Telling Time: Essays of a Visionary Filmmaker

TELLING TIME: ESSAYS OF A VISIONARY FILMMAKER Edited by Bruce McPherson Kingston, NY: Documentext, McPherson and Company, 2003, 144 pp. When Stan Brakhage passed away in March 2003, not only did the international avant-garde lose a groundbreaking artist, magisterial teller of tales, and esteemed public presence; it also lost an original, audacious and insightful theoretician. twenty-six pieces collected in Telling Time: Essays of a Visionary Filmmaker, first printed in the Toronto quarterly, Musicworks between 1989 and 1999, establish Brakhage's place among the most elastic minds of his generation. Similarly at ease discussing Russian poetry, romantic love, visual perception, child psychology, human cognition, and religious belief as he is debating aesthetic or cinematic issues, Brakhage's essays spark from stream-of-consciousness synapses, sudden insights culled from a lifetime of voracious reading, attentive reflection, and piercing observation. entries in Telling Time comprise Brakhage's most mature writing, but they continue to maintain the playful slips of language and leaps of faith that distinguish earlier works such as Metaphors on Vision (1963), Biographies (1977), and at Wit's End (1989). Devoid of footnotes and academic jargon, but replete with puns, intentional misspellings, humorous asides, conceptual enjambments, run on sentences and non-sequiturs, his speculative criticism is akin to a psycho-geographical derive. Suggesting thought-in-motion (unselfconscious, deliberate thinking], these freshly buoyant essays express the organic, uneven now-ness of his more intuitive film compositions. Given his lifelong study of modem classical music, the pronounced, asymmetrical rhythm of Brakhage's writing is apt. Music, he says, served as inspiration for both his photographic and his actual editing orders even as his creative philosophies were becoming silently oriented. As Bruce McPherson points out in his Editor's Note, Brakhage's column (titled Time...on dit) arose as an exploration of film and music's analogous relationship, and was intended for Musicworks' specialized readership. As time-based modes of expression, both music and film depend on rhythm for unity, development and coherence. Film and Music are continuity Arts, he writes. They share 'kin senses of rhythm and tempo, as well as corollary aesthetics with respect to 'tone.' But, as McPherson observes, Brakhage quickly departed from his investigation of film and music parallels to explore a vast array of cultural, scientific and philosophical genres, drawing links between poetry, painting, astronomy, aesthetics, and phenomenology. An unwavering fascination with rhythm, however, permeates all of these interests. On the first page of the volume's initial essay, About Time, Brakhage introduces Charles Olson's famous dictum, rhythm is image./ Of image is knowing/ And of knowing there is a construct. These three lines form a wellspring for many subsequent departures, such as the book's final, brief conjecture on vision, memory and perception. By juxtaposing open- and closed-eye descriptions of falling leaves, Brakhage illustrates how representational likeness is only one means for recounting a familiar visual scenario. He argues that we must forget how we are trained to see (i.e. the normative perspective derived from Renaissance art) in order to arrive at a fuller, more complex engagement with the natural world. In his example, the intertwined swirl of imagined, remembered, open-eye and hypnagogic images are inseparable components of heightened perception. He writes, The Leaf Ritual paradigm, which began this essay, can be read, then, as a verbal parable which attempts to explicate the results of such visual loss as is affiliated with the development of speech, as well as experienced as a lament composed of rhythms in memoriam. Here, Brakhage's oddly formed, prolix prose unintentionally points up the line dividing perception and description, while simultaneously confounding figurative associations. …

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