Stan Brakhage: The Text of Light

Cinema is consciousness and light is intelligence. ‘All that is is light’ (Duns Scotus Erigena) was a guiding quote and credo for Brakhage throughout the making of The Text of Light. Brakhage is exquisitely ‘photosensitive’, exploring all the visual registers of light across the known spectrum and through its unassigned frequencies and physiological and emotional manifestations. Cinema as consciousness and light as intelligence. Bookending this visually resplendent programme of non-representational ‘imagnostic’ film and landscape as engendering source are two of Brakhage’s evocations of the ‘filtered’ sublime. Jonas Mekas was perhaps the first to refer to The Text of Light as ‘cathedrals of light’. The vibrantly hand painted Chartres Series (propelled by a life changing visitation to see the incomparable stained glass windows of the Gothic cathedral in Chartres) and The Text of Light (a near microphotographic contemplation of the minute changes of refracted light painstakingly filmed through a crystal ashtray) have an affinity through their concern with light projecting through vitreous elements. Brakhage peered clairvoyantly into this crystal ashtray this Blakean grain of sand and found the basic makeup of all things a universe of colour and shape as living entities, a history of painting from Turner’s mists to Cézanne’s forests to De Kooning’s ‘Door to the River’ and unnameable angelic beings and spectral emanations.