Mothlight

It's rather tricky to rate and review a 4 minute film but I'm gonna try anyway. From the very beginning so called "experimental film" has dealt with the material of the film as such and there is a whole tradition of films made without the help of a camera. You can scribble on it, you can scratch it or as it was done here, you can glue two dimensional and transparent objects to it, then sandwich the negative onto it and let it run past a light source in order to expose it. Some people still think that film depicts reality, whereas all it really does is depict a reproduction of reality. But surely there must be another reality than what Hollywood is trying to sell us and Brakhage's approach is as simple as it is beautiful. In Mothlight wings of insects and thin leaves flutter over the screen and since each frame has no relation to it's preceding image, the outcome is rather fidgety. However, if you relax and stay focused at the same time you will realise that watching Mothlight is like staring at a bright light that is surrounded by moths. When I watched it for the first time, I thought the effect was rather impressive. You might argue that you don't go to the movies to watch moths flutter around bright lights but there is so much more to it. Experimantal film has always questioned our way of perceiving the world and Mothlight is no exception. Only it's also very beautiful and thus very entertaining.

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.

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.

This is not a fun film-it has no story or characters-but it is undeniably innovative. The method used to turn insects into a film was certainly novel and unique for its time. In that sense, it should be understood as both a methodological innovation and an art installation. It's always difficult to judge this kind of experimentation decades later, but putting yourself in the shoes of a director in the early 1960s, this is certainly not an idea most would conceive of, let alone execute. As someone who appreciates butterflies and moths, I do enjoy some of the patterns we catch glimpses of here.

Brakhage was intimate with his camera and with the world seen by his camera from the very beginning. And from a certain moment on he felt the camera was of no more use between him and the world. He started to put the world directly on the film, either by painting it, scratching it, or by physically gluing the world there, like in this 4 minute movie from 1963, Mothlight. It could sound crazy to you, but Brakhage collected patiently hundreds of moth wings from the inside of lamps and windows, added parts of leaves and other detritus and sandwiched them between two filmstrips. The outcome was the life of a moth, from birth to death: a dance of patterns on the wings, of psychedelic beauty. The world of butterflies, as seen by the light bulb; or the fascination in the eyes of butterflies deadly attracted by the light bulb; or the fascination of us in watching the screen.

You could ask, is this the real world? Of course not, this is the world created by the imagination of Brakhage. An artist creates universes on his own, he is some kind of God (or Frankenstein, matter of perspective), and the only criteria for us to judge should be the consistency of the world we see on the screen, on the canvas, in a book (or the world we listen to when in a concert hall).