American as Apple Pie

This brief tribute to Carolee Schneemann examines her self-conception as an American artist, considering how it intersects with the disruptive performance of gender norms in Americana I Ching Apple Pie (1972). The work was originally staged for the camera in Schneemann's London kitchen in 1972, during a period in which the artist was living in voluntary exile. She published a performance score for the piece in her artist's book Parts of a Body House (1972) and reprinted it in Cezanne She Was a Great Painter (1974–75). This essay reads Americana I Ching Apple Pie as an unruly reenactment of the highly gendered role that the filmmaker Stan Brakhage cast Schneemann to play in his short experimental film Cat's Cradle (1959). It considers the way she understood home and homeland as two interlocking fronts in the ongoing battle over how gender is encoded and enacted. It concludes by briefly considering the reception of Schneemann's work by a younger generation of artists, including Sondra Perry, who staged an homage to Americana I Ching Apple Pie in 2015.

Notas sobre a visão não tutelada em Brakhage e Kant

Este trabalho sugere uma comparação preliminar entre dois autores de tradições muito distintas - o cineasta experimental Stan Brakhage e o filósofo da cognição Immanuel Kant - em torno do tema da percepção não conceitual. Nosso objetivo é o de ampliar as perspectivas de compreensão desses autores pelo confronto de suas abordagens de um tema caro a ambos: a natureza da sensibilidade e da faculdade sensível imaginativa. O artigo está dividido em cinco seções. Na primeira, apresentamos a poética cinematográfica de Brakhage, no Prelúdio do filme Dog Star Man (1961) e na primeira parte de seu manifesto Metáforas da Visão (1963), tomando como guia sua metáfora do olho não tutelado por conceitos. Na segunda, situamos a perspectiva de Brakhage à luz do debate contemporâneo sobre o não-conceitualismo kantiano. Na terceira, apresentamos brevemente aspectos da teoria kantiana da percepção que nos permitem confrontá-la com a proposta de Brakhage. Na quarta, buscamos ampliar a análise da experiência perceptual na perspectiva da imaginação em ambos os autores. E na seção final, para concluir, procuramos extrair algumas consequências desse confronto.

Note on Hallucinatory Film

Comparisons between hallucinatory films of the 1960s and 2000s show a conversion of the earlier utopian signifiers from benign fields of intoxicating color that celebrate and induce psychic bliss, into high-definition alarm bells for a world imploding from accelerated hyperconsumption. Paranoid, conspiracy-driven 70s commercial cinema, which appropriates editing techniques from earlier experimental films, marks a threshold of disenchantment. The entropic model of 60s hallucinatory works by Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, and others, where film material and abstract imagery are modified analagous to the intensification of bodily pleasures, is digitally exacerbated in high-definition videos of Heather Phillipson, Ed Atkins, and Benedict Drew as if collapsing under environmental and psychic degradation. This later work maximizes hallucinatory HD properties through relentlessly overlaying imagery of interpenetrating, deflating, and exploding bodies that are avatars of overindulgence, the nightmarish uncanny descendants of 60s utopian intoxications. (MH)

The aesthetics of participation.

"In this paper I would like to articulate a mode of perceptual participation, primarily an aesthetic mode, whereby humans enter into relation with the natural world around them. In order to elaborate on the mode of this participation I will draw examples from artists and thinkers that I believe have determined to make the notion of 'participation' an integral part of their work. The purpose of this paper is to situate my project in a larger tradition and theoretical framework. Over the last two years of study I have been drawn to a number of artists and thinkers who have influenced me a great deal. The common feature among them, or the relevant feature to me, has been the theme of the interaction between the self and the world, the organism and the environment, to use John Dewey's terminology, and how this interaction speaks of humanity's carnal and perceptual inherence in the world. Among these artists are Charles Olson, Jack Chambers and Stan Brakhage, and I would like to discuss their work in relation to this interactive process of self and world."--Pages 2-3.

The aesthetics of participation.

"In this paper I would like to articulate a mode of perceptual participation, primarily an aesthetic mode, whereby humans enter into relation with the natural world around them. In order to elaborate on the mode of this participation I will draw examples from artists and thinkers that I believe have determined to make the notion of 'participation' an integral part of their work. The purpose of this paper is to situate my project in a larger tradition and theoretical framework. Over the last two years of study I have been drawn to a number of artists and thinkers who have influenced me a great deal. The common feature among them, or the relevant feature to me, has been the theme of the interaction between the self and the world, the organism and the environment, to use John Dewey's terminology, and how this interaction speaks of humanity's carnal and perceptual inherence in the world. Among these artists are Charles Olson, Jack Chambers and Stan Brakhage, and I would like to discuss their work in relation to this interactive process of self and world."--Pages 2-3.

This Common Clay

Stan Brakhage was perhaps the most original and celebrated figure in the history of American avant-garde cinema. He was also a tormented man who traced his internal conflicts and primal rage to a troubled, unhappy childhood. This chapter considers how the circumstances of his early life formed the artist’s personality, and argues that Brakhage found a way to weave even the most neurotic aspects of his character into the fabric and fugal design of his films. The latter part of the chapter focuses on Tortured Dust, the last film he made about his first family, the objects of his art and his rage, concentrating primarily on his tense relationship with his two sons. Edited while he was also dictating an “autobiography” to his first wife Jane, the film reflects the mournful fallout of the loss of his first family.

The Melancholy Lens

The Melancholy Lens is an original study of the films and videos of five major figures of American avant-garde cinema: Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, Robert Beavers, and Ernie Gehr. Unlike other books on these artists, the approach of The Melancholy Lens is to examine the filmic form, imagery, and structures of the selected works in terms of how they reflect, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, important aspects of the personal and psychological dimensions of each artist, including how each grappled with significant losses in their lives. The author, a film scholar and practicing psychoanalyst, is in a unique position to consider these filmmakers and their work from such a perspective.

Stan Brakhage and Ethnographic Praxis

Stan Brakhage (b. 1933–d. 2003) was a visual artist and filmmaker who embodied many of the theoretical tensions and pragmatic themes in cultural anthropology in the 20th century, despite not being an anthropologist and working almost totally through experiments in 16mm film. In traversing, and being claimed by, both modernist and postmodernist thinkers and artists alike, he was a creator as much influenced by the poetry of American Romanticism as he was the harbinger of a millennial deconstruction. He is generally considered, along with the filmmaker Maya Deren, the quintessential savant of American avant-garde cinema. His phenomenological approach to filmmaking and his attention to poesis in visuality, combined with his persistent dispensation with narrative and plot, drew to light still pressing existential questions about the space between structure and individualism, the unconscious mind, myth, and intersubjective experiences in the shared quotidian of everyday being. While his early works of the mid-1950s showed solidarity with the surrealist and Freudian-inspired themes of compatriots like Maya Deren, in the 1960s Brakhage quickly engaged with what he viewed as the untapped potential of cinematic celluloid as a malleable medium with which to both capture and express the immediacy of sensual experience. At the core of his creative impulse was an exploration of visual perception unfiltered by symbolic textuality. To that end, his 16mm films were mostly soundless, color-saturated, nonlinear impressions of the most consequential of life’s relational phenomena; birth, sex, human development, death, and familial intimacies untethered from linguistic discourses, character drama, and traditional act-based storytelling structures. Brakhage’s process of etching and painting directly onto the emulsified film strips he used for shooting enabled his impressionistic questioning of the boundaries of representation in moving images. Brakhage asserted that, much as with human vision, such manipulations punched holes in the epistemic orthodoxy of experiential narrative and instead stressed the messy and affective ways that our sensory organs force us to negotiate our immanent worlds. His early artistic tenure found him characteristically prolific in modernist aesthetics as he explored concepts ranging from the psychoanalysis of dreaming and the Freudian death-drive in Reflections on Black (1955) to the metaphysical man-myth opus Dog Star Man (1961–1964). Such themes paralleled similar theoretical concerns emergent in anthropology in the mid-20th century as evident in both the structuralism of Levi-Strauss and the persistence of the Freudian unconscious as an explanatory hermeneutic. Today, Stan Brakhage’s influence in anthropology is evident in ethnographic filmmaking that challenges the documentary impulse, ambiguates hegemonic truth claims, and explores the modalities of sensorial representation related to human experience through iterative experimentation.

The Rhythm of Life: The Pulse in the Image

This chapter analyses various prototypes of the pulse in cinematic rhythm, namely in the work of American avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, Structuralist/Materialist filmmaker Peter Kubelka, French Impressionist filmmakers and theorists Jean Epstein and Germaine Dulac, Dadaist filmmakers and artists Hans Richter and Marcel Duchamp, as well as in the protocinematic experiments of Étienne-Jules Marey. It argues that rhythm is concerned with ‘perceived’ movement, while the pulse is concerned with a response to the experience of a ‘felt’ time. This chapter develops this conception of rhythm and the pulse by observing Sigmund Freud’s differentiation between the rhythmic action of stimuli upon the perceptual apparatus and the force of the investment of energies in the unconscious/drives.

(Nie)żywe obrazy. Widmowość i cielesność filmowych zwierząt

Tekst jest poświęcony właściwościom medium filmowego, które sprawiają, że może ono być skutecznym narzędziem w studiach nad zwierzętami, szczególnie kina związanego z kwestią korporalności, śmierci i mechanicznego ożywiania „martwych”, nieruchomych obiektów. Na przykładzie kilku filmów z pogranicza kina i sztuk wizualnych (Zwierzę, zwierzęta, reż. Nicolas Philibert, 1996; Sirius Remembered, reż. Stan Brakhage, 1959; Kala Azar, reż. Janis Rafa, 2020) autor analizuje, jak refleksja na temat ciał zwierząt pozwala wydobyć paradoksalną właściwość kina polegającą na jednoczesnej widmowości i materialności tego medium. Autor, odwołując się do historycznych związków kina i muzeum historii naturalnej, proponuje kategorię „kina taksydermicznego”. Pozwala to wskazać na rolę kina w rozpoznaniu ludzkiej bezbronności i cielesnej kruchości (vulnerability), którą w obliczu śmierci ludzie dzielą z innymi zwierzętami.