Stan Brakhage: The Garden of Earthly Delights
A programme celebrating earthly delights and memorialising earthly remains: Eros and Thanatos, animal and human. Brakhage breaks prohibitive taboos of seeing giving witness to primal aspects of life and death. Pasht is in part a birth film and Sirius traces the slow disappearing act of decomposition. Window Water Baby Moving is probably one of Brakhage’s most controversial but best appreciated films. It is vivid, jubilant and deeply intimate look at childbirth, documenting the birth of his first child. Self Song Death Song affirms both life and the ravaging effects of cancer. Made in the wake of surgery, Brakhage’s Coupling imagines the percussive communication of internal organs during coitus. Visions In Meditation #2:Mesa Verde combines two different kind of preserved ruins, geographical and cinematic to speculate on a haunted event – his own images of Anasazi Indian ancestral pueblo cliff dwellings mysteriously abandoned with some of the earliest known film (and very problematic) documentation of epileptic seizures. The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes shot in an autopsy room in Pittsburgh confronts us with the terminal destination of the body reduced to a grave matter but still saturated with the recently evicted personalities of its former inhabitants. A film of unflinching courage and compassion. Mothlight and The Garden Of Earthly Delights are two of Brakhage’s most wondrous films both made without a camera by directly applying transparent wings or flowers, or other organic matter directly film.
In this combined programme
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The Garden of Earthly Delights
Classic meditative collage film created entirely without the use of a camera by pasting montane zone vegetation such as petals, grasses and leaves
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Sirius Remembered
Sweeping camera movements by avant-garde film master Brakhage around a dead dog.
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Embracing
Personal quest in which the maker traces her father, whom she hasn’t seen for a long time.
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Our Land – Episode 6 (Stalking)
Two dog teams search the Spring ice, men and boys hunt day and night. There are seals everywhere.