THE TREE OF LIFE (Theatrical Cut) - #942

This review was originally written for the theatrical release of the film and published on DVDTalk.com in 2011.

Writing about Terrence Malick's new movie, The Tree of Life, is a bit like trying to describe a particular segment of a backwoods stream--a beautifully lit and photographed segment of stream, mind you, but a stream nonetheless. The task is like living out the old Heraclitus quote about how you can never step in the same river twice. The water moves too fast, by the time you dip your toes in, it has moved on.

I also struggle with writing about it, because to do so, I feel like I will break the spell it has cast over me. The Tree of Life hasn't left my thoughts since I left the theatre. To do so is to also pretend that I got it, which I don't think I did--at least not entirely. My impressions at this point are shallow. To stick with the river analogy, I am maybe in up to my ankles, I have yet to get to the deep middle.

Though, ironically, it's the middle of the movie that is easiest to grasp. The front and the back are what make The Tree of Life a mesmerizing conundrum. It's as if Malick took the first and last reels of 2001, cut them up, reassembled them randomly, and then grafted them on to a story about a family in the 1950s. The O'Briens (played with alternating fury and vulnerability by Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) have three boys whom they are trying to steer through early life. Their parenting is a bit all over the place, balancing religion with an appreciation for art (or, specifically, music) and a Protestant work ethic with a laissez-faire day-to-day playfulness. The three kids run free with other neighborhood boys, causing trouble, testing the limits of their own perceived invulnerability. The two parents pull at them, particularly trying to mold the eldest, Jack (Hunter McCracken), into the man they want him to be. Both want their offspring to end up on the straight and narrow, but in that endeavor, one is strict where the other is lean.

Malick doesn't tell his story in any linear, sequential, or conventional manner. He prefers relaying information in short puffs of cinematic smoke. Small gestures stand in for greater events, and suggestion is preferable to explicitly laying out any greater meaning or intention. An individual moment as trivial as walking down the street might be shown in three different ways, from three different angles, at three different speeds. In this way, the real story blooms into being, revealing that Malick kept a tight grip on his narrative seedlings in the early portion of the film and is only letting things take shape after he has properly nurtured them. Family life for the O'Briens goes from idyllic to troublesome. Carefree romps in the woods turn to deadly games and dangerous dares. Malick also teases us with tragedy that is to come, one that nestles somewhere in the middle of his timeline. In a few brief scenes, we see Sean Penn playing Jack as an older man, contending with his past. As an adult, he is out of step with his environment, no longer at harmony.

Those scenes with Penn mark a fascinating change for Malick, who for the first time films modern cityscapes rather than the nature scenes he is most known for (the wheat fields of Days of Heaven [review], the Asian-Pacific jungle of The Thin Red Line). He and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (Burn After Reading [review], Children of Men [review]) shoot the towering skyscrapers the same way they would shoot a forest of redwoods--in awe of their majesty and from the vantage point of a puny human who is but a speck on the timeline by comparison. The Tree of Life is full of Malick's trademark visual poetry. The camera is rarely at rest. Instead, it circles and tracks and zooms; the whole of existence is constantly in movement.

If, as many would posit, the overall theme of Terrence Malick's filmography is the interconnectedness of all life, then some of the outlying sequences start to make sense. The director takes the viewer through time and space, to the farthest reaches of both, threading a slender line through various modes of existence. In some of his technique, one can see Stan Brakhage; in other spots, particularly the introduction of neon tracers as we enter the concrete jungle, Wong Kar-Wai (The Gradmaster [review]; In the Mood for Love [review]). There is also a touch of Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman [review]; Babel [review]) in the metaphysical final act--though in this, it is the master taking the pupil to school, showing Iñárritu how to evoke providence via simplicity rather than self-importance. (Hint: You look outside, not inside.) (Also, one could easily argue that Malick could school Wong Kar-Wai in aesthetic technique; as much as I love Kar-Wai's movies, one assumes the Chinese director was influenced by the American one, not necessarily vice versa.) It all comes together rather amazingly, though upon first viewing, I can't entirely decide if I'm just impressed that it ended up anywhere at all. My gut reaction is that Malick is saying something profound about grief, symmetry, and the eternal endurance of the human spirit, but there are so many pieces to put together here, I don't feel confident that I have it after just a single sampling. The Tree of Life demands more time, a commodity I will happily give in exchange for a chance to see its dreamy images again.

The Tree of Life is sure to be a movie that is hotly debated for some time to come. The first thing anyone heard about the movie coming out of Cannes last month was how it was both booed and cheered, by some reports in equal measure, with others suggesting the response skewed to one particular side. (The Tree of Life eventually took the festival's top prize.) Those with a predisposition for Malick will go see the film regardless, and I have no idea how to assess what a newcomer to the man's work will make of this ambitious endeavor. Part of me worries that The Tree of Life is almost too sincere for most audiences, be it the common man or the critical establishment. Too many are quick to reject honest sentimentality. (He's carrying a Bible! Run!) Good or bad, Malick means everything this film is trying to say. It's a deliberate, deeply felt artistic expression of the like few filmmakers are capable of. At least try to meet it on its own terms before you judge. It would be easy to fold your arms against it or to embrace it wholeheartedly because of the name above the title; instead, walk in with your hands at your sides, and let the film lift them all on its own.

BY BRAKHAGE: AN ANTHOLOGY, VOL. TWO - #517

It's fitting that Criterion is releasing selections of the Stan Brakhage film catalogue as an ongoing anthology, as I view my interaction with his experimental short films as an ongoing educational endeavor. I finally viewed my dusty copy of By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volume One in anticipation of the release of this sequel, By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volume Two, and as I noted in my review of that set elsewhere, it was actually my second time giving the DVDs a spin. I wasn't ready to go the first time, walking in cold was not the way to enter the Stan Brakhage library--at least not for me. I needed a tour guide.

To quickly summarize, Stan Brakhage was a filmmaker who emerged as part of the underground art scene of the 1950s. His short movies were abstract expressions of his philosophy and his life experience, using pictures and light and the very medium and raw material of film to provoke and inspire the viewer into deeper exploration. Most of his films were completely silent so that, under the right circumstances, he was creating a kind of cocoon around the person watching. It's just you and the cinema, make of it what you will. From what I gather, Brakhage had specific intentions with each piece, but his real goal was making someone watch and see for themselves, and what they took away from that was just as important as any plan he could come up with.

The first By Brakhage put twenty-six of his films on two discs; the second collects thirty films on three discs. The auteur's widow, Marilyn Brakhage, has put this set together, and her approach this time is to break the work down into six programs, showcasing specific periods of Brakhage's work arranged chronologically. This is a smart move, I say. Hitting "play all" on a full two-hour run of Brakhage can be a little overwhelming, and it can be harder to identify the evolution of his work without some notation of natural stopping points. This new archival system means two shorter programs per disc, which makes for a much more manageable intake. Also, as with the previous edition, Fred Camper's film-by-film breakdown in the accompanying booklet proved an invaluable map for knowing where I was and what I was seeing.

Program 1: 1955-67: Volume Two starts with four films from Brakhage's earliest abstract period, when he first broke from his more conventional "psychodramas" (and "conventional" is a term used loosely here) and into something less grounded in traditional moviemaking. The set leads with his 1955 film "The Wonder Ring," a commissioned portrait of New York's Third Avenue, which was scheduled for renovation. Rather than taking a straightforward walking tour through the neighborhood, Brakhage uses layered images and movement to convey the sense of the city's inherent rhythm and the hidden lives that make it so vibrant. These are like refracted observances of contained existences. A glimpse at a figure in a passing window, a street sign, an address number--endless pictures, endless patterns, everything is as one.

I didn't find the second film, 1960's "The Dead," to be as successful, despite employing some of the same techniques Brakhage developed in "The Wonder Ring." Here he uses positive and negative images, as well as color, to superimpose his reactions to a graveyard and its surroundings on top of the footage he took of them. I found it to be a little obvious in its imagery. The same could maybe be said of the longest piece of the group, the 64-minute "23rd Psalm Branch" (1967), except the outcry against war in this filmic collage is powerful in its cumulative impact. Brakhage layers together newsreel footage with words and bursts of color to create a stuttering image of combat that both replicates the flicker of a television screen and the staccato rhythm of a bomb attack. He moves the frame of reference from the battlefield to real, everyday objects, and then takes it deeper, practically examining life on a molecular level. Images are equated with ideas here, and what you see will hopefully make you think about why human beings are compelled to destroy one another. "23rd Psalm Branch" even ends with a question mark: are the images of children playing with sparklers meant to create a vision of hope, celebrating a better tomorrow, or is it a warning that this is a cycle that will continue?

Grouped together, these four films show a common interest in change/mortality, a passion for life, and a curiosity about man-made landscapes.

Program 2: 1967-76: If there is any obvious thematic connection between the four films in the second part, it's creation and simulation. These shorts all combine homegrown footage with color and abstraction to create intentional sensations and to convey the formation of life and art. In 1967's "Scenes from Under Childhood, Section One," Brakhage uses flickering red shapes to create his version of the fetal point of view, while the 1976 film "Desert" features the director creating his subject where there was none. Apparently, when he arrived to his shooting location in Riverside, California, he was surprised to discover it was a suburb and not a desert town. Using light, distortion, and extreme close-ups, he makes his own barren wilderness, a cinematic illusion.

Cinema and its tools and toys were an important component of the center films in this program. "The Machine of Eden" (1970) combines the concept of a weaver's loom with moviemaking, down to the very essential sprockets and film, while "Star Garden" (1974) explores the origin of light and image showing how the sun affects life and the motion picture frame. Interesting that, in both shorts, Brakhage is linking machines and nature, equating the things man has built to the cosmic construct that is our universe.

Program 3: 1972-82: Brakhage's drive to challenge the expectation of perception and the mistaken belief that there was a single objective reality gave him a rich and varied toolbox. Any kind of footage was fodder for his cinematic missions. In this third set, for instance, we see him working with both children ("The Process" from 1972; "Duplicity III" from 1980) and animals ("Burial Path," 1978; "The Domain of the Moment," 1977). In a way, by warping these most fundamental elements of life, he was showing how easily our view of the world can be manipulated. The fact that the children were regularly his own also crosses a line between outside observance and personal confession. The way he cuts together the footage in something like "The Process" is just as dramatic a statement about cinema's ability to capture and change what can be contained in the scope of a camera lens as his photographs of nature in "The Machine of Eden." In "The Burial Path," he uses the combined montage of a dead bird and living birds to suggest that life is both impermanent and ongoing. Being mutable or cyclical is not that different, it's all flux regardless, as memorable and ultimately reductionist as the burning of the bird's coffin at the end. Here, then gone...but not gone, transformed.

Sometimes these tests can strain the interest of the audience. "Duplicity III" attempts at grand gestures, poking at our understanding of storytelling and the dishonesty of contrived presentation, but the seemingly endless footage of a school pageant eventually drags. I was going to say it's "like" watching a strangers home movies, but why equivocate? It is watching a stranger's home movies, it just happens to be a well-known artistic stranger. Some of the small touches, such as the ghostly images of the kids walking through the forest and shown as a negative image, seem like side thoughts, too brief to have impact. Almost like Brakhage is saying, "This is what you expect of me, so real quick, here it is."

The collage approach in "Murder Psalm" (1980) is far more effective for me. Using found footage from news programs, educational films, cartoons, and other less identifiable sources, Brakhage makes a facsimile of a dreamscape. Inspired by his own nightmare, it is a portrait of the brain that also serves as his impression of how the mind functions. Juxtaposing actual brain models and objects that looks like brains with images of violent people and imposing blocks of color and light, he suggests that the human mind is over stimulated, regressively selfish, and dangerous; at the same time, maybe the indulgence of these thoughts are what curbs them. In "Arabic 12" (1982), which begins to suggest at the more painterly films to come, Brakhage manipulates space in the same way he manipulated the assembled footage in "Murder Psalm." He reduces a room to glimpses of the light within it, to shapes and sparkles that pulse and flow like molecules of blood coursing through a body. It's as far from narrative as you can get, and a big step from the almost accidental structure of "Burial Path"--one could see the earlier piece as a funeral procession, from the finding of the dead bird to its ceremonial release.

Program 4: 1989-90: This fourth grouping, found as the back half of DVD 2, breaks from convention to present a quartet of films that complete their own series. While other movies in this collection have been parts of larger works ("Arabic 12," or "Duplicity III," for example), the four-part Visions in Meditation is the first such series to be given here as a whole unto itself. These interconnected films were inspired by Gertrude Stein's poems Stanzas in Meditation. Between them they share a common technique and form a sort of travel film, traversing North America and exploring different terrains and the elements. The first part sets the tone: movement, nature, and random images from life, like people walking on a beach or places once visited. This connects what we see to memory, as if the world were imprinted with our experience.

The second part juxtaposes various elements: desert followed by ice followed by blue water. The third part adds sound, matching a minimalist electronic soundtrack by Rick Corrigan to places where people sit in the glow of light bulbs and fairgrounds lit by neon. Brakhage takes his camera down into Carlsbad Caverns to evoke the philosophical concept of Plato's Cave--images of people projected on stone, do they exist? images on a screen, are they real?--while Part Four makes reference to D.H. Lawrence, going to his former home and burial ground in New Mexico. The final film in the series features dynamic skies, flickers of black blotting out the image, and movement that suggests rewinding, like we are going backwards over what we have seen. It also features the most commonplace images, including shots of suburban America. Is this meditation coming to rest? Once again, it comes down to our mortality.

Program 5: 1982, 1992, 1994: As Brakhage moved into the later decades of his life and career, he continued to shift more into the abstract, getting more painterly in his employment of color and starting to work with his hands directly on the celluloid. His constant struggle was to replicate how the things he saw were filtered through his consciousness, to recreate the very act of looking on a primal, back-of-the-brain level. An early film in this stage, 1982's "Unconscious London Strata" is a good example of where he was going. Were the word "London" not in the title, you might not even know that was where this film was shot. Brief, distorted snaps of landmarks are only tiny clues along the path. Most of Brakhage's London consists of blurry sparkles and hues, like the literal mental record of that scene in The Rules of Attraction where a character's vacation in Europe is shown in a matter of minutes. (An unsophisticated comparison, I know.) Or maybe like the dancing galaxy on the astronaut's helmet in 2001. (Better? No?)

1994's "The Mammals of Victoria" is more grounded in its expression, at least in the fact that it's clear that Brakhage is depicting the ocean. The film keeps coming back to shots of water, spliced in the midst of more blank and spotty artistic impressions of the same. As the film progresses, Brakhage explodes the frame with sunlight, practically setting the sea on fire.

1992's "Boulder Blues and Pearls and..." once again uses Rick Corrigan's music to add an extra layer of sensation. Footage of nature, as well as one solitary image of a coffin, give way to explosions of color, leading into the direct painting of 1994's "From: First Hymn to the Night - Novalis." Brakhage creates a cinematic kaleidoscope with paint, like a modern art piece that the artist taught to dance. Laying in lines from a poem by Novalis also suggests--along with the earlier adaptations of Stein--that we shouldn't be looking at these movies as just visual media, but as poems as well. Color creates tone, images in sequence, like alien hieroglyphics.

Program 6: 1995-2003: As we shift into the last period of Stan Brakhage's filmography, the conventional boundaries of film discourse have essentially been obliterated. Necessitated partly by illness, but just as much part of his own creative impulses, Brakhage was creating more and more without actually shooting any film. 1995's "I Take These Truths" is a frenetic symphony of color--but it's not just paint that we are seeing on the screen. Brakhage is also scratching away the film emulsion and printing each frame twice, multiplying the layers of image to create effects that are both obvious and subliminal. At times, it looks kind of like the quickly passing graffiti as seen from the windows of a moving subway from a film set in 1980s New York. Other times it's like watching algae writhe under a microscope.

Not that the director abandoned the real world entirely. He creates his own version of "Wild Kingdom," going in as close as he could get to the garden and its creatures in "The Cat of the Worm's Green Realm" (1997). As the name suggests, the participants in this tale are a cat and a worm, and Brakhage's camera captures them amongst the foliage, with most of the film shot in extreme close-up, making that which is observed appear larger than life but also unreal, existing in a different space, unencumbered by the world outside of them. Made that same year, "Yggdrasill: Whose Roots are Stars in the Human Mind," combines the filmed with the hand-crafted to create a magical world that turns the everyday into the mythic. As in the second part of Visions in Meditation, there is an interplay between electricity, between neon and starlight and the visible ends of the spectrum, that is its own kind of mysticism.

The final film on By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volume Two - Criterion Collection, and actually the last short Stan Brakhage made, was created by the artist scratching onto black film with his fingernail while he lay on his deathbed. "Chinese Series" (2003) was printed posthumously, and it's hard not to give it a morbid interpretation under the circumstances. The white and yellow scratches look like dancing bones--though they aren't sad or scary, but rather playful. In this, "Chinese Series" has something in common with 1998's "'...'" Reel Five." The fifth entry in the Ellipses series is a cycle of Jackson Pollack-esque splatters set to avant-garde music by James Tenney. The squiggles and squishes flit by at a jaunty pace, buoyed by the almost counterintuitive pacing of Tenney's piano.

What may be more striking about "'...'" Reel Five," though, is the openness of it. In between the jagged lines are big, empty white spaces. In "'...'" Reel Five," less is more. Anything can happen in those white frames. It's as if Brakhage has cleared the brush away, and he has given our imagination leave to run wild.

To be honest, I think I ultimately failed in my interaction with By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volume Two. In working my way through the Criterion set, I did not become engaged enough, did not find my own path to understand what Stan Brakhage was trying to do. More often than not, I found myself explicating his experimental shorts rather than actually interpreting them through my own intuition--it's more like I was appreciating them in the way I felt I was supposed to, not in any real one-on-one fashion. Still, by Stan Brakhage's own mission statement, that might be enough. That I took the time to look and to think at all is really the only thing he would ask of me as his viewer. His tiny pieces of cinema speak large in terms of technique and in establishing a theatre of ideas, and in honor of that alone, everyone should at least attempt to give his work a go, even if you walk away confounded and swear never to go back again. I'm not there yet, I'll keep trying, but it's up to you in the end. Either way, By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volume Two is Recommended.

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full review at DVDTalk.

BY BRAKHAGE: AN ANTHOLOGY, VOL. ONE - #184

I tried to watch By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volume One a couple of years ago, but didn't make it very far. A darkened room, a bottle of sake, and a bunch of silent, "experimental" shorts--well, it ended up being a Friday night of me sleeping in my chair.

This isn't a negative comment on the film library of Stan Brakhage, nor is it really a negative comment on me. It just is what it is. I simply had no real idea what I was signing up for. I don't know what I expected, but it was not grainy, disjointed, and let me stress silent short films. I tried to go in cold and open-minded, and it didn't work.

The video store near my house had Jim Shedden's documentary Brakhage, and I vowed that before I attempted An Anthology again, I'd rent that and learn a little more about the subject, give myself some kind of foundation for understanding the man and his work. It was a good choice, as Shedden gives the uninitiated the basic groundwork for understanding Brakhage without doing all of the heavy work for us. He's armed me with the basic tools to approach Brakhage while still leaving me room for personal interpretation.

Stan Brakhage appeared on the art scene in the 1950s, at a time where traditional methods of expression were being dismantled in favor of something more personal. Perhaps it was a reaction against the conformity of the decade, perhaps it was an attempt to make a code so that the McCarthyites and other squares could not understand what was really happening. Maybe as a precursor to rock 'n' roll, the Beats and the avant-garde jazz musicians were pushing against the solid mass of post-War idealism. Into this, enter Brakhage and other new cinematic voices. Non-narrative, non-linear, their films are now called "psychodramas," and their intent was just as that sounds: a realization of the mind's abstractions, tales of the interior rather than the exterior. These were often surreal, without proper form, but one thing they were not prior to Brakhage was "first person." The filmmaker turned the camera from an outside observer looking at others to a single-person observer representing the filmmaker himself.

(Digression: I find the term "experimental" as applied to any artistic endeavor to be troublesome. As I interpret the notion of an experiment, particularly as it stems from scientific origins, is that an experiment entails putting two or more things together and seeing how they interact. The results are unpredictable, and they are what they are. There is no altering the outcome. In terms of cinema, there can be an element of randomness in what the camera captures, but the filmmaker is not beholden to the outcome. There is still choices to be made, and thus the material is manipulated. For instance, the artists chooses what to show, when to start and when to stop a shot, etc. If the final product goes beyond simply reporting the findings of the "experiment," is it still an experiment?)

There are twenty-six films on Criterion's two-disc first Anthology. The idea of reacting to each one film-by-film is daunting, to say the least. To interpret every short work here would require a particular critical rigor, especially since the films aren't really intended for traditional cinematic dissection. Stan Brakhage's shorts are meant to inspire a response that is often beyond articulation. The way he plays with light, the fleeting passing of images, is meant to leave an impression on the viewer and elicit a response that is often emotional, sometimes intellectual, but also somewhere beyond the ability of either to fully explain.

The set starts off easily enough. The first selection is 1954's "Desistfilm," the chronicle of a late-night party. It is one of the few movies in the collection to have sound, though the accompanying music is as dissonant in relation to the images as the images are in relation to one another. The camera here serves as a party guest, roaming the crowd, looking for someone to connect to but finding each of the other guests involved in their own thing. Given how inane some of the activity is, it quickly becomes obvious that this is likely staged rather than documentary. But if it weren't, which would be more self-indulgent: the action recorded or the act of recording (and exhibiting) said action?

It's a fair question, and one that certainly comes up watching the second film, 1959's "Wedlock House: An Intercourse." Brakhage records himself and his first wife, Jane, at home, moving in and out of shadow, catching small snippets of their lives together. The longer, more defined scenes involve them having sex, which is shown in graphic detail but projected in negative. Thus, the sex becomes otherworldly, almost as if we are seeing beings of living energy. (The Pander Bros. would achieve a similar effect in the 1990s with their infrared porno The Operation.) Yet, what are we to take away from Stan and Jane recording the minutia of their lives for all to see? Brakhage intended to meld life and art as one, but like reality television, is the act of living for the cameras something other than reality? (To be fair, much of these questions arose even before seeing "Wedlock House." In his Brakhage documentary, Jim Shedden shows pieces of autobio films made by Stan's friends and contemporaries that the subject wandered into, and the clips struck me as horribly self-involved. In the digital-video age especially, the act of turning a camera on oneself inspires the worst kind of narcissism. Hell, the whole internet age--the act of blogging!--has convinced us that our every brain wave is worth sharing. [For more of my thoughts on this subject, see my old piece on Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation.])

Not that Brakhage only kept the camera trained on himself and his loved ones. Though his film "Dog Star Man"* does show footage of the filmmaker and his pooch trudging through the snow in search of wood to chop, it also shows us many other things: landscapes both natural and man-made; the sun and the moon; the human body, both inside and out; water; babies; indistinct colors that shift like ink. Divided into five parts and clocking in at over an hour, "Dog Star Man" practically constitutes an epic in the Brakhage canon. Shot and edited between 1961 and 1964, the filmmaker plays with layers in this piece, overlapping his images so that two divergent tracks converge and melt together. He messes around with focus, movement, even readjusting the lens in mid-shot, stretching and distorting the captured object. His intention with all of his special effects was to replicate how we actually see things, how the eye moves as opposed to how a camera moves.

Similarly, his choice to forego audio was so that the viewer could provide his or her own soundtrack. Brakhage believed that the brain would create its own "music," as suggested by the tempo and arrangement of the imagery. If he provided music, it would create entirely different cues. Indeed, I admit to having cheated while watching "Dog Star Man". I thought Brian Eno's ultra-minimalist ambient piece Neroli would be quiet enough to help me stay engaged without interfering with my viewing--I have a very hard time sitting in silence--but even something as reductionist as that still created happy coincidences between sound and vision.** Then again, it's not as if we can ever watch a film in complete silence. Even turning down all my volume controls so there would be no hiss in my speakers, there was still the noise of my ceiling fan, my cat cleaning herself, and the hum of my own ears.

Stan's artistic intention is blatantly stated in the title of "The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes," the final part of Brakhage's famed Pittsburgh Trilogy. In this half-hour piece, Brakhage films in a Pennsylvania morgue, silently chronicling the bodies and autopsies. The absence of commentary does leave the viewer to only look, to absorb what is being shown, perhaps really looking at death in such gruesome and ghoulish detail for the first time in his or her life. It's strong stuff, and it closes out the first DVD in such a way that made me feel as if humanity could be and had been abstracted. This is life in all its detail. In all its absence of detail.

DVD 2 contains the bulk of the films in the anthology, and in addition to Brakhage's continued exploration of the filmed image, it also shows his shift into working without a camera at all. Brakhage's photographed shorts play out as living paintings, but in these other works, he approaches them as literal paintings. In some cases, he found ways to add paint and other substances to the movies through various means of construction; in other cases, he worked with the raw film itself, painting directly on the celluloid. "Mothlight" (1963) is one of his best known films, and it pioneered his abstract collage technique. In this case, he worked with a perforated tape to make a facsimile of film strips, and he put color and objects on them. When the resulting film prints were run through a projector, it created the illusion of movement and constructed images, including flapping insect wings. He used the same technique for his very short 1981 film "The Garden of Earthly Delights." In less than a minute and a half, Brakhage creates the sensation of being surrounded by foliage.

In 1972's "Eye Myth"--Brakhage's shortest piece, clocking at just 9 seconds--he paints around images of a man, and it alternately looks like the man is either being engulfed in the pigmentation or emerging from it. The same year, he used paint on a clear surface in front of the camera to create subtle changes over a landscape in "Wold's Shadow;" later, he'd paint on glass for other films, including 1994's "Black Ice."

"Dante's Quartet" from 1987 shows Brakhage burying faint images under gobs of color, making his own abstract versions of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. For "I...Dreaming" a year later, his tools weren't so much paint, but text and music, applied with the same collage-like manner (it's one of the handful of selections with soundtracks). Text is also used in "Untitled (For Marilyn)," posing existential questions amidst a symphony of acidic blobs. Various shots of windows show them as more than gateways to seeing, but perhaps like the cliché goes, a stand-in for our eyes and thus visions of our souls; there is even a crying out to God.

In some cases, Brakhage moved away from the concrete footage entirely, working with color to create ever evolving paintings, like the wall in a modern art museum come to life or an artist's easel engaging in a ballet. "Nightmusic" is a series of interconnected images creating one continuous effect, whereas "Rage Net" continues the experiment further through altering the strips of film before laying down the paint, creating unexpected special effects. 1991's "Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse" uses a violent rainbow of shading to recreate the effect of television on the eye, ultimately melting away to reveal the pattern lines of a TV screen itself.

In the mid-'90s, Stan Brakhage was diagnosed with cancer of the bladder. In a case of poetic irony, one theory is that the paints and film elements he used were a cause of his illness. Unsurprisingly, his films started to examine his own mortality, and perhaps none so poignantly as one of the last films on By Brakhage: An Anthology, "Comingled Containers" (1997). The short subject is a collection of footage of water, shot in extreme close-up, sometimes so you can see the actual movement of the liquid, sometimes so that the bubbles and currents are right in the lens, appearing like glass jellyfish, storm clouds, and even in some instances like the blurry light of an x-ray. Water is the stuff of life, and like life, it can be contained yet never wholly imprisoned. Man is his body, but he is also something else. Imagination, spirit, essence--whatever you call it, it can't be held in our fragile frame.

From what I gather, this is a primary belief of Brakhage's. Much of his work is a testament to the freedom of the imagination. His lack of artistic boundaries, his expanding mode of expression, was his ultimate comment on life: what we can dream, we can see; what we can see, can be shown.

There is now also a second part to this series, and both parts are bundled together as Blu-Ray release. Expect a review of the second collection in the coming weeks.

* Not to be confused with Suede's seminal album Dog Man Star, though, given some of his other tastes, the band's lyricist Brett Anderson would most likely cite Brakhage as an influence. Anderson's reordering of the title was meant to represent the ascendency of the individual. By nature, we start out low, rise to a certain distinction, but ultimately aspire to something more brilliant.

** Though eventually Eno's music was completely out of step with the frenetic editing in the latter parts of "Dog Star Man."