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Tim Cawkwell

~ currently publishing my poetry and verse. Blog entries on film and painting going back to 2014. My main website is www.timcawkwell.co.uk

Tim Cawkwell

Category Archives: Brakhage

Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes and what they can teach film-makers

15 Friday Jun 2018

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in artists' film, avant garde, Brakhage, Uncategorized

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Brakhage, gamelan, Goldberg Variations, John Cage, Sonatas and Interludes, Takemitsu, Tiberghien, Vimeo

Short films on Vimeo – there’s a lot of them out there. Some are even good, and you can ‘like’ them, and choose to follow the filmmaker. But, to make a generalisation, very few of these film-makers have thought enough about ‘form’.

Form can be imposed at two points: the editing bench springs first to mind, which is where Eisenstein, the author of the celebrated ‘Film Form’, placed a particular emphasis. But it can also be imposed in the camera, at the moment the film is being shot. This is Stan Brakhage’s major contribution to film aesthetics: even if he did not discover it, yet in view of the magnitude of his corpus, it is where the idea was most explored.

Now compare music. The same challenge exists: how do you impose form on a sequence of sounds? Western music answers this differently, since it has some eight or nine centuries of history behind it (assuming, arbitrarily I concede, a starting-point of Gregorian chant). Those centuries have been used to explore expressiveness of effect, but also to explore expressiveness of means. Composers have asked themselves questions about how to juxtapose notes, sequences of notes, sections of music – as it were, words, sentences and paragraphs.

Film is 120 years old, but has it concerned itself with these formal questions? Not nearly enough, because film is assumed to be made from representing persons, objects, dramas. It is not: it is made from frames and shots and sequences.

Music is made in the head, in itself, of itself. Film can be made in the head, but for the most part it is made from what is in front of the camera. It may be made ‘in itself’ but it is assumed mostly to be made ‘of something else’.

This train of thought is prompted by hearing the pianist, Cédric Tiberghien, perform John Cage’s ‘Sonatas and Interludes’ at Snape in Suffolk on 12 June. This is music made in Cage’s head, seemingly outside the Western tradition since he took his inspiration from Eastern philosophy and the sound of Eastern music. He wanted to break the listener out of the expectation which he or she brings to the music, in order to enlarge their understanding of the world. However, Cage did not jettison Western music. For a start he used the pianoforte – and then radically amended its sound world by the idea of the ‘prepared piano’.

Cage prepared piano - June 2018

This ropey image shows the piano prepared by the insertion of screws, nuts, bolts etc. between the strings to alter their timbre and make the piano sound more percussive, a process which Tiberghien said took him five hours. As we peered into it before the concert began, someone said, “Isn’t that fabulous?” – before she had even heard the noise the piano would make. Then someone commented, “Look at those screws. It’s hard to get that kind these days.” When I took this photo, someone asked, “Did you get a photo? People will never guess what it’s of.”

Secondly, the title ‘Sonatas and Interludes’ looks to Western compositional tradition, an AABB structure going back to 17th/18th-century sonata form, at least for thirteen of the sixteen sonatas. It is in the interludes particularly that Cage breaks away from this (which is why they are interludes). And the overall structure is a formal one: sonatas 1 to 4/interlude 1/sonatas 5 to 8/interludes 2 and 3/sonatas 9 to 12/interlude 4/sonatas 13 to 16. Listening to it brought to mind Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’, whose ‘thirty variations reiterate the harmonic implications of the same bass in thirty different forms’, so that when at the end the opening melody is brought back, we hear it differently. It feels cyclical.

I think cyclicality is a part of the Sonatas and Interludes. I read that it starts and ends in G major, although in my musical ignorance I could not hear that, except subconsciously perhaps since when the piece came to a close you could feel a sense of a journey completed.

So, is hearing the Goldberg Variations a cerebral exercise, and hearing the Sonatas and Interludes an ‘emotive’ one? No, since they are both cerebral, and both emotive. At Snape, in a darkened auditorium (where I could not read my notes to give me an intellectual way into the piece), I listened transfixed to the sounds, the clusters of sound, and each of the twenty pieces, and experienced a direct communication across the darkness from the pianist’s hands to my brain processing what my ears were hearing. This was underlined by the softness of the sounds as a result of the dampening and detuning provided by the piano being ‘prepared’. The result is much more piano than forte.

This served Cage’s purpose well. Drawing on ideas he had read in the work of the Indian sage Coomaraswamy, he wanted to convey eight ‘emotions’ (humorous, angry, fearful etc.) that led the novice to a ninth state, that of tranquillity. I could not hear any of the eight emotions, except perhaps anger, but you get a strong feeling of tranquillity being the core of the piece, its purpose and its effect. Again, Cage (I think) rejects the Western idea of ‘programme music’ for an ‘atmosphere’.

Sonatas and Interludes therefore looks both east and west, an idea confirmed by Cage’s very helpful comment that the bell-like sounds are from Europe and the drum-like sounds – metallic, wooden, dampened, detuned maybe – are from Asia. This is what makes it such a major work, straddling a divide between east and west, a bold attempt at global synthesis, suitable it may be considered for a country that had just fought a major war on two fronts, Europe and the Pacific – and had won. The USA was opening itself to the world, in effect was de-isolating itself.

Cage is therefore very much of his time, and it is also true that his originality allowed him to be fascinated and seduced by an Asian sound world, notably the gamelan orchestras of Indonesia. After Cage came the Japanese Toru Takemitsu, a master of ‘Japanese sound’ influenced by French musical impressionism, Debussy, Messiaen and others. And his rain music evoking rain-drops on water, patterning it to the eye, and resonating it in the ear, is very close to the sound world of the Sonatas and Interludes.

So, it was a wonderful concert. But as someone interested in film, I was envious: why cannot our film-makers do something like this? Take Brakhage’s Text of Light (1974, 67 minutes). This is an abstract film composed entirely of light patterns, but any sense of form eludes me. You can admire its textures and their variety, and the idea that “All that is, is light”, but where do you enter this work, where do you leave it? In defence, Brakhage might invoke the idea applied to Sonatas and Interludes, that Cage is “following a system, but he has no idea where he is going” (see James Pritchett in ‘Six Views of the Sonatas and Interludes’ at  http://rosewhitemusic.com/piano/writings/six-views-sonatas-interludes/), but this is admirable only up to a point, for where is the system being followed?

So, going back to Vimeo. Too many of the films I have been looking at feel too experimental, too random. There may be virtue in jettisoning Western ideas of order, tradition, proportion, a classical architecture as it were, but as I watched and admired these films I longed for those ideas to be brought back. But because film has not got all those centuries behind it, it lacks the grounding which Cage had in launching his experiments.

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SEEING INTO DEEP SPACE: BRAKHAGE AND SAM FRANCIS

05 Monday Jun 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in avant garde, Brakhage, metaphysical film, painting and photography

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Brakhage, galaxy photographs, Jackson Pollock, Sam Francis

Sam Francis, Untitled 1987 - detail       Sam Francis: Untitled (1987) – detail

Sam Francis, Tokyo 1974 - detail       Sam Francis: Tokyo (1974) – detail

Panels fm the walls of hvn

Stan Brakhage: Panels for the walls of heaven (2002)

Seeing paintings by the abstract expressionist Sam Francis (1923-1994) at a London gallery in May put me in mind of the late abstract films of his contemporary Stan Brakhage (1933-2003). There are intriguing links between the two artists. Francis is emphatically a Jackson Pollock disciple, fascinated with the techniques of flicking paint across the canvas or sheet of paper; less Pollockian in technique but Pollockian in spirit is his tactic of letting small pools of colour bleed into one another. Brakhage, to my mind, is another Pollock disciple in that Pollock’s crowded, all-consuming canvases of the 1950s, more than anything else at the time, encouraged Brakhage to use film as a mark-making process, frame by frame, that overwhelmed the spectator’s retina. In time he embraced abstraction pure and simple.

Second, you feel that Francis wants to express some macrocosmic view of the world, especially in those paintings with an ‘empty centre’ that offer a window onto infinity. He wants to emulate in paint the expressiveness of magnificent colour photographs of far-off galaxies.

Galaxy image 1

Galaxy image 2

Brakhage had similar preoccupations in his cosmic view of the world whether in the microcosm of Mothlight or the solar flares of the macrocosm in Dog Star Man, both from the 1960s. By the time of his pure abstract films of the 1990s, he pursues a fascination with light through stained glass (Chartres Series), and with the way the dull opacity of the film strip is made luminous by light passing through it. Francis too revelled in the pleasures of colour being made luminous when applied to a white background.

Both liked the colour blue:

Sam Francis, Chari Leiva

Sam Francis: Chari Leiva

Three Homerics 3

Stan Brakhage: Three Homerics (1993)

However – I should not get carried away. The way a Francis painting is perceived is in a different category  from the way a Brakhage film is perceived. You see a painting as a whole in a frozen moment even if you then choose to examine different areas of the picture. A film on the other hand is seen in time, as a sequence of parts, or if the film is made frame by frame, rather as a sequence of ‘atoms’ , and it is only when it is finished that you have a sense of the whole. The effects are very different: Francis has to be fixedly contemplated; with Brakhage you have to climb aboard the eyeball express.

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David Larcher’s ‘Mare’s Tail’ (1969)

17 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in avant garde, Brakhage, British cinema, spiritual cinema, underground film

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Brakhage, Edinburgh Film Festival, Larcher, LFMC

“A symphony should contain the whole world” was Gustav Mahler’s comment on his music. A film that aspires to the condition of music can do the same. Such is Mare’s Tail.

If the whole world is to be contained, you need length, so Mare’s Tail is 2½ hours long. In music, the risk would be tedium from the fact that the symphonic form is too conventional, too predictable, and too tedious, so that immense creative imagination is needed to break out of those constrictions. Mahler had it hence the power of his symphonies. In film, there are no such rules, at least not yet, so the risk for a film as long as Mare’s Tail is tedium on different grounds because the spectator has no idea where the film is going. David Larcher avoids this by threading into it, almost beneath our awareness, a beginning, a middle and an end. The film opens with a blank screen accompanied by a rising drone for some ten minutes. It reminded me straightaway of the droning E flat that opens Wagner’s ‘Ring’ cycle, and while further parallels should not be pressed, both works signal their epic intentions by this means. The middle of the film is taken up with a trajectory of some kind, from creation, to birth, to sex, to life, to death. And there is an end of a teasing kind. Finally after much shaking of the eyeballs, a written ‘FIN’ appears on the screen. This surely signals the end (although the use of French may be meant to throw us off the scent), only for our eyeballs to receive further jolts by the interspersing of white leader with fragments recalling earlier sequences in the film.

Larcher’s challenge was to glue the whole thing together. His principal way of doing this is by the style of the film. The images are clearly visible, but not in any way we are familiar with, since he uses negative footage, re-filming, stop-motion projection, optical printing, stretched images and other means to de-familiarise the way we watch films. The same strategy is used on the soundtrack, where we can hear words spoken and we can hear snatches of music, but they come to us through a fog filter of some kind so they are muffled and distorted. We know words are being spoken but we can barely hear what. We hear music, but identification is stymied. I thought I heard Bob Dylan’s ‘It’s all over now, baby blue’, but I am far from sure. There were suggestions of classical Indian music. The most identifiable piece was the tune from Beethoven’s Ode to Joy in his Ninth Symphony (another piece of music that contains the whole world), but it is played on unfamiliar instruments to give it a jolly, tinny, and quite anti-Beethovenian tone.

The right adjective for it all is an antiquated one from the 1960s – ‘trippy’. It invites us into a vision of the world where we feel free of anxiety. The humans that appear are beautiful people of their time, the animals, especially the frigate birds, are expressive of the wonders of the created order, and when he films a fly struggling on its back, or a fish gasping out its life in the water, or even the mass slaughter of turtles, these death throes feel free of pain. One brief sequence, filmed on the underground, shows a woman dropping down on the floor and playing dead or catastrophically ill; a young man then gets up, looks quizzically at her, crosses himself, and steps out of the carriage onto the platform. Even this death is treated as a tease. Also of its time is Larcher’s embrace of abstraction alongside the traces of the figurative and the autobiographical. By its length, the film disrupts time, and by its abstract particles, its dance of spheres and many other images that resist identification, it combines the microcosm with the macrocosm, and in doing so achieves a disruption of space.

The film was premièred at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1969, Larcher having worked on it for several years, all through the summer of love of 1967, the explosion of flower power, the elaboration of the ‘far out’ culture. “Oh in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.” It must have been a temptation to place a rock soundtrack on the finished film, but even if Larcher was tempted, he quite refused it. The whole film dances on the edge of the abyss of Self Indulgence, but somehow Larcher never falls in. Avoiding the facile solution of a rock soundtrack is one of the ways he does so.

Where do his images come from? In a way, they seem to have spilled out of him in a quite unmediated way, and for a British film Mare’s Tail is most unusually linked to the visionary quality of the pre-structuralist American avant-garde, when it was still called underground cinema. Had Larcher seen any of the films of Stan Brakhage? The birth sequences instantly bring to mind Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving (1959) and Thigh Line Lyre Triangular (1961), and the whole enterprise feels inspired by Dog Star Man (1961-4), Brakhage’s own epic vision of creation and his world within it. But this is quite speculative, and it is quite within the bounds of possibility that Larcher was making these images without any inspiration from Brakhage. What does link the film to the Americans is the ambition of his project. The 1970s work at the London Film-Makers’ Co-op, of which Larcher was a member, only rarely sought to match the scale of the American avant-garde, which itself took its cue from that of the Abstract Expressionist painters of the 1950s.

What does make it British is the fact it is in black-and-white. Surely this economy was forced on him, but Larcher makes the most of it both by his technical understanding of the medium of film, and also by the fact that when colour is used, it jolts the spectator, as if the annoying suspense of waiting for colour is resolved by the relief and the pleasure of its arrival. Like many good film-makers, including commercial ones, Larcher is focused on stringing good sequences together, always trying things out. You sense that there is never total mastery, but his technique never lets him down either, as if total mastery would banish the experimental, ‘open-field’ quality which he wants to convey.

So, is the film formless? Yes, but it is immersive and keeps drawing us in. Watching it, you can fall asleep certainly, and when you wake up you are re-engaged. It needs to be seen projected on a screen in a black space in order that we are properly underwater. In the end, its depiction of the whole of creation has an omniscient, life-affirming quality.

But I am still to discover why it is called Mare’s Tail. So what?

[Mare’s Tail was screened at the Close Up cinema in London on Sunday 15 January 2016.]

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

1971 revisited

19 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in avant garde, Brakhage, Creation, metaphysical film, spiritual cinema

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Baillie, Belson, Brakhage

sftc-1

In 1971 I made an 8mm film called Sketches for the Creation, drawing on my understanding of the films of Stan Brakhage, Jordan Belson and Bruce Baillie for its inspiration. I was 23 at the time.

This year I had it digitized and have produced a new digital version, slightly reduced in length and with some brushstrokes of sound (nothing coercive, naturally). It is 12 minutes long.

If you are interested in seeing it go to: https://vimeo.com/194487765

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Stan Brakhage – the works

08 Thursday Sep 2016

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in avant garde, Brakhage, spiritual cinema

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Émilie Vergé, Brakhage, Paris Experimental

Émilie Vergé (ed.)

STAN BRAKHAGE: FILMS (1952-2003)           Catalogue raisonné

446pp. Paris Expérimental [www.paris-experimental.asso.fr], 65 euros, ISBN 978 2 912539 49 6

‘Catalogue raisonné’? ‘Filmography’ is the usual word to connote a film-maker’s list of films with dates and collaborators. So, why apply the idea of the catalogue raisonné, normally used of painters, to the work of the film-maker Stan Brakhage? The answer is that Brakhage was such an unusual film-maker. When he died in 2003, at the age of 70, he had more than 350 films to his name, the longest 260 minutes, the shortest 31 seconds. Up to now it has not been easy to get to grips with the totality of his work, only a portion being available on DVD. Paris Expérimental is to be congratulated on this bi-lingual catalogue that at a stroke allows an overview of all five decades of Brakhage’s career. The idea of a catalogue is apt in another way too: Brakhage was a visual artist like a painter and not a film director who collaborated with others.

This is the opening paragraph of my review of this new book cataloguing Brakhage’s large output of films. For the full review, go to: http://bit.ly/brakhage_cr

cat-raisonne

WONDER RING/GNIR REDNOW: AN INTRIGUE

01 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in avant garde, Brakhage, surrealism

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Atget, By Night with torch and spear, Centuries of June, Joseph Cornell, Michael Pigott, P Adams Sitney, Rudy Burckhardt, Stan Brakhage, The Wonder Ring Gnir Rednow, Tower House, Wanderlust

A mild version of Cornell-mania has hit London with the ‘Wanderlust’ exhibition at the Royal Academy (due to go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in October), showing a number of his collages and boxes, some familiar, some less familiar. It is welcome to see these gathered together, and the occasion is made more welcome by the inclusion of some of his films. Triply welcome is an evening of his films at BFI Southbank on 3 September. Showing in the exhibition itself were firstly, Thimble Theater, a collage of trifles from the 1930s completed but not re-edited by Larry Jordan in the 1970s so that the collage remains as Cornell prepared it. Second was Angel, a collaboration with Rudy Burckhardt from 1957, that counterpoints an angel in a cemetery, frozen in stone, with fluidities and liquidities that barely register: shimmering water, waving flowers and trees, ending with a back view of the angel against clouds moving slowly across a blue sky. Best of all is a leaf resting on the water floating with a fastidious slowness into the angel’s dark shadow.

The third film is Gnir Rednow, his version of The Wonder Ring of 1955. The story is this: Brakhage was in New York in the mid-50s and Cornell gave him some Kodachrome asking him to use it to make a record of the 3rd Avenue Elevated railway, an overground track which was due to be replaced. The result was the 5½ minutes of The Wonder Ring, Brakhage’s second colour film and the one in which his preoccupation with light came to the fore signalling a major new direction in this work. P. Adams Sitney elaborates on its inception (in his ‘Visionary Film’, chapter 6 ‘The Lyrical Film’): “Joseph Cornell . . . wanted someone to film the 3rd Avenue El before its destruction. Parker Tyler gave him Brakhage’s telephone number. When Cornell called, according to Brakhage’s account, the young film-maker had to admit he had never been on the El. That ended the conversation and, he thought, his election to make the film. But the next day he received in the mail two tokens for the El. Cornell supplied the materials, and Brakhage made Wonder Ring.” I do not believe there is any particular record of what Cornell thought of the finished film, but I cannot help feeling it was not quite what he wanted – but that he was content with what had resulted. The only comment we do have, a very oblique one, is that he did his own version as Gnir Rednow (dated to 1960), the clue to which is in the end title: “The end is the beginning”, i.e. The Wonder Ring is run backward and upside down. Was this in mild mockery of Brakhage’s effort? Not necessarily at all, and anyway it now seems that Gnir Rednow users mostly out-takes from Brakhage’s footage. Some shots are surely the same in each: he uses from The Wonder Ring the bulbs on the roof of the carriage and the light-flooded roof or the elevated station stop:

WR 7    WR 1

only he inverts them. There is a precedent too, since his found film of ca 1942, By Night with Torch and Spear, has a sequence in a foundry which is upside down and running backwards, so he clearly was drawn to this idea for its own sake.

Some shots in The Wonder Ring he will have particularly valued: the door to the ticket office, the coloured glass, both of which Brakhage’s camera caught (did Cornell instruct him to include these?).

WR 2    WR 3a

These have period charm, that bland phrase hiding the aesthetic burden Cornell placed in such details: “we don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone” (to use the words of the song), and the preservation of such details in an artwork makes them even more precious than they were before.

As an example of difference between the two films, Gnir Rednow includes a clear shot of a series of billboards in the station, ephemeral advertisements which, as they recede in time, take on an added lustre of pastness. In The Wonder Ring, Brakhage has the billboards but they are filmed through the distorting glass of the window so that as the train moves, the image ripples – and Brakhage is interested more in the ripple, the way the image is shown rather than what is shown.

WR 8

This points to a fundamental difference between Brakhage and Cornell. Brakhage was anxious in his aesthetics to make the distinction between still images and moving images, between photography and film, and to discourage the notion that you could switch easily from one to the other. The difference is ontological, a difference in essences. Did Cornell on the other hand want Brakhage just to make a documentary record in the manner that the French photographer Eugène Atget recorded the streets of Paris and their shop windows about a century ago, that gentle surrealism which Cornell preferred to the erotic or subversive version of (for example) Max Ernst?

And yet it is hard to see Cornell objecting to what he got. He seems to have been intensely interested in New York modernism, and must surely have responded favourably to The Wonder Ring’s evanescent window lights which so felicitously illustrate frames and sprockets passing through the projector gate.

WR 15

In hindsight we can see that The Wonder Ring points to the materiality of film that was going to obsess film modernists in the 1960s and 70s, a development that Cornell could not have predicted but one that he would have surely accepted as valuable in its own right.

© Tim Cawkwell 2015

Three afterthoughts:

1              In his book ‘Wits End’ (1989) about film-makers he had known, Brakhage does not have a chapter on Cornell, although he does refer to the mutual friendship with Cornell that he and Ken Jacobs shared.

2              In 2013 Bloomsbury published ‘Joseph Cornell versus Cinema’ by Michael Pigott, a welcome essay on Cornell’s film work which turns out to have been more extensive than originally appeared. But it is unfortunate that the book contains no filmography.

3              Cornell and Brakhage also collaborated on Tower House – Centuries of June. Again, Sitney is helpful in ‘Visionary Film’: “The same year [as Wonder Ring] Cornell asked Brakhage to photograph a film for him of an old house that he liked which was about to be torn down. The film he made was called Tower House until Cornell edited it and renamed it with the phrase of Emily Dickinson’s, Centuries of June.” Big question: which was made first? If Wonder Ring was first, the commissioning of Tower House underlines Cornell’s faith in the film-maker.

4              It was back in 1973 (in ‘Artforum’ for January of that year) that Paul Arthur first drew attention to the way The Wonder Ring manages to replicate the way the film strip could be put in the foreground: “This constitutes a wonderfully ironic reversal of the persistence of vision phenomenon in that the windows assume the basic shape of successive film frames though which the figures of passengers standing on the opposite platform remain motionless.”

 

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