allengaryk-2

Accomplished earlier work by Stan Brakhage in which his wife Jane and he play a young married couple experiencing the intimacies of marriage. Shot in black and white without any soundtrack, the film is made up brief shots in overlapping chronology of a young couple who secure their house--locking doors, closing windows, pulling drapes--to provide security for their private evening. There is a nonstop flow throughout every shot of the film, whether it comes from a gesture by the actors, a pan of the camera, motion from the swinging lights or the drift of cigarette smoke, that keeps the viewer's attention focused on the beauty of the small details as they are revealed moment by moment. The brief glimpses of nudity as the couple intertwine on their bed are presented in negative and give an x-ray glimpse of the forces that bring them together. More a depiction of Walt Whitman's "adhesiveness" than eroticism, the film shows just how quickly Brakhage had mastered the skills of making a successful art film.

Stan Brakhage described his film as "a hand-painted visualization of sex in the mind's eye". My mind finds little that could be called erotic, but much that is visually sensuous. In part, that is due to his painting techniques here, as many of the individual images are strongly crackled or impastoed and apparently photographed still wet, so that the paint glistens in the changing light. Additionally, the rate of image change is much slower than usual with him. Rather than the expected 12-24 images per second, here we see 2 or 3 per second and have more time to enjoy the abstract shapes and the rotation of rich colors through the palette. Should some numerically-oriented person ever decide to count the total of individual paintings done by Brakhage in his hundreds of short films, I think we'll find that Picasso was not the most prolific painter of the 20th century after all. "Lovesong" forms a striking and satisfying conclusion to the "By Brakhage" collection.

Extremely autobiographical piece made during an intensely depressive period for the filmmaker after his divorce from Jane, his first wife, and separation from his five children. Brakhage calls it "a true, narrative, dramatic psychodrama". The film's background music is a piece which is a collage of brief phrases from various Stephen Foster songs whose common theme is loss. Brakhage scratches individual words from these songs on the film at intervals, and the shaky letters dance uncertainly across the frame. The primary visual theme is of the 55-year-old filmmaker himself brooding in a lonely apartment, sitting on the floor leaning against a wall, repeatedly rising naked from his bed and falling back. This is intercut with footage made years earlier, in the 70s, when his children were much smaller, as they played happily in the home they once shared. Even at his very lowest point, Brakhage continued to turn his life into art.