Stan Brakhage: Scenes from Under Childhood

A monumental achievement. Brakhage often turned to exploring the world of children and especially the earliest phases of childhood. Not as an idealised world of presumed or projected innocence, but as a site for the foundations of vision and the bedrock of identity. In Scenes from Under Childhood Brakhage begins with re-imagining ‘foetal beginnings’ and moves into the outer world of the newborn.Brakhage has addressed us confidentially from the inside, bringing us across a threshold of remembrance, energising what is encrypted and alive in the deepest levels of subjectivity. It’s like seeing a ghost. And in observing the stages of action of the child’s struggles and physical negotiations with the world we recover a visceral memory of making those gestures ourselves. Scenes from Under Childhood envisions a pre-innocent state of perceptual apprehension. Brakhage has established equivalents for the visual registers of this homeland territory, the sparkling needles and luminous dust of phosphene activity so familiar to children, eidetic memory and hypnagogic closed eye vision. This film places us in the playing field of early childhood’s ripening radar – the undiluted seeing, beset with apparitions, confusions, the obstacles of alarming indifference and harm, the polyphonic cross talk of inner and outer stimuli. Brakhage cuts to the quick of things within this endless everyday world.