Created over fifty years of ceaseless activity, filmmaker Stan Brakhage's body of nearly 400 films is notable for its dazzling kineticism, expressive camerawork and rich use of optical and painterly abstraction and for its emphasis on direct, primal and pre-linguistic vision as direct conduit to the nervous system and as the conveyor of experience and meaning. In this radical centering of vision, Brakhage promoted a general aesthetics of cinematic silence and the abstraction of experience through the attenuation of the auditory. Considering his work to be expressive of "moving visual thinking" Brakhage was, of course, deeply influenced by music and the experience of sound. It is not surprising then that his rare forays into sound filmmaking have resulted in films which are among the most unique sound/image works in the history of the medium.
An anomalous entry in Brakhage's oeuvre, Passage Through: A Ritual (1990) pairs Fluxus composer Philip Corner's long form solo piano piece Through the Mysterious Barricade: Lumen (after F. Couperin)--itself composed in response to Brakhage's The Riddle of Lumen (1972)--to a pointilist stream of image bursts (Brakhage: "the most exacting editing process ever") punctuating an experience of cinematic darkness. Engaging rhythmically with Corner's rejoinder, Brakhage's Passage Through... presents contrapuntal dialog with the obsessions with sound/image synchrony of Sharits and Kubelka and the minimal and temporarily spacialized cinema of Markopolous while--most crucially--creating space for the reflective experience of memory, anticipation and perceptual surprise. This evening's program--which will also include Brakhage's The Riddle of Lumen (1972) and Ephemeral Solidity (1993)--will be introduced by John Powers, author of "Moving through stasis in Stan Brakhage's Passage Through: A Ritual," published 2019 in Screen, vol. 60, Issue 3.
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An anomalous entry in Brakhage's oeuvre, Passage Through: A Ritual (1990) pairs Fluxus composer Philip Corner's long form solo piano piece Through the Mysterious Barricade: Lumen (after F. Couperin)--itself composed in response to Brakhage's The Riddle of Lumen (1972)--to a pointilist stream of image bursts (Brakhage: "the most exacting editing process ever") punctuating an experience of cinematic darkness. Engaging rhythmically with Corner's rejoinder, Brakhage's Passage Through... presents contrapuntal dialog with the obsessions with sound/image synchrony of Sharits and Kubelka and the minimal and temporarily spacialized cinema of Markopolous while--most crucially--creating space for the reflective experience of memory, anticipation and perceptual surprise. This evening's program--which will also include Brakhage's The Riddle of Lumen (1972) and Ephemeral Solidity (1993)--will be introduced by John Powers, author of "Moving through stasis in Stan Brakhage's Passage Through: A Ritual," published 2019 in Screen, vol. 60, Issue 3.
Created over fifty years of ceaseless activity, filmmaker Stan Brakhage's body of nearly 400 films is notable for its dazzling kineticism, expressive camerawork and rich use of optical and painterly abstraction and for its emphasis on direct, primal and pre-linguistic vision as direct conduit to the nervous system and as the conveyor of experience and meaning. In this radical centering of vision, Brakhage promoted a general aesthetics of cinematic silence and the abstraction of experience through the attenuation of the auditory. Considering his work to be expressive of "moving visual thinking" Brakhage was, of course, deeply influenced by music and the experience of sound. It is not surprising then that his rare forays into sound filmmaking have resulted in films which are among the most unique sound/image works in the history of the medium.
An anomalous entry in Brakhage's oeuvre, Passage Through: A Ritual (1990) pairs Fluxus composer Philip Corner's long form solo piano piece Through the Mysterious Barricade: Lumen (after F. Couperin)--itself composed in response to Brakhage's The Riddle of Lumen (1972)--to a pointilist stream of image bursts (Brakhage: "the most exacting editing process ever") punctuating an experience of cinematic darkness. Engaging rhythmically with Corner's rejoinder, Brakhage's Passage Through... presents contrapuntal dialog with the obsessions with sound/image synchrony of Sharits and Kubelka and the minimal and temporarily spacialized cinema of Markopolous while--most crucially--creating space for the reflective experience of memory, anticipation and perceptual surprise. This evening's program--which will also include Brakhage's The Riddle of Lumen (1972) and Ephemeral Solidity (1993)--will be introduced by John Powers, author of "Moving through stasis in Stan Brakhage's Passage Through: A Ritual," published 2019 in Screen, vol. 60, Issue 3.
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An anomalous entry in Brakhage's oeuvre, Passage Through: A Ritual (1990) pairs Fluxus composer Philip Corner's long form solo piano piece Through the Mysterious Barricade: Lumen (after F. Couperin)--itself composed in response to Brakhage's The Riddle of Lumen (1972)--to a pointilist stream of image bursts (Brakhage: "the most exacting editing process ever") punctuating an experience of cinematic darkness. Engaging rhythmically with Corner's rejoinder, Brakhage's Passage Through... presents contrapuntal dialog with the obsessions with sound/image synchrony of Sharits and Kubelka and the minimal and temporarily spacialized cinema of Markopolous while--most crucially--creating space for the reflective experience of memory, anticipation and perceptual surprise. This evening's program--which will also include Brakhage's The Riddle of Lumen (1972) and Ephemeral Solidity (1993)--will be introduced by John Powers, author of "Moving through stasis in Stan Brakhage's Passage Through: A Ritual," published 2019 in Screen, vol. 60, Issue 3.
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80 Turk Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
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