Stan Brakhage: A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea

Capturing a full range of tidal cadences and luminosity, from aquatic shimmering to half tones of twilight stillness, A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea is a film of surpassing beauty. A visually opulent tone poem this is the first in a series of films (The Victoria Trilogy named after the location on Vancouver Island) that lovingly examines the childhood landscape-seascape of Brakhage’s wife Marilyn. The film-maker attempts to submerge himself into her informing world, to dream on the seabed, performing a kind of empathic (auto)biography through transference and identification with his wife’s past. ‘There I was in her childhood backyard – and then there was the sea, not as a counter balance but as a hidden generator of it all, of the World to be discovered by the/any child.’Agnus Dei Kinder Synapse is one Brakhage’s most indelibly compact and perfect miniatures. Artificial enchantments (a toy train ride), kindred shapes (elephant ears and other natural forms) and mental representations imitate and become what they resemble, as things of real substance. A film of concise transformative magic. The gorgeous turbulence of the hand-painted film Concrescence ignites conflagration in the eye-brain. The title a metaphysical term indicating the volition, perhaps divine, within all things that sparks leaps into actualisation and interrelation.