Stan Brakhage: Murder Psalm
The films on this programme approach mythic presences, quests and convulsive flights within external and internal landscapes.The Wold Shadow: ‘My laboriously painted vision of the god of the forest.’ Yggdrasill is the inverted World Tree of Nordic Legend whose branches plunge deep into the earth and whose roots stretch to the fiery stars. In Brakhage’s envisionment, these roots are the tendrils of the deity connecting to sparking synapses and stems in the human brain. Creation is an expedition through the glacial opalescence of Alaskan fjords through tundra and terra incognita. A landscape film that would have been deeply appreciated by F.W. Murnau or Caspar David Friedrich. Though profoundly different works, both Weir Falcon Saga and Murder Psalm show to some degree vulnerable children riddled with medical and spiritual problems subject to counselling authority. Weir Falcon Saga is poised near narrativety, exploring a child’s spirit of play and relative sense of self interrupted by fever. Murder Psalm, one of Brakhage’s most unique films, is strong medicine. Sprung from a dream of matricide it blisters with the electricity of transgressive energies. A beautifully orchestrated crazy quilt composed from scientific and educational films, processed television and cartoons this negative regenerative myth is a dark and ferocious Dostoevskian version of the found footage collage film. Brakhage again explores the jagged strata of identity, the structuring of memory and myth, the sieges waged by an asphyxiating dominant culture against individual consciousness. The undreamt of betrayals that lead to transformative affliction and saving exodus.
