Mothlight

Finding Brakhage was an accident, but when I did stumble upon his world, I shut the door to the "Hollywood" world, and I sat down in the dark, to watch Brakhage. MOTHLIGHT was the first one I saw, and MOTHLIGHT was all I needed to see in the beginning before I wanted to get into experimental film. It traps you and doesn't let you go. Those who have seen it, know what I'm talking about. It's something amazing, and something everyone needs to experience at least once. **** four stars.

When I just started watching this movie, I only had two balls, one of them defunct. However, while the movie played, my balls started undergoing a cloning process just like the cells of the moth wings that I could definitely see due to the EXPERT videography.

Edit: I just found out from my doctor when I did my last physical that I have testicular cancer and that the ball I thought I developed is actually a HUGE FKING tumor. Apparently the doctor said it was "inoperable" and that "he was sorry". Well, the only person he should be sorry for is himself for missing out on watching this masterpiece of a movie.

Edit 2: I was just informed that I was in "Stage 3" now, which is a good thing right? I heard that that is usually the last stage that cancer patients try to beat. In the meantime, this movie has endless room for interpretation that I can transform into my 1000 page book "Mothlight, Testicular Cancer, and Me: How I fell in love with pieces of dead-moth wings, dirt, and roots"

No camera was used to make this dazzling short movie: legs, wings and other parts of butterflies were glued directly on the filmstrip, thus creating a shifting pattern of unsurpassed beauty. The way Brakhage extents the possibilities of his medium is typical of 1960's experimental film-making.

We see the world through butterfly wings. Every millisecond another colorful wing passes before us. It isn't long before we want to go outside and get some fresh air. It's just not that interesting because there is no real center.

Brakhage made this piece by physically placing moth wings and other things to white leader and fixing them in place with splicing tape. interesting to watch this because it reminds us how trained we are to look for narrative and pattern in everything we see. i found myself searching for redundancies, trying to "figure out" what was going on. I then allowed myself to just sit back and let myself be transported by the material. Made me feel like I'ma little insect zipping through the grass in a field. Like Brakhage's other works, it is very much a collage projected versus what we traditionally call a film. Not unlike more static visual arts like painting and photography where we allow ourselves to get to the meaning alone as opposed to being given the meaning by the author.