User reviews

Don't ask me to describe 'The Dante Quartet (1987),' because I wouldn't know where to start. Painted over six years, an inordinately long time for the prolific Stan Brakhage, the film is a six-minute representation of the afterlife inspired by Dante's "The Divine Comedy" {a work I'm not very familiar with, so please forgive any inaccuracies}. The main character's ascent from Hell is divided into four phases – titled "Hell Itself," "Hell Spit Flexion," "Purgation" and "Existence is Song." The amount of work that must have gone into the film is staggering, with images flickering by at a rate far too rapid to register each frame individually, but that doesn't mean you don't see anything. During the first segment, I started to see Hellish visions that I'm not sure were even there – haggard faces, fallen heroes, rearing steeds and stranded ships. Brakhage plays on the subjective experience of the viewer, subliminally directing their thoughts through his use of colours and brush-strokes. Adding more subconscious layers to the film's narrative is his use of "found footage," with photographs and film (including shots from a worn 70mm print of 'Irma La Douce (1963),' apparently) seeming to "rise to the surface" of the frame. When I first caught the faded vision of a man with sunglasses, I leaned forward scrutinisingly, and it was like discerning the devil in the flicker of television static. Indeed, so uncertain was I of what I'd just seen that I began to doubt my own eyes – perhaps, after all, I'd only caught the silhouette of my reflection in the computer monitor. Seeing isn't believing where Brakhage is concerned.

This four part film piece is vagurly named after the movements of the Divine Comedy. The meaning seems elusive to me, but the abstact beauty of the painted was rather enlivening. Among Brakhage's most beautiful films to look at I'd say. Meaning be damned....