Prelude: Dog Star Man

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

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.

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.

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.

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.