Abstract
For its Winter 2001/Spring 2002 edition, Chicago Review published a special edition to complement the miniature Stan Brakhage festival that Chicago held earlier that same year. Stan Brakhage: Correspondences, as it was named, ‘includes critical essays [that] perfectly complement Brakhage’s own writings and present a range of new perspectives on his cinematic ambitions and accomplishments’. Among them is a conversation between Steve Anker, then Artistic Director of the San Francisco Cinematheque and American poet Michael McClure, in which they discuss Stan Brakhage’s foremost artistic ability: Stan uses his energy and it’s almost like moving his shoulders powerfully to break the walls between realms. Some of these realms are the concept of painting, the idea of poetry, the meaning of music, what portrait is, what personal physiology is; other realms that Stan opens up are human and other biology, also the nervous system, ideation – how things are conceived; and then there’s the separation between hearing and seeing, sound and silence, and music and sound, which are all explored and more or less brought into one shape in his work. (p. 171)
From this, we find a genesis of sorts for the new work edited by Marco Lori and Esther Leslie, Stan Brakhage the Realm Buster. Dismissing the possibility of sheer coincidence, Lori and Leslie note their title’s inspiration in the book’s acknowledgements (2018: ix). However, ‘inspiration’ is not exactly an apposite classification. Rather, the acknowledgement to Chicago Review simply thanks the publishers for allowing them to use the specific title words of Anker and McClure’s conversation. Classification of this title, as with classification of many a Brakhage film, is, at times, a moot point. To understand what I mean by this, I direct readers to the back cover.
On the cover, Lori and Leslie contend that the prolific oeuvre of Brakhage’s films is presumably expressed through ‘opposing tensions, which give his figure and films an extraordinary depth, even as they evince fleetingness, elusivity and paradoxicality’. They continue, ‘this collection aims not only to clarify aspects of Brakhage’s art, but also to show how his work is involved in a constant mediation between antinomies and opposites.’ However, this paradigm of diametrically opposite tension is problematic insofar as it foils the multitudinous nature of ‘the realm buster’. In limiting the possibilities in Brakhage’s approach to filmmaking put forth by Anker and McClure, it might appear that Lori and Leslie too limit their ability to be true to the very source of their appropriated nickname for the late Brakhage. Consequently, the book’s title, Stan Brakhage the Realm Buster could be seen to be not only undermined by its core assumption, but largely divorced from its presented thesis. However this is not the case, and Lori and Leslie make right by clarifying the primary goal for their proposed thematic engine. Indeed, they achieve this goal with a good deal of efficiency: while several newly commissioned essays take priority in the Realm Buster, the editors include a number of relevant previously published works as well, thus providing an apt way to encourage a dialectical engagement among the writings, while still serving the goal of the volume.
I begin with the latter group, the two essays which have been judiciously selected for republication in the Realm Buster with a consideration for their potential to spark a correspondence with the book’s other six originals. They are ‘Bottom-up Processing, Entoptic Vision and the Innocent Eye in the Films of Stan Brakhage’ by Paul Taberham, and ‘The Renewed Encounter with the Everyday: Stan Brakhage and the Ethics of the (Extra)ordinary’ by Rebecca A Sheehan. Taberham’s piece posits inroads to Brakhage’s films through the framework of cognitive science. First, he explores Brakhage’s oft-cited notion of the ‘untutored eye’, famously written on in Metaphors on Vision. Then, he transitions towards a discussion of a ‘retutored eye’, while on the way introducing the argument that Stan Brakhage incorporated the realms of ophthalmology, biological development, and beyond into his filmmaking. Sheehan, in ‘The Renewed Encounter’, similarly looks to the realms of film theory and film-philosophy, via Ludwig Wittgenstein, as two areas ripe for reconsideration. She looks specifically at Brakhage’s handling of everyday material in ways that subvert traditional methodologies for understanding cinema and instead propose a ‘nomadic’ journey of spectatorship (p. 90).
While the six new essays in the volume do not feel as beholden to any unifying identity of a realm buster, they remain deeply insightful. Gareth Evans’ essay ‘The Eye and the Hand: Brakhage’s Challenge to Ocularcentrism’ is a wonderful foray into the filmmaker’s tendencies against a single sensory dominance of vision in viewing his films, despite the frequent writings that suggest this very point. Evans implies Brakhage’s approach strives for a more corporeally holistic viewing practice, and elucidates this notion through examples from Interim, Desistfilm, and Dog Star Man. Nicky Hamlyn’s contribution, ‘Brakhage’s Blacks’, with its discussion of Brakhage’s visionary optimism towards the possibilities of the color black is one of the strongest in the entire volume; it reframes the physical, metaphorical, functional, and graphic properties of the color black in film so that it ‘is an equal partner in so many of these films which are more usually described in terms of their light qualities’ (p. 25).
This particular nickname for Stan Brakhage, the Realm Buster, is an interesting starting point for a book of collected essays. Curiously, the new essays – unlike the reprinted ones – rarely invoke the notion of a realm buster. And while the book’s core assumption, the presence of opposing tensions at the core of Stan Brakhage’s oeuvre, forecloses to a sizable extent the limitless potential of realm busting, in actuality the book is greater than the sum of its parts. This is to say, succinctly, that while the individual essays do not necessarily further Anker and McClure’s idea terribly much beyond its present state, the volume as a whole honors the practice of realm busting by including radically diverse perspectives from several of the field’s premier scholars. Lori and Leslie preface that there is no proper order to reading their book, nor is there even a beginning; and, in doing so, they maintain the very spirit of the realm buster himself, free from restrictive understanding, open to infinitely new critical possibilities.