Stan Brakhage: The Loom

Both rr and The Wonder Ring, one of Brakhage’s aesthetic breakthroughs of the 1950s, play meaningfully in that area that links cinematic perception and the motor sensory experiences and illusions that come with train travel. The Wonder Ring is a pivotal film ‘commissioned’ by the artist Joseph Cornell, who requested that Brakhage film the ‘el’ train above Manhattan’s Third Avenue before its demolition.In The Dead, Brakhage films the sepulchres and shadowed pathways of Pere Lachaise cemetery and the Seine. This darkly lyrical threnody superimposes negative and positive images slightly off register and conveys a struggle with the paralysing weight of history. The other films in this programme utilise in different ways the erotically tactile elements of touching surfaces and the metaphors for cognitive layering that superimposition can imply. Prelude to Dog Star Man from Brakhage’s best known epic conveys a balancing of biological, mythical, sexual, atomic and astronomical elements through juxtaposition and superimposition. The Dante Quartet, originating from photographic and hand painted overlays on IMAX, 70mm and 35mm, has similar achievements but in a stunning and more compressed form. Brakhage compares The Loom to the form of a musical quartet as there are almost always four layers of superimposed materials or ‘voices’. In its depiction of a theatrically framed animal menagerie, The Loom derives inspiration from magician and pioneer film-maker Georges Méliès.