Stan Brakhage: Anticipation of the Night

At the core of this programme is Anticipation of the Night, a seminal film for Brakhage and for film history where the psychodramas of his earlier work transformed into a wholly new kinaesthetic vocabulary. This film is a rapturous idyll, a lamentation, an exorcism and a death wish. It traces the mortal trajectory of our visual experience from Edenic optical ecstasies to and its descending tilt towards the eclipsing ‘night’ of vision arrested and crucified by the process of socialisation. Everything in Anticipation of the Night is seen in a multiplicity of aspects, changing velocities, crucial shifts of light and granular structures. This film dissolves the moribund notions of a visible on-screen protagonist and dramatic cinema’s crude contrivances of ‘point of view ‘. Brakhage establishes the film-maker as the generating and apparent source of all seeing whose subjectivity is paramount but shared and deeply involving for the viewer. In his films, cinematography is an autograph. An autobiography in the present tense, life in the making. The camera dances in an active response galvanised by what is seen – an extension of the body’s limbs and the nervous system’s electrical firing.Anticipation of the Night comes out of the stark suburban ‘horror film’ that is Fire of Waters, but it stretches the imagination to think of these two film erupting out of the 1950s at the geographical centre of Eisenhower’s America.