Prelude: Dog Star Man

yeah yeah.

so you dont sit down and watch the dog star man series. can we move past this now? its still beautiful and worth every penny of your pocket if you can track it down. i recommend putting some music on in the background though- something like william bakinski or aphex twin's select ambient II or my bloody valentine or what have you. and, you know, do whatever you have to do chemically to your body to.

brahkage is itself an experience. visually, you will never run into anything quite like what he constructs in the way he constructs it unless you are seeing something that generously takes from him. its a totally now construction.you wont confine or condition anything from his films to memory apart from the overall breadth a brahkagian work in motion.

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.

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 think the "Ugh, nobody could watch this, it just gives people a headache" argument died with MTV.

This avant-garde approach to film-making certainly isn't popular, even among cineastes who take film seriously. However, it's still an effective film, even if neither hide nor hair could truly be reaped from it. It tends to annoy people when something isn't supposed to make sense (even when it follows a narrative like 2001: A Space Odyssey), but it's not ABOUT making sense much less than it TRIES NOT to make sense.

You're supposed to sit back and watch, and that's all the work you do. If you can't handle that, then I'm confused as to what you get out of film.

But enough about you, let's talk about this movie. According to Brakhage, it's supposed to tire your eyes, make them exercise, work them "to see with one's own eyes", to relearn how to see, all that wonderful philosophical stuff. However, jabbingly quick editing and barely synthesized flashes of color are actually the mainstream of cinema now (think stuff like Domino), thus that appeal is quickly lowering. Instead, it's becoming... *gasp!* relaxing! to watch this film. It helps that this, the prelude, has no sound. Instead it's just a flow of flashes, a realm of color easy to get lost in.

--PolarisDiB