Chapter 1—

The Camera-Eye:
Dialectics of a Metaphor
It's an obsession, really, of the eye. He'd sell his own mother for a look.
—Gilette in Sidney Peterson's Mr. Frenhofer and the Minotaur

Long ago, I pointed to the lens and said the trouble was here!
—Picasso, conversation with David Douglas Duncan

1—

"Everybody who cares for his art, seeks the essence of his own technique," said Dziga
Vertov.[1] This characteristically modernist "mystique of purity," as Renato Poggioli has
called it, pervades the avant-garde tradition and produces the desire "to reduce every
work to the intimate laws of its own expressive essence or to the given absolutes of its
own genre or means."[2] A typical exponent of the essentialist position was Germaine
Dulac, who wrote in 1927, "Painting . . . can create emotion solely through the power of
color, sculpture through ordinary volume, architecture through the play of proportions
and lines, music through the combination of sounds." Thus, Dulac argued, it is
imperative for film artists "to divest cinema of all elements not particular to it, to seek
its true essence in the consciousness of movement and of visual rhythms."[3]

Probably the best known among the early candidates for cinema's "true essence" was
Louis Delluc's photogénie . Jean Epstein declared, "With the notion of photogénie was
born the idea of cinema art."[4] But Epstein also admitted, "One runs into a brick wall
trying to define it."[5] The best description Delluc could come up with was, "[A]ll shots
and shadows move, are decomposed, or are reconstructed according to the necessities of
a powerful orchestration. It is the most perfect example of the equilibrium of
photographic elements."[6]

― 12 ―

The concept of photogénie simply did not get to the heart of the matter. It directed
attention to the image—"the equilibrium of photographic elements"—but not to the
properties or "elements" of the image itself. Not, in other words, to the "true essence" of
cinema. Other avant-garde filmmakers and critics looked deeper and found cinema's
basic principles in three interrelated elements: light, movement, and time.

"For cinema, which is moving, changing, interrelated light, nothing but light, genuine
and restless light can be its true setting," said Germaine Dulac.[7] Louis Aragon called
cinema "the art of movement and light."[8] And even the leading proponent of
photogénie , Louis Delluc, wrote, "Light, above everything else, is the question at
issue."[9] Coming closer to the present, we find Jonas Mekas declaring, "Our real
material had to do with light, color, movement."[10] Stan Brakhage has called light "the
primary medium" of film. "What movie is at basis is the movement of light," he has
said. "As an art form really, the basis is the movement of light."[11] For Ernie Gehr,
"Film is a variable intensity of light, an internal balance of time, a movement within a
given space."[12] According to Michael Snow, "Shaping light and shaping time . . . [are]
what you do when you make a film."[13] For Peter Kubelka, "Cinema is the quick
projection of light impulses."[14]

Although Kubelka, among others, has insisted that movement is merely an illusion
produced by the "quick projection of light impulses," some filmmakers regard
movement as, in the words of Slavko Vorkapich, "the fundamental principle of the
cinema art: [cinema's] language must be, first of all, a language of motions."[15] In a
manifesto in 1922, Dziga Vertov called for "the precise study of movement," and added,
"Film work is the art of organizing the necessary movements of objects in space." For
Vertov, the recording of moving objects was less important than "organizing" their
movement and if necessary "inventing movement of objects in space" through frame-to-
frame and shot-to-shot relationships.[16] These relationships—or "intervals" in Vertov's
terminology—are temporal as well as spatial. They are the basis of what Snow calls
"shaping time." As Maya Deren has put it, "The motion picture, though composed of
spatial images, is primarily a time form ."[17]

"Light, color, movement," "the movement of light," "the quick projection of light
impulses," "light and time," "a time form"—such phrases reflect the specific interests of
individual filmmakers but taken together they specify film's "true essence" in terms
appropriate to the avant-garde's "mystique of purity": "light-space-time continuity in the
synthe-

― 13 ―

sis of motion," in Moholy-Nagy's neat formulation.[18] What is most significant for our
present purposes is that the same terms can be applied to visual perception . The basic
requirements for seeing are also light, movement, and time. As one researcher has put it,
"The eye is basically an instrument for analyzing changes in light flux over time."[19]
That succinct statement delineates a common ground for vision and film, and it points
the direction I will take in seeking a perceptual basis for the visual aesthetics of avant-
garde film.

When we look at the world around us, we do not, as a rule, see "changes in light flux
over time." We see solid objects moving and standing still in a well-defined three-
dimensional space (at least, that is what we see in the most focused, central area of our
vision). Nothing would be visible, however, were it not for the "light flux" entering our
eyes through the pupil and flowing over the photosensitive cells lining the back of our
eyeballs. Experiments have shown that when the retinal cells receive a steady,
unchanging light, when the stimulus is absolutely fixed and unvarying, the cells quickly
"tire." They stop sending the information our brain needs to construct the visual world
we see lying in front of our eyes.[20] Thus there has to be a "flux," a movement of light
over the retinal cells; otherwise, we see nothing at all. (If the sources of light do not
move, the eye's own movements will keep the light moving across the cells.) "All eyes
are primarily detectors of motion," R. L. Gregory points out, and the motion they detect
is of light moving on the retina.[21] Only by these changing patterns of illumination can
the world outside our eyes communicate with the visual processes of the brain. From
that communication emerges our visual world.

Since light moving in time is the common ground of vision and film, perhaps it was
inevitable that avant-garde filmmakers seeking the "true essence" of their medium
would hit upon the "essence" of vision as well. Avant-garde filmmakers, especially the
filmmakers of the 1920s, did not necessarily make a conscious effort to equate the basic
elements of cinema with the basic processes of visual perception. Whether they did so
or not, their work has been influenced by an implicit equation between cinema and
seeing that this chapter is devoted to making explicit.

The superimposed eye in the camera lens in Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera
(1929) and Man Ray's Emak Bakia (1926) is in fact an explicit depiction of that implicit
equation. Less explicit references to the relationship of film and vision occur in many
other images of eyes created by avant-garde filmmakers. What Steven Kovaks has
called "the leitmotif

― 14 ―

of the eye" in Emak Bakia can be traced throughout the history of avant-garde film.[22]
To mention a few examples: the infamous sliced eyeball in Un Chien andalou (1928),
the photograph of an eye operation in Paul Sharits's T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968), the close-
ups of Kiki's eyes in Léger's Ballet mécanique (1924), the oriental eye at the keyhole in
Cocteau's Blood of a Poet (1930), the artist's escaped eyeball in Sidney Peterson's The
Cage (1947), the Eye of Horus in Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome
(1954, revised 1966 and 1978) and Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), and the
"cosmic eye" created by swirling clouds of color in several of Jordan Belson's films. To
end this potentially endless parade of avant-garde eyes are two especially pertinent
examples: the extreme close-up of an eye at the beginning and end of Willard Maas's
Geography of the Body (1943) and an eye super-imposed over a reclining woman near
the end of Brakhage's Song I (c. 1964).

The eye in Geography of the Body alludes directly to the extremely close and (literally)
magnified seeing that is the principal concern of that film—not the voyeur's secret
sexual gratification but the explorer's fascination with the human body as terrain seen
for the first time.[23] Brakhage's Song I also alludes to visual exploring, or what
Brakhage would call the "adventure of perception," which should prompt all
filmmaking. The eye in that film, which Guy Davenport has called "an overply, the
flesh window," is seen in the world it sees, as it sees the world.[24] The Brakhagean eye
is a participant-observer (perhaps the anthropologist rather than the explorer is the
appropriate analogue). It refers specifically to the inseparability of seeing and
filmmaking—as do Vertov's and Man Ray's images of the eye in the camera lens. As I
pointed out in the Introduction, there are significant differences between Brakhage's
emphasis on "the flesh window" of the human eye, and Vertov's and Man Ray's
emphasis on the "mechanical eye" of the camera. But both make direct reference to the
metaphor of the camera-eye and more indirectly to film as (in James Broughton's
phrase) "a way of seeing what can be looked at."[25]
To show that film is "a way of seeing," that it resembles visual perception in basic and
specific ways, I will reexamine the metaphor of the camera-eye. Visualized directly
through the superimposition of eye and camera lens, alluded to indirectly in many other
variations on "the leitmotif of the eye," it is a metaphor so intrinsic to the visual
aesthetics of avant-garde film that despite (or perhaps because of) its familiarity, it
requires close, careful explication.

― 15 ―

[Full Size]

The eye and lens superimposed in

The Man with a Movie Camera
(Dziga Vertov).
[Full Size]

The eye replaces the lens in Emak Bakia

(Man Ray).

― 16 ―
[Full Size]

A razor slices the eye in Un Chien andalou

(Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali).

[Full Size]
An eye operation in T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G
(Paul Sharits).

― 17 ―

[Full Size]

The eyes of Kiki, the Parisian model, in Ballet mécanique

(Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy).
[Full Size]

The eye at the keyhole in Blood of a Poet

(Jean Cocteau).

― 18 ―

[Full Size]

The escaped eyeball of an artist caught in a mop in The Cage

(Sidney Peterson).
[Full Size]

The Egyptian Eye of Horus superimposed on

a human eye in Invocation of My Demon Brother
(Kenneth Anger).

― 19 ―
[Full Size]

The "cosmic eye" in Infinity

(Jordan Belson, video version).

[Full Size]
The magnified eye in Geography of the Body
(Willard Maas).

― 20 ―

[Full Size]

The superimposed eye in Song I

(Stan Brakhage).

― 21 ―
2—

The metaphor of the camera-eye is constructed of synecdoches. That is to say, the eye
and the camera are parts standing for the whole of their respective visual apparatuses.
Vision is no more a product of the eye alone than pictures (especially the "moving
pictures" of cinema) are made by the camera alone. In each case, what we see is the
result of complex processes that only begin in the eye and the camera. No doubt it is
because they house the beginnings of their respective ways of seeing that the eye and
the camera have acquired their synecdochic weight. They are the outermost extensions
of visual systems whose other structures and functions are hidden inside the skull and
inside film labs, editing rooms, and projection booths. Even the crucial light-receptors
of each system (the retina and the film) are hidden from view. An analysis of the
camera-eye metaphor may properly begin with the eye and the camera per se, but if it is
to demonstrate the metaphor's relevance to the visual aesthetics of avant-garde film, it
must go on to seek other, less apparent correspondences between the two visual
systems.

The classic essay on the subject is George Wald's "Eye and Camera," published in
Scientific American in 1950. Wald first asserts, "Today every schoolboy knows that the
eye is like a camera," and summarizes these likenesses as follows:

In both instruments a lens projects an inverted image of the surroundings upon a light-
sensitive surface: the film in the camera and the retina in the eye. In both the opening of
the lens is regulated by an iris. In both the inside of the chamber is lined with a coating
of black material which absorbs stray light that would otherwise be reflected back and
forth and obscure the image.[26]

Wald goes on to point out similarities in the light-sensitivity of the film and the retina.
Just as a fine-grained, "slow" film is designed for high intensities of light and a more
coarsely grained, "fast" film for low intensities of light, so the retina has two kinds of
receptor cells: the cones, which operate in bright light and provide the more sharply
defined details of our visual world, and the rods, which work at lower light levels and
are the source of the coarser, less sharply defined details in the peripheries of our visual
world.

Moreover, the cones and rods are on the ends of minute stalks that respond to the light's
intensity, so that when the light is dim, the rods are pulled forward and the cones pushed
back; when the light is bright the cones move forward and the rods draw back. As Wald
says, "One could scarcely imagine a closer approach to the change from fast to slow
film in a

― 22 ―
[Full Size]

Comparable structures and functions of the camera and the eye

(adapted from George Wald, "Eye and Camera,"
Scientific American , July 1950).

camera." In subsequent layers of the retina, according to more recent research by Frank
S. Werblin, the bipolar cells emphasize high contrast in the retinal image, while the
amacrine and ganglion cells moderate contrasts. "It is as if," Werblin writes, "a camera
system could switch automatically from a high-contrast film to a low-contrast film
when it encountered a rapidly changing or a very contrasty scene."[27]

For Wald, the retina and photographic film offer another kind of analogy, because of
their chemical response to light. The rods contain a pigment, rhodopsin, that bleaches in
the light and is resynthesized in the dark. This led the nineteenth-century physiologist
Willy Kühne to devise an experiment in which he was able to take a picture with the
living eye of a

― 23 ―
rabbit. First, the rabbit's head was covered to allow rhodopsin to accumulate in the rods.
Then it was uncovered and held so that it faced a barred window. After a three-minute
"exposure," the animal was killed, its eye removed, and the rear half containing the
retina "fixed" in an alum solution, so that the bleached rhodopsin could not be
resynthesized. "The next day," Wald reports, "Kühne saw, printed upon the retina in
bleached and unaltered rhodopsin, a picture of the window with a clear pattern of its
bars."

Wald's own variation on this experiment was to extract rhodopsin from cattle retinas,
mix it with gelatin on celluloid, expose it to a pattern of black and white stripes, then
"develop" it in darkness with hydroxylamine. The result was a "rhodopsin photograph"
showing the same black and white pattern. Thus, just as exposure to the light produces a
"latent image" in a film's emulsion, so, Wald argues, "light produces an almost invisible
result [on the retina], a latent image, and this indeed is probably the process upon which
retinal excitation depends. The visible loss of rhodopsin's color, its bleaching, is the
result of subsequent dark reactions, of 'development.' "It is now known that the cones
also contain rhodopsin-like pigments that make color vision possible, which leads John
Frisby to write, "So really the rods and cones are two distinct light-sensitive systems
packaged together into a single 'camera'—the eye."[28]

If the vertical bands of light and dark gray make one think of the barred window that
left its lasting impression on the retina of Kühne's rabbit, it is an appropriate—if
somewhat ironic—association, so long as one remembers that neither image duplicates
actual vision . They are simply chemical traces of rhodopsin's response to the "light
flux" that reaches the retina from the outside world; they are images of "the process
upon which retinal excitation depends," as Wald put it. Nevertheless, Wald's and
Kühne's experiments show the eye to be more like a camera, and seeing more like
photography, than is often recognized. They strengthen the metaphor of the camera-eye
by grounding it in processes that can be scientifically verified. In Wald's words, "The
more we have come to know about the mechanism of vision, the more pointed and
fruitful has become its comparison with photography."

As convincing as that may sound, it is not a view all scientists of vision share. In
Handbook of Perception R. M. Boynton offers a pointed and thorough rebuttal:

The eye most emphatically does not work just like a camera, and the differences are
worth discussing. The eye is a living organ, while the camera is not. In a camera, light
passes through the image-forming optics of high refractive index, and then back again
into air before striking the film plane. In the eye,

― 24 ―

high-index media are encountered as light enters the eye at the outer surface of the
cornea, but the light never again returns to air. The control of pupil size begins with the
action of light upon the identical photoreceptors that initiate the act of vision, while the
camera's photoelectric analog, when there is one, is located so that the light falling upon
the photocell is not affected by the size of the opening in the iris diaphragm. The lens
surfaces in most cameras are sections of spheres, to which an optical analysis developed
for spherical components can properly be applied. There is no spherical surface
anywhere in the eye. The camera lens is homogeneous in its refractive index (or at most
contains a few such distinct elements, each of which has this property). The lens of the
eye is layered like an onion, with the refractive index of each layer differing slightly
from the next. Cameras have shutters and utilize discrete exposures, either singly or in
succession. The pupil of the eye is continuously open. Cameras must be aimed by
someone; the eye is part of a grand scheme which does its own aiming. Images
produced by photographic cameras must first be processed and then viewed or
otherwise analyzed; the image produced upon the retina is never again restored to
optical form, and the mechanisms responsible for its processing are perhaps a
billionfold more complex than those used in photography.[29]

The list of differences "could be expanded," as Boynton says, but it is surely long
enough to discourage anyone from turning to literal-minded scientists for validation of
the camera-eye metaphor.

The fact that the eye does not work "just like a camera" is indisputable, but it is also
irrelevant, since the significant similarities between the two are metaphorical, not literal.
Boynton's effort to discredit the camera-eye metaphor is useful, however, for several
reasons. First, it specifies the basic difference underlying the likenesses implied by the
metaphor. The difference is between a machine and, in Boynton's words, "a living
organ"—between Vertov's "mechanical eye" and Brakhage's "flesh window." It is the
basis of the dialectical relationship of eye and camera, from which the visual aesthetics
of avant-garde film have emerged.

Second, Boynton repeats a common objection to equating the camera and the eye when
he emphasizes the difference between the photographic image and the retinal image. It
is true that the retinal image is "never again restored to optical form" and is nothing
more than a stimulus for retinal cells at one of the earliest stages in the total visual
process. What must be stressed, however, is that the production of an optical image in
the camera and in the eye, though essential to both visual processes, is not in itself the
basis of their most significant resemblances. Light moving in time—not images—is the
"essence" they share.

A third point arises from Boynton's critique of the camera-eye metaphor. Like virtually
all commentators on the camera and the eye, Boynton

― 25 ―

implies that the photographic image is the visible equivalent of the image cast by the
lens on the film plane of the camera. In still photography this is more or less true
(allowing for the inevitable differences created by the chemistry of processing and
printing photographs), but in cinema, it is not. What the film viewer sees are not images
on film but images projected on a screen . These images are created by light moving in
time, and therefore they much more closely approximate the sources of seeing than do
the images fixed in the emulsion of photographic film.

Cinematic images partake of the same "optical flow" described by Gunnar Johansson:
"The optical flow of images into the viewfinder of a camera (or into the camera itself
when the lens is open) corresponds to the optical flow impinging on the retina during
locomotion."[30] In fact, since the eyes are always in motion, the image falling on the
retina is always flowing over the retinal cells. Of course, cinematic images can not
reproduce the same "optical flow" that entered the camera. There are too many
intervening steps to permit the original "optical flow" to emerge from the projector
unchanged (not to mention the fact that cinematic images may be made without the use
of a camera at all). They can, however, represent the same kind of "flow" that impinges
on the retina, the only difference being that their "flow" is shaped by the filmmaker
through the materials and processes of the cinematic apparatus. Thus the camera-eye
metaphor continues to be valid, if one takes into account the actual nature of the film
image and conditions of film viewing.

A fourth point is suggested by Boynton's sentence "Cameras must be aimed by

someone; the eye is part of a grand scheme which does its own aiming." The camera-
eye metaphor should remind us that the camera, too, is "part of a grand scheme" that
controls the way it is "aimed" at the world. Whether the camera is held in the hands of
Stan Brakhage and "aimed" by Brakhage's intuitive response to his feelings and
immediate environment, or attached to a motorcycle's handlebars and "aimed" by
Vertov's cameraman as he steers around an inclined track, or perched atop Michael
Snow's elegant remote-controlled machine and "aimed" at the Québec landscape by
electronic impulses scripted by Snow—the camera is integrated in "a grand scheme
which does its own aiming." Metaphorically, it is like the eye in its own "grand scheme"
of muscles, tissues, nerves, and brain cells. Here, in fact, is another way of comparing
the eye and the camera as synecdoches representing a whole—the "grand scheme"—of
which each is a particularly conspicuous but totally integrated part.

Despite the objections raised by Boynton, then, the camera-eye meta-

― 26 ―

phor not only continues to make sense but gains strength and pertinence as it is given
closer scrutiny—so long as (1) it is understood to be a metaphorical juxtaposition, not a
literal equivalence, producing a dialectical relationship of mechanical and organic
structures and functions; (2) its implied similarities between the retinal image and the
photographic image are recognized to be less relevant than its allusion to the flow of
light essential to both visual and cinematic perception; (3) it is treated as a comparison
of interrelated parts and processes constituting the "grand schemes" of visual and
cinematic perception.

3—

The camera's "grand scheme" includes taking in the light (shooting), converting the
light to images on film (developing), arranging the images in a meaningful order
(editing), reproducing that order in combination with all other visual effects (printing),
and reconverting the images into a "light flux" (projecting), from which the viewer's
own visual system constructs the cinematic image. The original "light flux" entering the
camera goes through a series of interactions and transformations, so that the light
emerging from the projector will take on the shapes and rhythms imposed by the total
filmmaking apparatus (in which the filmmaker plays an important though not
necessarily the chief role). Only in this extended sense can one properly call the
cinematic image a representation of what the camera "sees."

Only in an equally extended sense can one refer to what the eye "sees." The visual
world is a product of the brain. The brain's building materials are electrical impulses
traveling through millions of cells in a network connecting many different parts of the
brain. No single line of cause-effect events (like those that constitute the camera's
"grand scheme") can be traced from the eye to the completed visual world. Many parts
of the brain contribute to the eye's "grand scheme," and at least some of those parts
communicate with each other in an order that scientists have been able to map.

A small area at the back of the brain called the visual association cortex seems to pull
together all the information supplied by other parts of the brain. Data on color, motion,
and three-dimensionality probably come from the immediately adjacent prestriate cortex
which has already received information on shape, size, and spacial orientation from the
striate cortex. The so-called hypercolumns of cells in the striate cortex receive and
coordinate data arriving (after several intermediate steps) from the

― 27 ―

optic nerves, whose ganglion cells make up the last of four layers of cells in the retina.
These cells have already begun to make preliminary discriminations between lighter and
darker areas and their movements. Their information comes from impulses produced by
the rods and cones as they respond to the retinal image. The rods and cones, as we have
already seen, have their own specialized functions, the most obvious being the rods'
response to the movement of light and the cones' response to the wavelengths (i.e.,
color) of the light. Although some visual information also comes from nerve cells
monitoring the movements of the eyes, it is reasonably accurate to say that the visual
process begins when the rods and cones respond to the light moving over them.

(At this point, it should be remarked parenthetically that all visual activity is not
initiated by light falling on the rods and cones. Much can be seen when the eyes are
closed. There are phosphenes and other visual phenomena produced by the internal
workings of the visual system, as well as dreams and visions that are seen as vividly as
anything the eyes encounter in the external world. Similarly, not all cinematic images
begin in the camera. Film may be exposed directly to the light, and it may be scratched,
painted, or otherwise invested with shapes and colors that the projector's light will cast
on the screen. Within both "grand schemes," in other words, there are alternative
sources of seeing, about which much will be said in the chapters that follow. For the
moment, one need only note that the "grand schemes" underlying the camera-eye
metaphor do not necessarily require the presence of either a camera or an eye.)

Because light rays entering our eyes cross at the pupil, they produce a retinal image that
is upside down and backwards, relative to the visual world as we perceive it. And
because the eye moves—not only in large, intermittent movements, but also in minute
and continuous jumps and tremors—the image darts this way and that across the retina.
The retinal image is fluid and unstable; yet we normally perceive a solid and stable
visual world. The retinal image spreads across a curved, two-dimensional surface;
whereas, the visual world fills three-dimensional space. These transformations of retinal
image into visual world are products of the eye's neural network in the brain.

Actually, the network begins in the eye itself. The cells of the retina develop from the
same embryological tissue that produces the brain, and they function just like other
brain cells. By surfacing in the eye, the brain makes direct contact with the "light flux."
As the retinal cells make their preliminary discriminations, the brain is beginning to
"think" about the visual world it will produce. The visual world is the completed
"thought."

― 28 ―

Although it seems simply to be there, in front of our eyes, the visual world is, in fact,
the product of what R. L. Gregory calls the "internal logic" of the brain's visual system,
a system based on collecting, comparing, and drawing conclusions from data that is
both "stored" in the brain and constantly arriving for the first time via the retinal
image.[31] This process, which is still poorly understood, is not nearly as linear and
hierarchical as my brief summary may seem to imply, and it is composed of nothing but
electrical impulses traveling along millions of neural pathways at the same time. Shape,
size, depth, movement, color, texture—all the components of the visual world are really
millisecond-by-millisecond configurations of electrical activity in the brain.

4—

Scientists of vision are careful to distinguish between what we see and the sources of
our seeing. In one sense the source is the external world from which light flows to the
eyes. In another sense, the source is the light itself, or the retinal image formed by the
light. In still another sense, the source is the combination of electrochemical
computations made by the millions of cells throughout the visual system of the brain.
These sources produce what we see, but we do not see them. We see "an internal
representation," as David Marr puts it, of what the eye's "grand scheme" has been able
to derive from its encounter with "the light flux over time."[32]

Likewise, what we see in cinema is the result of a complex process that begins with the
external—or profilmic—world from which light streams into the camera's lens. Like the
eye, the camera uses optical principles to form an image and photochemical principles
to make that image available to subsequent cinematic processes. After that point,
however, the camera's "grand scheme" operates quite differently from the eye's "grand
scheme." In the latter, the photochemical transformation of the image on the retina
produces changes in the voltage of the retinal cells. Those changes cause
electrochemical impulses to pass from cell to cell throughout the brain's visual system
until the final constellation of impulses creates what we see as the visual world.

In the camera, the incoming light changes the chemistry of the film's emulsion,
producing a latent image that is made visible by chemical processing before it continues
on to subsequent stages of analysis, modification, rearrangement, and reimaging within
an optical-chemical system, not (as in the brain) a chemical-electrical one. Whereas the
brain cells
 ― 29 ―

complete the eye's "grand scheme" without further reference to an image, the collective
"brain" of the camera's "grand scheme" continues to work with images until the
projector turns them back into the "light flux" received by the viewer's eyes.

The camera-eye metaphor should not be allowed to blur these distinctions, but neither
should it be dismissed because of them. Clearly, its relevance varies according to which
aspects of the two "grand schemes" are being compared. While the metaphor suits the
light-gathering and image-forming capacities of the eye and the camera, it seems to
have little relevance to their subsequent production of the visual world and the
cinematic image. It can be applied, however, to their over-all function, which is to
invest the originating "light flux" with a final, visual form. Neither "grand scheme" is
simply a series of relay stations through which the external world sends along visible
replicas of itself. Both schemes subject the light to mediating and transforming
processes built into their respective visual systems. Looking at visible objects is not the
basis of the camera-eye metaphor; rather, it is creating visual representations out of light
moving in time.

The dialectic of eye and camera finds its synthesis, then, in the viewer's perception of
these visual representations emerging from the "grand scheme" of cinematic production.
While this is true of all film viewing, only avant-garde films call attention to that
dialectical process and treat its synthesis as an aesthetic problem. As subsequent
chapters will show, different avant-garde filmmakers have resolved that problem
differently, but all in their own ways have responded to the dilemma raised in the two
quotations that serve as epigraphs to this chapter.

In Sidney Peterson's Mr. Frenhofer and the Minotaur (1949), the model Gilette says of
her lover, Nicolas Poussin, "It's an obsession, really, of the eye. He'd sell his own
mother for a look." In an afterword to Prismatics: Exploring a New World , David
Douglas Duncan recalls that while he was photographing Picasso in his studio, the artist
said to him, "Long ago, I pointed to the lens and said the trouble was here!"[33] In these
brief quotations we have the visual artist's obsession with seeing (probably the most
extreme form of what Arnold Gesell has called "the visual hunger of cultural man")
juxtaposed with the artist's deep suspicion of the camera and by implication the
photographic process as a whole, because of its dispassionate and manufactured ways of
seeing.[34]

Although both sentiments are attributed to painters, their relevance to avant-garde

filmmakers should be apparent by now. The "leitmotif of the eye" testifies to the avant-
garde's obsession with seeing. The camera-eye

― 30 ―

metaphor implies that film artists can satisfy that obsession through the apparatus of
cinema. But to do so they must confront and resolve the "trouble" in the lens.
Otherwise, the camera will shape their vision to suit its own limited ends. To appreciate
the strategies avant-garde filmmakers have employed on behalf of their "obsession of
the eye," we must take a closer look at the "trouble" Picasso pointed to. Where did it
come from? How did it get built into the camera? What does it imply for a visual
aesthetics of film? The next chapter will try to answer those questions.

hapter 4—
"Giving Sight to the Medium": Stan Brakhage
When giving sight to the medium, "with, not through, the eye" (William Blake), with,
rather than thru, machine, with any means at your bestowal (rather than disposal), with
the light, and naturally then OF all these things also as in any gift, the term "moving
picture giving" takes on a blessed (and necessary to me) dimension.
—Stan Brakhage, A Moving Picture Giving and Taking Book

The poet Robert Kelly summed up his reaction to Brakhage's film The Art of Vision
(1965) with the phrase "mind at the mercy of eye at last."[1] Another poet, Robert
Creeley, echoed Kelly's judgment: "Seeing your films," he wrote to Brakhage, "I do see
, first of all, and 'think' later."[2] The primacy of "seeing" over "thinking" is frequently
assumed to be the principal characteristic of Brakhage's films. Fred Camper, for
example, writes in a retrospective essay on Brakhage, "He has, more than any other
filmmaker, defined film as visual , freed it of extra-visual considerations, and then used
the visual to express a totality of thought."[3] Camper's reference to "a totality of
thought" is crucial to an understanding of Brakhage's visual aesthetics. Rather than
putting "mind at the mercy of eye," Brakhage appeals to what he has termed an "optical
mind," which is "dependent upon perception in the original and deepest sense of the
word."[4] In its original sense, perception is a creative union of mind and eye, a
"sensuous or mental apprehension, perception, intelligence, knowledge," as the Oxford
English Dictionary defines the Latin origin of the word. Translating sensuous
knowledge into visual art has been Brakhage's greatest accomplishment as a filmmaker.

1—

If Brakhage often speaks on behalf of the eye, it is to counterbalance what he feels to be

our culture's bias in favor of the mind and our conse-

― 78 ―

quent failure to recognize how easily the mind can imprison itself in an abstract and
diminished universe of its own making. As he writes in Metaphors on Vision: "Even the
Brains for whom thought's the world, and the word and visi-or-audibility of it,
eventually end with a ferris wheel of a solar system in the middle of the amusement
park of the universe. They know it without experiencing it, screw it lovelessly."[5] In
contrast, Brakhage invokes an "adventuring eye" that acts in "partnership" with the
mind:
My eye, again, outwards (without words) dealing with these "indescribable,"
"imaginary" vibrations. . . . an irresponsible gamble thwarting the trained response link
between retina and brain, breaking the associational chain, this mind-eye partnership
playing the game with an unmarked deck, as in the beginning, giving eye's-mind a
chance for a change, yet a deck all the same, only ship-shape for exploration, not a-
bottled-trophy.[6]

Without the eye's sensuous knowledge, the mind will atrophy, become a mere trophy,
like a ship in a bottle, incapable of sailing out on voyages of exploration. In
"partnership," however, the "mind-eye" can go exploring in a world that is like an
unmarked deck ("as in the beginning"), and it can know the world without labels and
"the associational chain" that binds the "tutored" eye.

In his campaign to give "eye's-mind a chance," Brakhage has confronted two major
obstacles. The first is the cultural bias that not only separates thinking from seeing but
relegates seeing to a secondary or supporting role in the drama of mental life. As
Brakhage has put it, "We don't know how to let the eyes think, or how to be conscious
of eye-thought."[7] The second obstacle is a consequence of the first: viewers of his
films, including many critics, seem to have great difficulty equating the imagery of the
films with the phenomena of actual visual perception. This difficulty was exemplified
for Brakhage when, as he describes it, P. Adams Sitney "refus[ed] to close his eyes and
see if he couldn't see something that was related to the painting on my film." Though
one of Brakhage's most insightful and sympathetic critics, Sitney seemed unwilling to
grant the possibility that the sources for certain aesthetic effects in Brakhage's films
might be found behind his own closed eyelids.

Whether or not the incident occurred as Brakhage describes it, the point he wishes to
make is clear:

I said [to Sitney] I am the most thorough documentary film maker in the world because
I document the act of seeing as well as everything the light brings me. And he said
nonsense, of course, because he had no fix on the

― 79 ―

extent to which I was documenting . He and many others are still trying to view me as
an imaginative film maker, as an inventor of fantasies or metaphors.[8]

That is, in fact, the predominant view of Brakhage in Sitney's Visionary Film and in
most other commentaries on Brakhage's work. Given that the title of his first and most
important collection of writings is Metaphors on Vision , critics can hardly be blamed
for interpreting Brakhage's "documentaries" metaphorically. Yet, a pervasive theme of
that work is the literalness of the "eye adventures" described there. One example,
quoted at length in chapter 3, is Brakhage's changing perceptions of his wife as his eyes
become increasingly saturated by light. Anyone willing to accept the veracity of that
and many other accounts of "untutored" vision in Brakhage's writings and lectures
should not be surprised by Brakhage's claim to be "the most thorough documentary film
maker in the world." Or as he put it on another occasion:
I really think my films are documentaries. All of them. They are my attempts to get as
accurate a representation of seeing as I possibly can. I never fantasize. I have never
invented something just for the sake of making an interesting image. I am always
struggling very hard to get as close an equivalent on film as I can, as I actually see it.[9]

If poets are "literalists of the imagination," in Marianne Moore's well-known phrase,

then Brakhage is a literalist of perception, striving to make equivalents of what he sees,
as he actually sees it.

"Equivalent" is the crucial term. It stresses unadorned accuracy in representing what is

seen but makes allowance for the mediation of the materials and processes of
filmmaking. The term "equivalent" allows for the fact that not everything that can be
seen can be photographed: phosphenes, for example, or visual "noise" and other
sensations of light, texture, and color created by the visual system itself. Furthermore, as
Brakhage noted in an interview, there are "qualities of light" for which film is "too gross
or too inferior or whatever to be receptive to." This being the case, Brakhage continues:

I have to search for equivalents that will give something of the quality of what I'm
seeing. Well, that takes me back to the absolute beginning—because all along, all I or
anybody else have been able to do, is create by whatever means—film or any other
art—an equivalent of what we were seeing.[10]

When Jane Brakhage, who also took part in the interview, comments, "It's a weird thing
to do in the first place," Brakhage first agrees, "Yes, it

― 80 ―

is isn't it?" then adds, "But if you think about it, it's so beautiful, because only by doing
such a weird thing could you actually get involved in trying to create an equivalent for
something that most people weren't already seeing." By stressing weren't , Brakhage
implies that although people may not have seen equivalents of what Brakhage sees, they
could see them and would recognize them as being like their own, if they had the
chance to do so. His films offer them that chance. "I mean," Brakhage adds, "you begin
trying to get an equivalent that's rather close cousin to whatever anybody else is seeing."

Here is an indication of the social role Brakhage's films can play. If viewers recognize
equivalents of their own seeing in Brakhage's films, they may become increasingly open
to ways of seeing that do not conform to the social conventions respected by the
"tutored eye" and that are not incessantly reinforced by conventional techniques of
image making. As Brakhage puts it, "I really want to help people to see, to the extent I
have any clear social function as an artist."[11]

To accomplish this goal, Brakhage attempts to "document" seeing that is available to

everyone—not just to artists and visionaries privileged with some sort of rarefied visual
acuity—otherwise his images could not communicate with the "baby" that "remains
forEVER 'untutored'" in everyone.[12] This is why Sitney's "refusal to close his eyes"
was so galling to Brakhage. It seemed like an implicit rejection of the social relevance
as well as the perceptual accuracy of Brakhage's films.
By insisting on the documentary aspect of his work, Brakhage also challenges a
common assumption about the difficulty in viewing his films. Fred Camper once
described the difficulty this way: "There is no 'base' that one can approach [Brakhage's]
work from," because it offers no "connection with [the viewer's] direct experience." In
fact, Camper said, "One cannot understand Brakhage in terms of what you see, or the
way you view the world; you must understand his work by trying to understand the way
he sees the world."[13] It is true that conventional assumptions about seeing are of little
help to the viewer of a Brakhage film, but that is because they place such narrow limits
around the possibilities of seeing. In challenging those assumptions, Brakhage has taken
it upon himself to help people see what they are truly capable of seeing; thus, it is not
Brakhage's way of seeing that we must come to understand but our own. In Brakhage's
words: "I am primarily concerned with making films which can be taken into the
viewer, in thru his experience of himself in the act of seeing, without his being taken in
by the film and/or via his lack of experience."[14]

― 81 ―

2—

To take film in, instead of being taken in by it, viewers cannot remain passive receivers
of images. They must become engaged with film in a continual creative process of
visual renewal, a typical example of which is offered by the conclusion to Dog Star
Man (1961–64). Dan Clark's description of the closing moments of the fim is
meticulous:

DSM [i.e., the Dog Star Man] chops, bare chested, in

sunlight—same as before
DSM walks through snow, looks up
daytime sky with clouds
night sky with stars
DSM chops, in b&w negative, in orange-toned color
DSM chops, in close up, medium shots, from below
flashes of a roll of film ending, orange, white
DSM chops
axe chopping roots of a dead tree
flashes, sprocket holes move slowly down frame
DSM chops
flashes
b&w roots chopped
black
orange
white
flashes
black
DSM chops
white
black
orange
b&w roots
flashes
sprocket holes
star in black sky
black
dark purple
dark green
orange
black
blue
black[15]

Although no verbal description can equal the experience of seeing the film, Clark's list
of images is as accurate as one could hope to make it, given the film's extremely rapid
pace (most of the images are on the

― 82 ―

screen for only a fraction of a second). Drawing upon these images, I propose to show
how visual renewal figures thematically and perceptually in the conclusion to Dog Star
Man .

One line in Dan Clark's text clearly indicates Brakhage's method of integrating imagery
and theme: "axe chopping roots of a dead tree." An axe chopping tree roots also appears
earlier in Dog Star Man , usually in a context that seems to equate chopping with sexual
intercourse. At the film's conclusion, however, the chopping is more specifically related
to "cutting" film. In addition to sprocket holes, which remind us of the material strip of
film itself, the images include pieces of film askew on the screen as if they were chips
of the dead tree sent flying by the impact of the axe's blade. What Clark calls "flashes"
are places where all film opacities seem to have been cut through, permitting pure light
to burst forth.

The film contains within its own imagery the means of bringing itself to an end (as
Clark notes, there are "flashes of a roll of film ending"). The act of chopping within the
film cuts the film off with a few final "flashes," sputtering colors, and finally "black."
The ending thus emphasizes the means of making the film, especially the editing, which
can be thought of as cutting away the deadwood, eliminating the stale, familiar
representations of the visual world so that new ways of seeing can have room to grow.

In its fusion of method and message, the film also joins and temporarily shapes the
viewer's process of visual perception. This is its specifically perceptual significance,
which emerges when Clark stops referring to recognizable objects ("axe chopping
roots," "sprocket holes move slowly down the frame," and so on), and begins listing
simple visual impressions ("flashes," "white/black/orange," "orange/black/blue/black,"
and so on). These impressions of changing light and color, combined with the quick,
nervous rhythms of the editing, allow us to experience with our own eyes the intensity,
the flashing and surging of energy that Brakhage has given to light moving in time. This
is visual renewal, and to see film in this way is to know it sensuously and as
immediately as the nervous system knows something is hot—or to use a subtler analogy
and one truer to Brakhage's stated interests, as the body "knows" itself through the
"movement of its own tissues," to quote Charles Olson.

In the interview preceding Metaphors on Vision , Brakhage refers specifically to Olson's

"Proprioception," a collection of notes or "working papers" (as Olson's editor calls
them) concerned with that sense of the self one derives from perceptions of one's own
body: "PROPRIOCEPTION:

― 83 ―

[Full Size]

The Dog Star Man wanders in a maze of bare branches and

superimposed streaks and flares of light in Dog Star Man, Part 4 .
[Full Size]

The Dog Star Man chops dead wood amid superimposed

lights and sprocket holes in Dog Star Man, Part 4 .

― 84 ―

the data of depth sensibility / the 'body' of us as object which spontaneously or of its
own order produces experience of, 'depth' Viz SENSIBILITY WITHIN THE
ORGANISM BY MOVEMENT OF ITS OWN TISSUES."[16] It is a very short step
from this definition and its corollary, "that one's life is informed from and by one's
literal body,"[17] to Brakhage's goal of making films that must be "taken into the viewer
in thru his experience of himself in the act of seeing." While taking in the lights, colors,
textures, fleeting images, and darkness that bring Dog Star Man to a close, one can
hardly avoid an immediate and nearly physiological sense of one's own "act of seeing."

In that sense, vision can be "proprioceptive." It can produce the opposite of the
disembodied, objective "view" that Gibson labeled "the visual world" and that social
convention (buttressed by orthodox studies of visual perception) takes to be the correct
and normal way of seeing. Visual renewal arises from a more direct, physiological sense
of light-eye-brain interaction.

Since Brakhage's goal as a filmmaker is to create equivalents of "the act of seeing,"

"film is, thus, premised on physiological sense—takes Sense as Muse," as he wrote in
an article published in 1967.[18] To Jonas Mekas, Brakhage wrote, "I find myself feeling
that it is the total physiological impulse of a man must be given form in the making of a
work of, thus, called, art."[19] And to Michael McClure: "I am simply here involved with
a process so naturally always existent its workings have been overlooked: that the light
takes shape in the nerve endings and IS shaped, in some accordance we call
communication, thru physiological relationship."[20] Visual renewal is a way of looking
again at that "process so naturally always existent its workings have been overlooked."
It depends on the filmmaker's ability to shape light's movement in ways that not only
communicate with the viewer but retain some sense of the interplay of brain, nervous
system, and the eyes that receive the light of the external world.

This is why Brakhage has taken exception to William Blake's neat couplet: "We are led
to believe a lie / When we see with not through the eye." For Brakhage, the filmmaker
engaged in "giving sight to the medium," as he writes in "A Moving Picture Giving and
Taking Book," must see" 'with, not through , the eye' (William Blake), with , rather than
thru, machine."[21] In Brakhage's dialectic of eye and camera, the "machine" is no more
a "window" than the eye is. Both eye and "machine" make what is seen; hence,
cinematic equivalents of seeing cannot be divorced from

― 85 ―

the materials and processes of filmmaking, any more than human sight can be separated
from the body's visual system.

It is, then, "with, not through , the eye" that Brakhage would have the viewer
experience—not simply see depictions of—the process of visual renewal. Both the
inspiration for his films and their means of communicating with the audience derive
from the premise that in each moment of seeing, the world is made anew. "Everything is
new to the eye. Everything at every instant is new," Brakhage has said. "Only in the
long take, it begins to decay and get old. So that first impression, if fully realized, if
fully lived, that is fixed for all time."[22] Equivalents of those first impressions are what
Brakhage strives to fix for all time in his films: "So the whole point is, in bouncing light
off things, or catching it howsomever, that everything shall be something integrally
new. It will be new anyway, but if it doesn't maintain its newness then I have failed,
because I am new at every given moment."[23]

The "flashes," brief glimpses of "white," "orange," "blue," and moments of "black" at
the end of Dog Star Man summarize the process of seeing everything "integrally new."
They produce a metaphor of vision in the most direct way possible: by making the
viewer aware of seeing as a physiological, nerve-centered event before it becomes a
conscious recognition of labeled and familiar objects and events. Visual renewal, in
other words, restores the perceptions of the "untutored eye."

3—

New ways of seeing and of understanding what can be seen have been Brakhage's
principal preoccupations for nearly four decades. Only his earliest films, as Brakhage
has said, drew their inspiration from "drama" rather than from the dynamics of
perception.[24] The change came with Desistfilm (1954), in which, Brakhage explained
many years later, "I was beginning to accept my own sight."[25]
What Brakhage accepted was the jerky, discontinuous movements of the eyes
themselves. For example, during the teenagers' party that is the subject of the film, one
shot begins with a close-up of a hand on the neck of a mandolin, then slides down to the
other hand strumming the strings, moves up to the face of the boy playing the
instrument, then darts diagonally downward to the hand of another boy holding a
cigarette to his lips, and as he takes a deep drag, the camera moves upward to reveal his
full face. A cut replaces that face with another boy's face, and then in the same

― 86 ―

shot, the camera pans quickly to a fourth boy's face, edges to a tighter close-up, then
sweeps back across the room, veers up to the ceiling, plunges back down again, and in a
series of circular movements, zeroes in on the face of a girl who is the center of the
party's tensions and desires.

The camera movements are motivated in part by the emotional intensity of the scene,
but they are also evidence of Brakhage's nascent acceptance of his own sight. Catching
and releasing one point of interest after another, the camera moves as the eyes do when
they dart from detail to detail of an unfamiliar scene. As Brakhage quite rightly notes,
eye movements are not like smooth, continuous pans: "The eyes are clutching at things.
They are at times almost clawing to prevent this [smooth panning] movement." So in
Desistfilm , the camera "goes up curtains, grabbing patterns and arrives where it does,
stays there or doesn't, because that, at the moment, is either vital to me or not."[26]

Such camera movements are indeed characteristic of the way the eyes actually scan a
scene. Rather than slide smoothly from point to point, they make a series of short
jumps, or saccades, with intervening pauses of 1/10 to 3/10 of a second. When the eyes
follow a moving object, their movement is less saccadic but never absolutely smooth.
Even when "fixed" on one point, the eyes are engaged in three involuntary movements:
a slow "drift" away from the point of fixation, a series of tiny saccades that flick the
fixation point back to the center of the fovea (where the focus is sharpest), and a
continuous high-frequency tremor. The eyes are never still, because as Alfred Yarbus
explains, "Good conditions for perception cannot be obtained if the retinal image is
strictly stationary."[27]

Blinking and saccades are ways of constantly renewing the perceived image. After each
blink or saccade, "new signals arise from the whole retina or from certain of its parts."
Yarbus found that "ordinarily, the end of a blinking movement or the end of any
saccade (a very large voluntary one or a small involuntary one) is always the beginning
of a new process of seeing." It is "new" because "certain signals arising from the retina
are inhibited while others reappear."[28] Here is still another reason to take Brakhage
literally when he says, "Everything is new to the eye. Everything at every instant is
new."

During each saccade the retinal image is probably blurred, but the blurring and
moments of blackness that accompany each blink of the eyelids are ignored by normal
vision and rendered invisible in the conventional visual world. For Brakhage, however,
they became unavoidable aesthetic considerations. "I have increasingly worked with
this quality of seeing—this jumping," he says. "The problem is that most people are
reading these films out

― 87 ―

of the trained experience of the normal film. To them, my film is making the statement
that the subject or person is jumping and leaping about. But what I am really stating is
that the eyes jump and move about."[29] They do indeed "jump and move about," not
only to renew the retina's signals to the rest of the visual system but also to satisfy
curiosity, assuage fears, feed desires—in brief, to make their contribution to what
Rudolf Arnheim calls the "total engagement by which the organism lives in its world,
acting upon it and being modified by it."[30]

Moreover, as Arnold Gesell notes, when the eye shifts focal lengths it seems to want to
"catch" and "hold" objects in its view. This leads Gesell to call the eye "a teleceptive-
prehensory organ" that "gropes and grasps" the world around it.[31] The explanation for
this can be found, at least in part, in the eye's evolutionary development. The eye and
the visual areas of the brain evolved in direct relationship to the increased ability of
primates to see, grasp, and move about. "The forces of evolution," Gesell writes, "had to
provide continuously for a harmonious inner-adjustment between eyes, hands and
feet."[32] Although increased prehension and manual dexterity permitted human vision
to become more "versatile" (Gesell's term), the same "inner-adjustment" continues to
guide our "act of seeing." While retaining traces of their evolutionary heritage, the eyes
have become the swiftest and most sensitive "limbs" of the body—and Brakhage's
hand-held camera is a most appropriate means of conveying their capacity for
"clutching," "clawing," "grabbing," and "jump[ing] continuously."

Like Gesell (whose classic studies of child development support many of Brakhage's
personal observations and intuitions), Brakhage has argued that sight is inextricably
bound to the "sense" of movement. Gesell writes, "Specific acts of vision always occur
within the total unitary pattern of the organism. Mentally they have a motor basis."[33]
Brakhage pursues the same notion in a letter to James Tenney:

I sense "motion " as the first sense, at least in the sense of "control" viewable as
"response," long before either "touch," where one could make a verb of it in relation to a
baby, and "seeing," where the eyes could be said to be moved.

As evidence Brakhage cites

that particularly fascinating movement of the whole infant head, wobbling forward in
straighter and straighter, less and less wobbling, bee-line, zeroing-in so to speak, on the
breast which does, then finally, depend upon the tactile, lips to nipple, for "the
connection" so to speak. Sight does, finally, negate some of the urgency of this
movement, finally putting an end to "the wobble"; but I am convinced the brain, alive
center of this conscious-seeming head movement,

― 88 ―
must from the start BE consciously impressed by movement as prime instrument of
primal search.[34]

Here, in other words, is another motivation for Brakhage's camera movement: the
"primal" sense of movement itself. His hand-held camera expresses the body's
integration of tactile, kinetic, and visual senses.

When Brakhage writes in Metaphors on Vision , "One may hand hold the camera and
inherit worlds of space,"[35] or when he tells an audience, "I've trained myself to hold
this camera so that it will reflect the trembling or the feeling of any part of my body; so
it is an extension, so that it becomes a thing to in-gather the light,"[36] he is simply
acknowledging the body's inevitable role in "giving sight to the medium." Gesell writes,
"Vision is an act, almost a creative act, which requires total and detailed participation of
[the body's] entire action system."[37] Brakhage would say the same thing, except he
would leave out the qualifying "almost." For him vision is a "creative act."

By the late 1950s, in films like Loving (1957), Anticipation of the Night (1958), and
Sirius Remembered (1959), hand-held camera movement had become one of the most
pronounced characteristics of Brakhage's visual expression but never the only one. Not
only are the movements tightly edited, but frequently they are augmented by other
visual effects such as flares of light, superimpositions, and paint applied directly to the
film surface.

In Loving , the camera races over the ground, rushes up tree trunks, and sweeps in
blurred arcs across the edge of a forest clearing. At other times it moves only slightly,
rocking and gliding in close-ups of a man and woman embracing. In one passage
Brakhage intercuts blurred pans of the forest and nearly stable close-ups of the lovers.
The effect is a percussive glance-gaze -glance-gaze -glance-gaze —a rhythm in keeping
with the film's overall structure and with the camera eye's ambivalence toward its
intrusions on the lovers' intimacy. Later in the film, yellowish flares encroach on and
finally efface images of the woods. There follows a flickering sequence of clear frames
and fleeting images of the ground and a pine branch. Like the flashes at the end of Dog
Star Man , these flickers suggest the pulsing energy required for the "creative act" of
seeing.

Sirius Remembered includes similar passages of "white blinking," one of which is

composed of rapid alternations of clear leader and images of the ground partially
covered with snow. Also like Loving , this film is constructed from conflicting
movements of staring and looking away, which are repeated again and again as
Brakhage's camera catches sight of, then

― 89 ―
[Full Size]

Alternating clear frames and images

of the ground produce a blinking
rhythm in Sirius Remembered .

― 90 ―

veers away from, the body of a dog decaying on the forest floor. The camera
compulsively returns to the dog, but always by way of editing, never by reversing its
movement during the same shot (thus offering a good example of the editing eye's
influence on the camera-eye's movement).

Longer than Loving and more complex in its camera movement and editing, Sirius
Remembered also carries the "creative act" of seeing a step further through the
introduction of dissolves and superimpositions. Treetops are moved by dissolves rather
than by the wind; the bared teeth of a dog's partially decayed mouth are accompanied by
faint white superimpositions; one eye of the dog stares through superimposed dead
leaves and twigs on the ground; rapid tilts up to the treetops are completed in brief
dissolves to the dog's body stretched out on the ground under the trees; still shots of the
dog are superimposed with repeated quick pans that launch a second image of the dog
toward the edge of the frame; superimpositions of quick tracking movements forward
lift one image of the dog toward the viewer, while the other image continues to show
the dog lying in the tall grass at the edge of the woods. In keeping with its thematic
development of death, decay, and regeneration, the film's dominant impression is of
unceasing movement in an environment that is superficially completely still. It is the
seeing that is moving in accordance with what Brakhage was seeing and feeling and
also in accordance with the processes of nature: the transference of energy from the
decaying animal to—and through—the earth it lies upon.

Anticipation of the Night deals with physical and spiritual death, symbolized by a
suicide at the end and summarized in Brakhage's view at the time that "all of childhood
was just an anticipation of the night of adulthood."[38] Yet, like Sirius Remembered , it is
intensely alive in its camera movement and editing strategies. It may be that as Ken
Kelman suggests, "The pressure of death breaks down the habitual ways of seeing and
makes possible absolute and direct vision of life, vision without preconception or
restraint."[39] Or, in Sitney's gloomier view, the film as a whole "describes the doomed
quest for an absolutely authentic, renewed and untutored vision."[40] Thematically, the
quest for "untutored vision" may be doomed, but formally it succeeds—at least to the
extent that camera movement can "break down the habitual ways of seeing" and achieve
a more precise equivalent of the direct and immediate act of seeing.

The camera may seem to move "without preconception or restraint" in Anticipation of

the Night , but its movements are not without meaning and metaphorical significance. A
building resembling an ancient Greek temple for example, is always seen to be level
within the frame and always

― 91 ―
brought in and out of the frame by straight horizontal and vertical movements that are as
classically ordered and balanced as the architecture of the temple itself. A baby
crawling on the grass, however, is presented in impulsive, erratic camera movements;
most shots of a sleeping child are smooth, hand-held pans quietly tracing the child's still
form on a bed. The moon dances to the rhythm of the trembling camera; rows of
glowing street lamps advance or recede in exaggerated or flattened perspective as the
camera travels along nighttime streets; lights on carnival rides twist, turn, circle, and
whiz across the screen in abstract streaks of color. Trees—in daylight, twilight, and at
night—travel through the frame again and again, as they might past a car's window (one
of the many suggestions of the protagonist's inexorable journey toward the "night" of
his death).

Anticipation of the Night , Michael McClure writes, "takes place inside of a man's
vision , and the spectator merely has to watch," which is something many spectators
find hard to do until they can accept this man's vision (not necessarily what is seen but
how it is seen) as equivalent to their own.[41] In addition, Brakhage's camera movements
and editing involve formal and thematic considerations, as well as reflect psychological
and even symbolic concerns: "When I made Anticipation I was of course still sunk very
much in metaphor," Brakhage points out.[42] But they also show Brakhage's increasing
responsiveness to the immediate realities of visual perception. Explaining why he left
out shots of a burning rosebush, Brakhage says, "The image was too myth-structured,
too unreal to me, to be used in Anticipation of the Night: it had to be made more out of
eye sources."[43]

Hand-holding the camera has been one of Brakhage's principal means of staying close
to "eye sources," which means, as well, close to the body and its "entire action system,"
in Gesell's phrase. This strategy has distressed some critics. Parker Tyler complains that
Brakhage's "racing rhythms" reveal a "crude infantile compulsion,"[44] and Annette
Michelson once labeled Brakhage's camera movements "crude automatism"—though
she subsequently retracted that judgment and became one of Brakhage's most astute
supporters.[45] One suspects that these negative reactions, like Sitney's refusal to close
his eyes to find equivalents of Brakhage's painting on film, stem from a prejudice
against the body as the source of art, against "Sense as Muse," and therefore against
"giving sight to the medium with, not through , the eye . . . with , rather than thru,
machine." Brakhage's hand-held camera demonstrates, however, that the "machine" can
gain in sensitivity and flexibility when it enters into a dialectical give-and-take with the
"eye sources" from which Brakhage draws his inspiration.

― 92 ―

4—

For Brakhage the sources of vision are not limited to what the eye takes in. They
include as well the light produced within the visual system itself. "I think," he wrote to
Robert Kelly, "there is some 'short circuit' of light pouring into any eye, as it 'meets' that
person's out-put/memory's-discharge, and that we SEE in midst of a smoldering fire of
cross-currents."[46] Especially during emotional crises, Brakhage found that he saw the
scene in front of his eyes and at the same time saw "patterns that move straight out from
the inside of the mind through the optic nerves. In other words, an intensive crisis I can
see from the inside out and the outside in."[47]

Although the fullest possibilities of seeing combine "inside" and "outside," Brakhage
has taken particular pains to describe and find equivalents for seeing that comes from
inside the visual system, because it is less often noticed and much less often represented
in cinematic images. Yet, like peripheral vision and saccadic eye movements, it is part
of everyone's vision and therefore must be taken into account by anyone "giving sight to
the medium."

For Thigh Line Lyre Triangular (1961), Brakhage painted on the film to produce
equivalents of what came from "inside" each time he watched the birth of one of his
children. In an essay published in 1971 he writes,

When I photographed the births of my children I saw that with their first intakes of
breath their whole bodies were suffused with rainbowing colors from head to toe: but
the film stock always recorded only the spread of reddish blotches across the surface of
the skin: and so, by the time I had photographed the birth of my third child and in each
occasion seen this incredible phenomenon, I felt compelled to paint some
approximation of it directly on the surface of the 16mm film and superimposed, as it
were, over the photographed images of the birth.

There were other visual impressions coming from "inside" that, as Brakhage goes on to
explain, required a different mode of recreation in the film:

I felt free while editing this third birth film to also paint, on each 16mm frame at a time,
all the visions of my mind's eye and to inter-cut with the birth pictures some images I
had remembered while watching the birth—some pictures of a Greek temple, polar
bears and flamingos (from a previous film of mine [Anticipation of the Night ]) . . .
images which had of course, no real existence at the time of the birth except in my
"imagination" (a word from the Greek meaning: "image birth") but were, all the same,
seen by me as surely as was the birth of the baby.[48]

― 93 ―

Brakhage's statement can also serve as an implicit rebuttal to two common explanations
for his painting on film: that it is motivated by purely formal, painterly concerns or by
the desire to call attention to the material nature of the film medium. Although these are
not irrelevant to Brakhage's intentions, they are tangential to his guiding concern with
documenting what actually was "seen by me ."

When Brakhage writes in Metaphors on Vision , "My eye, then, inspiralling, frictioning
style-wise, being instrument for striking sparks, is bequeathed visions at every
illumination it's struck to create," he is not indulging in fanciful rhetorical flourishes but
is seeking to evoke some literal sense of the light—phosphenes and various
manifestations of visual "noise"—that is "available to any viewer willing to release his
eye for comparable movement."[49]
Not only are these phenomena of "closed-eye vision" important to Brakhage because
they are there and therefore essential to any complete documenting of seeing, but also
because they draw attention to the internal processes of the visual system itself, to the
medium of seeing within the message of sight. Brakhage puts it this way: "You are
seeing yourself seeing. You're seeing your own mechanism of seeing expressing itself.
You're seeing what the feedback of the mind puts into the optic nerve ends that cause
them to spark and shape up like that."[50] Here, in effect, is another way of saying that
we see "with, not through , the eye" and that behind closed eyes one can see evidence of
those processes of seeing at work.

To make equivalents of the introspective awareness of seeing, Brakhage not only paints
on the film but bleaches, scrapes, gouges, and even coats it with mold and crystals. He
also emphasizes the graininess of the film's emulsion, most apparent in his 8mm Songs
(1964–69) and in their more recent reprinting in 16mm (1980–86). Although the visual
effects of these techniques vary tremendously, they have in common a grainy texture in
constant flux. This comprises the base of what Brakhage frequently refers to as "closed-
eye vision." The grains may flow evenly across the screen or swirl and hover in a
tumultuous crowd, like a cloud of gnats or like silty water blocked and turning back on
itself. They may produce amorphous waves of color-light-texture or cluster into patterns
and recognizable though highly mutable shapes. Whatever their form, they are intended
to be equivalents of what anyone might experience as "the rhythm-pattern-flashes of the
eye's nerve-ends, making up the grainy shapes of closed-eye vision."[51]

In addition to phosphenes and visual "noise," closed-eye vision in-

― 94 ―

cludes the more precise images of hypnagogic vision. Hypnagogia has long been
recognized as perception experienced while falling asleep, waking up, or any time when
consciously directed awareness becomes disengaged from ordinary, active intercourse
with the external world. Such mental states produce visual images ranging from
phosphenelike shapes and patterns to distinct faces, figures, and scenes. However it
manifests itself, hypnagogic vision originates in the brain's own neurological circuitry.
According to one recent theory, it begins in the so-called old brain, the limbic and
reptilian systems whose functions preceded the logical and linguistic formulations
imposed upon thought by the newer (evolutionarily speaking) cerebral cortex.[52] If this
is true, hypnagogic images would be particularly appropriate examples of the "eye
adventures" that Brakhage says are "completely beyond any linguistic expression
whatsoever."[53]

Typically, hypnagogic images appear briefly, change rapidly, and seem to come and go
without the conscious volition of the person experiencing them. Brakhage's films offer
innumerable examples of such images, which sometimes appear alone, sometimes in
superimposition with other images, and sometimes woven into the grainy textures of
other forms of closed-eye vision. In a letter to Robert Kelly, Brakhage writes,

I think the mind's eye's electrical output to the backside of its optic nerve does express
itself in rhythm shifts, many clusters of same per second, much as the ear's hearing-of-
innards is. . . . [T]he comparable light-beeps of eye's out-put do tend, thru colors (order
of colors, in rapid flashes), to make the shapes of closed-eye vision which resolve into
the specific details of memory's pictures.[54]

In other words, "closed-eye vision" is not limited to "abstract" patterns of grainy light
and color. It may include the clear, recognizable images of hypnagogia, which emerge
full blown yet seemingly unsummoned from the depths of consciousness.

No film explores this process more thoroughly than Scenes From Under Childhood
(1967–70). During the early planning stages, Brakhage said he would explore "the
possibilities of creating, and depending upon, a level of film which can occur as
exclusively in the mind of the viewer as certain levels of Dog Star Man , etc., can only
occur in the eye."[55] If Dog Star Man emphasizes—though certainly not exclusively—
what comes "from the outside in," then Scenes From Under Childhood emphasizes what
comes "from the inside out." Discussing the film after its completion Brakhage
explicitly connects his "use of paint and material suspended in oil [and]
superimpositions" with an attempt to "express something of this world

― 95 ―

that's so alive to children: of closing the eyes and seeing explosions and dots and so
on."[56] Like Gerald Oster in his study of phosphenes, Brakhage refers to Rhoda
Kellogg's studies of children's art and suggests, "These drawings they were doing at the
very early stage had a lot to do with closed-eye vision." Speaking more generally about
the inspiration for Scenes From Under Childhood , Brakhage goes on:

The strangest world I think we have available to any sense is the world that occurs when
the eyes are closed. And this whole work could be considered as moving in that
direction, not just where I'm using dots and specks and patterns, but in fact in the
memory process."[57]

The "memory process" of Scenes From Under Childhood begins in Part 1, with rapid
dissolves of red and black—actually red and an ephemeral green-black produced by
red's negative afterimage briefly retained during the subsequent frames of black. Since
afterimages are created by and can only exist in the visual system itself, they offer an
apt equivalent for seeing "from the inside out." They engage the viewer's visual system
in a special way, since it is the viewer, not the filmmaker, who gives the black its (in
this case) green overtone. In a very literal sense, as Brakhage has pointed out, producing
afterimages is a way of "mov[ing] the film into the minds of the people watching it."[58]

Amid the red-(green) black alternations some orange begins to appear; then a fluttering
of oranges and reds; and at some moments, an odd blinking of horizontal lines across
the frame. Finally a wavering, distorted image of a small child appears among
superimpositions of vague red shapes and flickers. Amid the superimpositions, blurry
red shapes, and flickering colors, images of the baby's world begin to emerge: an
overturned chair, passing figures of older children, polished floorboards, a door
swinging open, a lamp, clothes in a closet, a donkey, the outside wall of the house, the
mother picking up the baby, and the baby sitting, crawling, and struggling up to a
standing position. Finally, in a shot of total clarity, a little girl tries to feed the baby,
who constantly interferes by grabbing at the spoon in her hand. Part 1 ends with this
clear-eyed image of conflicts arising at the juncture of instinctual desires and social
roles. The tight, steady framing and sharp focus offer the first intimation that the
multilayered, polymorphous visual experience of the "untutored eye" can evaporate in
the heat of single-minded, task-oriented activities and the exertion of individual wills.

The red that predominates in Part 1 may draw upon what Brakhage called "the
commonest type of 'closed-eye vision,' [which] is what we get

― 96 ―

when we close our eyes in daylight and watch the moving of shapes and forms through
the red pattern of the eyelids."[59] Or it may come from the way the mind's eye colors
memory. All of the children are dressed in red in the early passages of Part 1. Their
clothes may have absorbed the coloring of memory; or perhaps the clothes are the
source of the color memory has given to these scenes of/under childhood. Either way,
the colors, like the superimpositions and various pulsations and flickers of light, engage
the viewer's perception at a level "dominated by the rhythms of inner physiology," as
Brakhage puts it in a letter to Bruce Baillie.

The relevant passage in that letter illustrates Brakhage's sense of how theme, structure,
and imagery in Part 1 combine along a line of development from "inner" to "outer"
seeing:

[I]t's coming to seem to me that "Scenes From Under Childhood" on its primary visual
level IS a track of the evolution of SIGHT: thus its images flash out of blanks of color,
thru fantastic distorts/twists of forms and orders (those fantasies wherein one imagines
oneself: even suggesting those "pre-natal" fantasies wherein Freud to his despair, finally
found that unanalysable nest hatching all basic neurosis), space/shape absolutely
dominated by the rhythms of inner physiology, then shaking like jellied masses at first
encounters with outers, the beginning of The Dance, shattering OUT of even memory's
grip thru TO some exactitude of sight/light.[60]

The feeding sequence ending Part 1 could be an equivalent of the "shattering OUT of
memory's grip thru TO some exactitude of sight/light." Although it retains a visual
richness and nearly comic sense of sibling rivalry—over who will control the spoon—
the conclusion of Part 1 presages the conclusion of the fourth and final part of the film,
in which the "exactitude of sight/light" has been reduced to gray images of "organized"
play—track and field sports, baseball, flying motorized model planes—and of public
buildings in a flat, gray photograph. Thus the end of Part 1 seems to parallel the
beginning of the end of natural, spontaneous, "untutored vision": the undifferentiated
inner-outer seeing that Brakhage believes to be inherent in early childhood.

In subsequent parts of the film Brakhage introduces explicit equivalents of "seeing

explosions and dots and so on." Large irregular flakes and disks of glowing white light
hover, drift, and dance; swarming, grainy yellow-white specks sway like dust motes in
invisible currents of air; scattered sparkles float aimlessly about or cluster in one or
another part of the frame; dense showers of glittering golden flakes fall gently through
the frame (producing images somewhat reminiscent of the snow in the glass
 ― 97 ―

paperweight in Citizen Kane and conveying some of the same nostalgia for lost
childhood).

Many of these manifestations of light could be described with a passage from

Metaphors on Vision in which Brakhage describes the "non-blue" light he detects in the
daytime sky: "seeing thru the so-called color of it, discovering light, now sighting it
down to 'flakes,' 'God-gold,' 'falling,' 'down.' Metaphors—feathers, snow, reign, all
golden."[61] (Brakhage notes in the same passage that young children may color the sky
yellow in their drawings until they are taught to make it blue.) These and other
equivalents of phosphenes and visual "noise" evoke the visual world of the child and the
adult's mental return to childhood's mysterious and exhilarating richness of vision.

The equivalents of the "flakes" and "grainy moving particles" of light in Brakhage's
films come from many photographed sources, as well as from painting, bleaching, and
scratching the film and from the film's own grains of emulsion. Another equivalent,
which Brakhage seems not to have recognized until the mid-1960s, is the television
screen with its thousands of phosphorescent dots. In "Hypnagogically Seeing America,"
an essay that appeared in the Los Angeles Free Press in 1967, Brakhage explicitly
linked the television image to the phenomenon of closed-eye vision:

The T.V. viewer becomes center-of-the-universe 1st time thru medium because the
image-carrying-light comes directly at him (or, as McLuhan puts it: "The viewer is the
screen") and comes en-meshed, or made-up-of, the television-scanning 'dots' which
closely approximate his most private vision—his sense of his own optic nerve-end
activity, seen as a grainy field of 'light'-particles when his eyes are closed, particles
which seem to cluster into shapes in the act of memory and, thus, make-up the picture
being re-membered as if it were a slide cast from the brain against the closed eye-
lids.[62]

Some fifteen years later, in Murder Psalm (1980), Brakhage would use "television-
scanning 'dots'" to complement painted, bleached, and stenciled equivalents of the
"grainy field of 'light'-particles" in closed-eye vision. In that film, the television screen
supplies literal equivalents of the electrical activity of the visual system as well as of the
brain and nervous system as a whole (which is particularly appropriate in a film that
compares two kinds of massive electrical disturbances: those in nature that produce
lightning bolts and those in the brain that produce epileptic seizures).

At the time of writing "Hypnagogically Seeing America," however, Brakhage's interest

in the correspondences between the television image

― 98 ―
[Full Size]

An equivalent of grainy closed-eye vision in Murder Psalm .

and closed-eye vision was of a different sort. What concerned him was television's
power to infiltrate the viewer's memory processes:

The T.V. 'dots,' backed by the light-source and the pale blue-ish [in black-and-white
T.V.] tone of it (prime color of closed-eye vision in deep memory process, blue tinting
the whole grainy field when the eyes have been closed in a dark room for a long time),
do pre-tend the brain of the viewer is IN THE 'SET,' a tendency that soon makes him
feel as if what he's watching had always been stored in his own memory banks, as if he
ought to act on instructions from T.V. as surely as he would on his own experiences as
remembered.[63]

The implications of this "tendency" are especially dire considering that at the time
Brakhage was writing, the United States was engaged in the Vietnam War, and
television was the principle source of images of the war and the political and social
events surrounding it. As a social critic, Brakhage wanted to alert people to the impact
television was having on public attitudes toward the war. As an artist, however, he
chose not to deal directly with the Vietnam War and its electronic extension in
American life. Instead, he made 23rd Psalm Branch (1966–67), an 8mm film about war
in general and, more particularly, about his own memory's images (from newsreels and
documentaries) of World War II.

The television image, as such, is not a source for 23rd Psalm Branch , but the common
ground shared by television and closed-eye vision is a

― 99 ―
major visual element in the film. Some passages in the film are composed entirely of
tumultuous blotches of painted colors, others of paint superimposed on photographed
images. Newsreel shots of explosions are visually echoed in boiling swirls of orange
and black paint; then, as if the energy of the explosion were dissipating, the painting
becomes scraped and cracked and finally is replaced by orderly rows of dots gliding
smoothly through the frame.

As Brakhage had emphasized in his letter to Sam Perry (see page 72), the "dot plane" of
closed-eye vision includes many different sizes, shapes, and movements of dots. In 23rd
Psalm Branch they range from frenetically dancing spatters of ink and paint to rows of
large round dots parading slowly across the screen. Often several sizes, shapes, and
movements will be visible at the same time, such as tiny black pin-points sliding
diagonally downwards while large round dots slide in the opposite direction. This
regimenting of dots occurs for the first time following footage of ticker-tape parades
and a shot of Mussolini. At first the air is filled with fluttering bits of white paper, then
as if under the influence of Fascism itself, the "grainy field" of white specks is
converted into orderly rows of black dots superimposed on more footage of parades and
public ceremonies. Subsequently, the tight rows of black dots become circles in a black
grid laid over more newsreel footage.

Brakhage seems to imply that even one's "most private vision" may surrender to images
of authoritarian leaders and the mass psychology they exploit. If this seems to be
pushing beyond the limits of credibility—if not into the realm of paranoia—one should
at least consider the fact that psychological states often have physiological counterparts.
In this case the "grainy field of 'light'-particles," which permits us to "see ourselves
seeing," may reveal the psychological response certain images elicit. This may be
Brakhage's most despairing comment on the dangers mass-media images pose for
individual sensibility.

The film ends, however, on a different note. Its closing shots of children playing with
sparklers at night have been variously interpreted as hopeful and even ecstatic images of
childhood innocence; as a balancing of playfulness and violence; and, most
pessimistically, as allusions to "the Nazi Walpurgisnacht " and thus to "the seeds of war
in the pastoral vision."[64] What seems clear, however, is that the sparklers offer a
particularly accurate equivalent of the brilliant sparks of phosphenes, and the children in
their innocent play are engaged in a ritual celebration of light as it may be seen in
closed-eye vision. In the final shot of the film, sparks fly off a sparkler in the hands of a
young girl who is rapturously whirling

― 100 ―

about in a large cloak (a young priestess of light?). On closer inspection, however, the
sparks appear to be superimposed on the image of the girl, which suggests that the
sparklers are external equivalents of the internal sparks of the visual system itself. They
are the bridge between seeing "from the inside out and the outside in."

5—
Whether the seeing comes from "inside" or "outside," its "medium" is light. Therefore,
in "giving sight to the medium" of film, Brakhage works on the assumption that "what
movie is at basis is the movement of light." As the moving light takes shape, it produces
"what are called recognizable objects," after which "drama begins to come in, or story,
or picture," but the basis, Brakhage insists, is always "the movement of light."[65]

In addition to its physiological, psychological, and cinematic significance, light has a

metaphysical dimension in Brakhage's visual aesthetics. He frequently draws attention
to Ezra Pound's translation of "Omnia quae sunt, lumina sunt"—"All things that are are
lights" (Canto LXXIV )—from the writings of the ninth-century philosopher and
theologian Johannes Scotus Erigena, and he often refers to the later school of English
"light philosophers," in particular to Bishop Robert Grosseteste, whose treatise De Luce
was an important source for Pound's—and hence Brakhage's—ideas about light.
Drawing upon Neoplatonic thought, Grosseteste proposed that the whole universe
derives from light. God is light in its purest and most immaterial form, and the visible
world of things is light's outermost extension, where it takes on a material appearance or
becomes most completely "corporeal," in Grosseteste's terms.

Erigena's statement "All things that are are lights," expresses what Brakhage has long
believed to be "the natural condition of the film maker at the moment of making."[66] In
cinema "all things that are" quite literally are lights moving in time; therefore Brakhage
had at his disposal the ideal medium for conveying the luminosity he perceived in the
world around him—except that when "drama begins to come in, or story, or picture,"
viewers tend to forget about the basis of it all in "the movement of light." The challenge
for Brakhage was to make light itself the film's subject, to preserve its luminosity
without reducing it to purely abstract shapes.

In many of Brakhage's films, techniques such as extreme soft-focus, over and

underexposure, flicker effects, negative and solarized images, flared frames, clear
leader, and refractions of light in the lens have produced intermittent glimpses of light
as a meaningful subject in its own

― 101 ―

right. But with The Text of Light (1974), the two series of short films with roman and
arabic numerals as titles (1979–82), The Egyptian Series (1984), and most recently The
Babylon Series (1989–90), Brakhage has produced an impressive body of work with
light as its overt and continuous subject. Although they are the films in Brakhage's
oeuvre most likely to be labeled "abstract," they are more profitably viewed as concrete,
literal documentaries of the physical and metaphysical light invoked by Erigena and
Grosseteste.

Brakhage's comments at the time of making The Text of Light stress the film's
equivalence with actual—if rare and hard to describe—perceptions of light:

I see light behaving in all kinds of ways that [are not] photographable with given
means—that is, the given lenses and film stocks and so on. And most people don't see
these things, although I've met some people who have seen them.
That light travels over the ground, that it pools—that there is a pool of luminescence
which is very ephemeral, and which takes a relaxing of Western muscles in the eyes in
order to be aware of. That light-streaks come down previous to rain—splitting the air—
light-like phosphorescent streaks of . . . something! That I call light!

Also that where, in the Spring, before the grasses grow up and around these pools of
light, there are up-shoots; it seems to be light shooting up, that shapes plant-like things,
and then later plants come up there.[67]

In The Text of Light light does flow, pool, fall in streaks, shoot upwards, and take on
innumerable forms in an ambiguous space that sometimes seems open to infinity and
other times appears as flat as the screen itself. Some viewers see landscapes, cities,
forests, oceans, sunsets, faces, and myriad living forms; others see chiefly light, color,
texture, and rhythmical movement. A combination of both ways of seeing the film
would probably be truest to what Brakhage calls the "primary impulses" of the film:
Erigena's "All things that are are lights" and Blake's "To see a world in a grain of
sand."[68]

Brakhage found visual equivalents of these "primary impulses" in sunlight refracted by

a crystal ashtray and filmed with a macro lens held so close to the glass that it is
impossible for the viewer to know how the images were created. By shooting one frame
at a time as the light changed with the sun's movements, and by moving the camera very
slightly between each exposure, Brakhage imparted to the camera's eye the minute
shifts and tremors of a living eye and transferred that life to the images on the screen.
Moreover, the glass itself gives the light a certain density or

― 102 ―

[Full Size]
Hints of a misty landscape in The Text of Light .

[Full Size]

Light streaks downward through the darkness in The Text of Light .

― 103 ―

"materiality," like that of physical objects. The light seems to take on the shapes,
textures, movements, even the three-dimensionality, of things; yet, things in the film
look like light. It is as if Brakhage were documenting the instant at which light achieves
"corporeality" (in Grosseteste's terminology) but before its "glow" is extinguished in
corporeal forms.

Because of these intimations of physical-spiritual relationships embodied in light, the

film moves into what Brakhage calls Jordan Belson's "territory." What it means to enter
that territory will be discussed in chapter 6, but it is worth noting now that as Brakhage
worked on this film he carried on "a friendly argument in [his] mind with Jordan
Belson":

He would say, O wonderful what it is, but why is it jerky? Or why not centered? Or,
you know . . ., and to hold myself together I would say, No, Jordan, it has to be this
way. So I, I owe him very much. He sustained me in that way a beautiful argument can,
because it was very much in his territory. I mean this film is very much on his side of
the street.[69]

So it is, but its way of conveying the perception of light is uniquely Brakhage's. The
"jerky," off-centered images are not simply aesthetic preferences. They assert the
physical presence of the eye/machine in even the most metaphysical contemplation of
light. When Brakhage says it requires "a relaxing of Western muscles in the eyes" in
order to see certain luminescences in nature, he is not implying an escape from the
physiology of vision into some dreamy, other-worldly transcendentalism. He is alluding
in yet another way to "the untutored eye" and to breaking "the associational chain" that
prevents us from seeing all that is available to be seen in this world.

The roman and arabic numeral films also occupy Belson's "side of the street."
Introducing film I , Brakhage writes:

This begins a new series of films which ordinarily would be called "abstract," "non-
objective," "non-representational," etc. I cannot tolerate any of those terms and, in fact,
had to struggle against all such historical concepts to proceed with my work.[70]

Instead, he coined the term "imagnostic," to suggest a combination of image and

knowledge. "Image birth is the heart of the matter for me," he told an audience at the
first screening of films I, II , and III . "But that isn't sufficient," he continued. "Imago
means so much more than image. Gnostic carries so much more than knowing; it carries
it for example in the Biblical sense of knowing and birth."[71]

Presumably, Brakhage does not object to terms like "abstract" and "non-objective"
because they imply images that are not "referential" (Brakhage's

― 104 ―

[Full Size]

"Imagnostic" imagery in III of the Roman Numeral Series .

[Full Size]

An image from the brain's "tree-of-nerves" in 14 of the Arabic Numeral Series .

― 105 ―

term), but because they fail to convey the intensity and physicality of "image birth."
They also fail to specify the crucial contribution of the cinematic apparatus itself. These
images were never seen, Brakhage says, "except in their making." Pursuing this line of
argument, Brakhage explains:

I'm trying to find a place in the mind that is beyond picture or other than picture . . .
some area that isn't drawing at least in any easy or recognizable sense on pictures or
combinations of pictures, so that something new can be born.[72]

Although Brakhage soon dropped the term "imagnostic," he continued to draw upon
sources "beyond picture" as he completed the roman numeral series and then went on to
the arabic numeral films, The Egyptian Series , and The Babylon Series . Working with
very soft focus, extreme close-ups or macrophotography, and innumerable
unidentifiable lights and reflections, Brakhage produces a world of diffuse, mysterious
shapes; misty glowing colors; piercing glints of light; and nearly total exclusion of
"referential" shapes. Except for recurrent hints of light refracted through a camera
lens—quivering, elongated diamonds, materializing and evaporating, hovering and
sliding in and out of the frame—there is little to connect the imagery of the films to
anything outside the creative meeting of the mind and the camera-eye.

Even so, despite the emphasis of these films on "mind's moving-visual-thinking,"

Brakhage does not forget the physiological basis of these mental processes. His
persistent emphasis on trembling microrhythms and swift, dynamic juxtapositions of
images (characteristic of his work as a whole) produces metaphors of the energy
underlying thought's images, the electrical impulses that Brakhage envisions surging
through the brain's "tree-of-nerves," as he puts it in a comment on the arabic numeral
films.[73] By documenting the birth of images in the mind, Brakhage took another step
along the "track of the evolution of SIGHT" he followed in making Scenes From Under
Childhood .

In fact, from the moment he decided to "accept [his] own seeing" in Desistfilm ,
Brakhage committed himself to following that track—wherever it might lead. From
open-eyed engagement with the light of the world; to closed-eye visions of dots, sparks,
grainy fields of light, and hypnagogic images; to intimations of the electrical patterns of
thought itself—Brakhage has pursued the implications of that early, crucial decision. In
the process, he has remained true to "Sense as Muse" by gathering light and giving it
forms that communicate with other "optical minds" and their own "moving-visual-
thinking."