Stan Brakhage: Preludes
This programme was chosen by Brakhage himself and contains some of the films that he most wanted to present in this Focus on his work. The first two films are dedicated in many senses of the word to the film-maker’s wife Marilyn. Divertimento, hand painted in hospital in the aftermath of cancer treatments, seems a longing for, if not fullness, then a tabula rasa, but a finding of something evident in the so called ‘Alzheimer’s paintings’ of De Kooning – the habitual, tenacious, skeletal elements of capability, of internal feedback and the undercarriage of thought. Preludes is one of Brakhage’s most magnificent hand painted film series whose various concerns are evident throughout its multiple parts. It is fair then to think of the numerous musical preludes that may have existed as spur or correlate, Bach and Buxtehude if not Debussy and Scriabin. Vestiges of external scenes of various locations imprinted in the mind and rendered back as portraits of place ‘plein aire abstract’ as Brakhage calls it, are interspersed amidst Preludes purely untranslatable to, or from, any other form. As is often the case with much of his work, Brakhage’s hand painted films are meditations on the particulars of a specific subject and the ineffable.
