it feels like an epic and so 'out there' in a pre-psychedelic sense that it makes the Jupiter & the Beyond the Infinite in 2001 look like a conventional effects trail.

When you climb a mountain and come down the other side, you're in a different place. When we saw Prelude: Dog Star Man in 1963, after it was over we were in a new world. My college roommate Bob and I ran a film series - the last night was this masterpiece. Brakhage had just finished editing it. He sent us the 16mm print in a can. (There were a few bits of popcorn in the can too.) The print even had some last-minute splices in it. I couldn't imagine him sending it out with splices. But that was his generosity. Watching the film with a hundred students who, like almost everyone else on Earth, had never seen a movie remotely like this one, was a thrilling experience. They loved it. I certainly did - two years later, my film school thesis was about the complete version, which Brakhage had titled The Art of Vision. He passed away last year - perhaps the cancer was caused by the toxic pigments he used to diligently paint his cinematic creations, particularly his later, completely abstract works. But the mountain remains - the mountain of his film output, the mountain of the legacy of a life dedicated to Vision.