Text of Light by Nicky Hamlyn
Transcript of an introduction to the screening of Stan Brakhage’s Text of Light organised by LUX as part of the Colour After Klein exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery, London in July 2005.
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| Text of Light, Stan Brakhage |
Text of Light can be seen as one kind of end point for this move, since Brakhage here achieves pure abstraction, or one could say, representation is broken down and the light from which those representations were formed is reconstituted as dramatic forms that can be readily interpreted as geomorphic; canyons, cliffs, stormy skies etc. Comparisons have been made with Turner, and painters like John Martin also spring to mind. In its even, leisurely pace and extended duration, Text of Light is untypical of much of Brakhage’s work, which is more usually characterised by its nervous mobility, brevity and compression of forms and ideas. It does, however, look forward to further abstract works, such as the Arabic and Roman Numeral films of the early 1980s and the hand painted films made from around 1985 onwards until his death in 2003.
Text of Light began initially as a portrait of an old school friend, a businessman called Gordon Rosenblum (the resulting short portrait film, Dominion, was also completed in the same year as Text of Light, 1974). Text of Light was shot over the period of a year in Rosenblum’s office in Denver. In addition to the glass ashtray, pieces of glass -crystal knickknacks and so on- were placed around the ashtray and on the window sills but not between it and the lens, so the film is a bit more contrived than its usual, one-line description implies. The film was shot frame by frame, with the camera clamped down. Incremental movements were made by tapping it. In other words, there is no handholding and no normal 24fps shooting: the whole film is animated from singly shot frames. Like many of Brakhage’s films, it was shot on Kodachrome, which gives intense, saturated colour and fine grain. A macro lens with a bellows attachment was used . (Super 8 Kodachrome amateur film recently discontinued, but 16mm still processed in the USA. Kodachrome has been replaced with a new Ektachrome stock, so demand is still there).
The ashtray is the film’s putative subject, but insofar as it becomes, in effect, a lens extension, and thus part of the apparatus with which it is filmed, it is absorbed into the technology that produces its image, IF that is what it does indeed do. So the film comes to occupy a metaphysical no man’s land, a place where the distinctions between the camera and its subject, or between subject and object, dissolve into a play of coloured light. The camera is always looking through, rather than at, since there are no objects to look at. The principle of looking through serves to stress vision as a process and the visual field as one that is always in a state of flux. The visual field is not made up of solid things in empty space, as most movies would have us believe. There is only light play.
Because the film’s forms are no longer representational, colour can become primary in a way that it tends not to be when it’s seen in representational art. In this regard it is surely no accident that most colour painters have been, to a greater or lesser extent, abstractionists. Yves Klein, in his having striven for an apparently medium-less colour that could somehow thereby escape pictorialism, or picture making, could be said to have tried to move beyond the representation/abstraction dichotomy, into a non-pictorial realm. Brakhage disliked the distinction between abstraction and representation, and Text of Light also seems also to want to move beyond film into a realm of pure coloured light. Thus both Klein’s paintings and Brakhage’s film perhaps share a transcendentalism in this sense.
William C. Wees, has written eloquently on this film in his book Light Moving in Time. He has also said elsewhere that the difference between narrative cinema and artists’ film is that in narrative cinema light is in the service of film, whereas in artists’ work, film is in the service of light. Text of Light exemplifies this latter position, because light is allowed to determine what happens to a greater extent than in many of Brakhage’s more controlled and egotistical films. Brakhage didn’t like the term experimental, and insisted he knew exactly what he was getting when he shot Text of Light. However, if experiments form the practical part of an investigative process, Text of Light is tantamount to experimentation in its investigative approach to its subject.
Scott MacDonald: A Critical Cinema 4, Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, California University Press, 2005, pages 94-101.
David Bachelor: Chromophobia, Reaktion Books, 2000
William C Wees: Light Moving in Time, California University Press, 1992.
All Text of Light images courtesy of the Estate of Stan Brakhage and Fred Camper (www.fredcamper.com)
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