Desistfilm

Stan Brakhage is best known for experimenting with the film medium itself--painting on film, gluing moth wings onto film, and other unusual cinematic techniques. Though he made Desist Film the old-fashioned way, with actors performing in front of a camera, it's just as inscrutable and bizarre as his other experimentations.

I don't remember everything that happens in the film, but it focuses on a group of burned out teenagers who entertain themselves in various ways (one of them practices lighting five matches at once, and another tries to build a structure out of various books). Like any good avant-garde film, the on-screen action can't really be understood as any kind of logical narrative. What matters is the feelings and moods and ideas evoked by the film, and Desist Film is a strangely unnerving, creepy movie experience. Though some of the editing is a bit too disorienting for its own good in my opinion, I don't think I'll ever forget the movie's very last shot. Even in a film where nothing makes sense, that last image is unspeakably chilling.

Highly recommended if you ever get the chance to see it (I saw it in a film class at the University of Colorado in Boulder).

Stan Brakhage's short film, DESISTFILM is good because it makes the audience feel warped without giving us anything in particular to feel warped about. It is all in the sound design. The image of what appears to be people doing whatever they can to defeat boredom. The film is only seven minutes long, but this is plenty of time for the viewer to be disturbed. The music is creepy and sounds unearthly, though very zany in a strange way. Why does this music bug the senses so much? Why do the images seem so cryptic an unnatural, yet normal? This film needs to be watched more than once. More than twice even. The speed of the film feels frantic, yet the interaction between different characters seem so grungy and unreal. This film is simply a series of images of people defeating boredom. and while there may be more to it than a viewer may garter, it is still a very unforgettable experience.

(I watched this film as part of the DVD short film collection of Stan Brakhage entitled, BY BRAKHAGE: AN ANTHOLOGY.)

It is a very important movie, for some reasons.

It is the first time when Brakhage's camera becomes definitely subjective. Instead of telling a story from outside, here the observer becomes part of the story; instead of seeing the scene from outside, here the camera becomes part of the scene: and so the movie is rather a story about the way the story is perceived. Brakhage did not know the movies of Dziga Vertov by that time, however he was following the same path.

It is the first movie of Brakhage where camera becomes truly part of himself, and he becomes part of his camera. And here Vertov comes again in mind. Only it is something special at Brakhage: if he is part of camera, and camera is part of him, then camera enters his life, his life becomes his movies. You see his movies, you see him. And he would find the courage and the honesty to tell us everything, about birth and about death, about sex and all kind of intimacy, about fears and about enthusiasms, about craziness - and it would be impossible for him to do otherwise, because he was bound by his camera. And after many years, he would get rid even of his camera - his great movies of the eighties and nineties would be hand painted directly on the film. His immersion in the world of his movies would become total.

Darragh O'Donoghue considers that Desistfilm is a prototype horror movie, shot through with the quicksilver sensibilities of Cocteau and Epstein (Senses of Cinema). I would say that it is rather voyeuristic, as it carries an almost unbearable sense of intimacy. This is the great art of Brakhage: the closeness of filmmaker, camera and scene. Each one, filmmaker, camera, scene are observing each other with minutia. It results a universe where people, objects and time are alike, loosing any solid ground, floating somehow in space, behaving unexpectedly and being just scary; a universe where nobody can be in control; and it results a horrible feeling of claustrophobia and of paranoia.

And why this title, Desistfilm? Well, for the beat generation of the fifties, rebels without a cause, even existentialism wasn't worth to exist any more.

I'm guessing Desistfilm is one of the most narrative Brakhage films. It starts off with a few people sitting around, not doing much of anything. The camera mostly stays away from the people's faces: at the start it's more important to see what they are doing than how they feel about it. There's a young man playing a mandolin, a woman smoking, and another guy reading a book. Two other young men are having a conversation. A new arrival distracts everyone, the camera moves wildly as the characters begin to move more quickly, alcohol is poured. Suddenly they begin to dance in a ring, then return to their earlier roles. Instead of continuing their banal tasks they now begin doing unusual things such as stacking books and lighting fires. Everyone looks on as one of the males and the girl dance. Their motions become unbridled, the rapid camera movements reflect the characters' frantic actions. The already jarring music adds to the unsettling atmosphere as the characters revelry becomes more and more frantic. The couple is seen again with an odd distortion; the others voyeuristically leer at them and it becomes clear that the viewer is being shown the scene through the twisted viewpoint of the newly demented.

The editing and camera movements create an unsettling atmosphere as the characters in Desistfilm rapidly transform from dull, normal people to deranged savages, apparently due to a bit of drink. Desistfilm is simply a wild, Bacchanalian revel caught on film; it's extremely unsettling, probably because it seems to take so little to cause normal seeming people to devolve into fiends.

It is atmospheric, creepy, weird, funny, and it's only 7 minutes! I'd definitely recommend it to fans of experimental filmmaking, or anybody interested in filmmaking. Even if you don't like it, you still wouldn't have wasted all too much of your time.

Yes, it has a pretty low user rating, and I can understand if you dislike the film. It is VERY weird and nonsensical and confusing, but I, personally, enjoyed it, and it makes me want to watch even more Brakhage films.

The main problem about "Desistfilm" is that there isn't much to say about it. I can't say it was a flawless, cinematic masterpiece, because it just wasn't good enough for that. I could phrase it differently, by saying that it was missing something, but it wasn't aiming for anything that high, it is just a short, experimental piece. Not Brakhage's best, but still a great short film.