Stan Brakhage and the Newer Laocoon of Film

This is an essay I wrote a year ago on film aesthetics, arguing for Stan Brakhage's films as the Newer Laocoon of Film. I disagree with a few points of my argument, but it is a framework that I still find influential to my way of thinking about films and filmmaking.

Stan Brakhage and the Newer Laocoon of Film
In his famous 1940 essay Towards a Newer Laocoon, art historian Clement Greenberg argued for the aesthetics of abstraction in the plastic arts as ‘an inexorable historical tendency’ that avoided the dominance of literature; preserving the purity of the plastic arts by communicating in terms of pure sensation and on their own terms instead of that of literature. The body of work produced by the great American avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) and the theoretical framework of Closed Eye Vision he proposed stand as an important response to Greenberg’s argument. On the one hand many of his films are works that communicate meaning to the viewer in terms of pure sensation, yet his filmmaking practice was greatly influenced by poetry - one of the main tributaries of the literary tradition. By examining Brakhage’s films in terms of the aesthetic frameworks of Closed Eye Vision and Greenberg’s Newer Laocoon it becomes apparent that while Brakhage was influenced by works of other artistic media - primarily literature (specifically poetry) the peculiar qualities of film allow for the overlap with this medium because of the shared characteristic of temporality in film and literature. Therefore, in comparison with films that utilize conventional narrative and structural-materialist approaches to filmmaking it can be seen that Stan Brakhage’s Closed Eye Vision and the later handmade films produced under its aesthetic framework are the closest response to the filmmaking process that resemble the aesthetics of Greenberg’s thesis.

The Newer Laocoon of Film
While Greenberg’s writings were principally concerned with modernist painting (in particular endorsing the work of the Abstract Expressionists), it is possible to construct a ‘newer Laocoon’ of film based on the overarching points of his argument for the purity of media. In Towards a Newer Laocoon, Greenberg suggests that literature, having become the dominant art of the 17th century became the prototype for all art and that the other media shed their ‘proper’ characteristics and nature in ‘an attempt to attain the effects of the dominant art’ . He then argues that abstraction as “art of ‘pure form’” is a return to the true nature of the medium (which in painting is simply paint and canvas); avoiding the illusions of the subject matter of literature and the three-dimensionality that is the ‘true’ domain of sculpture. Extrapolating this argument, the ‘newer Laocoon’ of film would be an art that did not attempt to attain the effects of the dominant art (or other media for that matter) and instead returned film to its true nature - through the art of ‘pure form’ produced by the sensorial experience of abstraction - and displayed the qualities unique to the film medium. Therefore, the model for a ‘newer Laocoon’ of film would be an abstract, sensorial art that draws attention to what film essentially is; movement in time.

The Narrative Film and Structural-Material Film Options: Newer Laocoons?
Several filmmaking models exist that have been considered as ‘art’, though very few have the characteristics of the avant-garde art Greenberg is advocating. The French New Wave is considered one of the most important film movements in cinema’s history, teaching ‘an entire generation [of filmmakers] to experiment with the rules of storytelling’ . Yet, as experimental as the films were, they are films that are arguably attempting to mimic the properties of literature instead of communicating in terms of pure sensation. Perhaps this can be best illustrated with the films of New Waver Eric Rohmer. His films such as My Night at Maud’s (1969) are often described as being ‘literary’ in quality and dialogue heavy. In his essay ‘For A Talking Cinema’ Rohmer tellingly writes:

If talking film is an art, speech must play a role in conformity with its character as a sign and not appear only as a sound element, which, though privileged as compared with others, is but of secondary importance as compared with the visual element.

Therefore, Rohmer is suggesting that language not play a simply sensorial element in film; rather it should play an important cognitive role ‘as a revelation of world and character’ . This predominance of language –the domain of literature – marks these films as oppositional to Greenberg. While it should be noted that not all French New Wave films are quite as literary as Rohmer, the influence of American crime fiction on such seminal films of the movement as Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1959), Shoot the Piano Player (Francois Truffaut, 1960) and Elevator to the Gallows (Louis Malle, 1957) as well as the predominance of story in these films, the films of the French New Wave are works that certainly are attempting to take as their own the characteristics of the art of literature and are not truly avant-garde in the sense Greenberg suggests art should be.

The films of structural-materialists are closer to Greenberg’s aesthetics as they are films that draw attention to their essential nature, yet even they do not propose a model that consistently can be described as a cinematic ‘Newer Laocoon’. The material exploration of ‘film as film itself’ being the key area of exploration, structural-materialist films explore the ‘pure form’ of film as movement in time. For example, the filmmaker Peter Kubelka takes ‘the individual still frame as the essence of cinema’ and explores the idea of movement in time at its most abstract. His film Arnulf Rainer (1960) strips cinema to its bare essentials; black and white leader cut into rhythmic patterns of dark and light. In its use of an abstraction of imagery to create a sensory experience in a way that only film can, Arnulf Rainer is a film that fits Greenberg’s model. Yet, not all of the structural-materialist films are quite as sensory as Arnulf Rainer and often utilize no abstraction at all. Nostalgia (1973) by Hollis Frampton experiments with time displacement, but it does so with figurative representations of photography and the mini-narratives of the temporally displaced voice-overs. Even though the narrative in Michael Snow’s landmark Wavelength (1967) ‘exists only to reinforce the film's emphasis on the camera's ability to simultaneously represent and alter space’ , the imagery in the film is still figurative and not sensory. Furthermore, these (even Arnulf Rainer) are presenting the material qualities in a way that can be read as philosophical and psychological experiments in cognition; they are revealing the ways we ‘read’ the basic elements of film form and movement in time rather than just being purely about sensation. In this manner, the structural/materialist project does not fully provide a cinematic model for Greenberg’s ideas; lacking the abstraction and predominance of the sensory he advocated.

Film’s Newer Laocoon Realized: Closed Eye Vision & Handmade Film
It is in the idea of Brakhage’s Closed Eye Vision and the handmade films that the model for film’s ‘newer Laocoon’ is realized. In his Metaphors on Vision, Brakhage wrote:

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic. An eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through the adventure of perception….before the “beginning was the word”

Though he goes on to suggest that a true return to childlike perception is impossible, in this statement Brakhage is advocating a cinema of ‘the adventure of perception’; a cinema which drew attention to the sensory act of simply seeing. Greenberg writes; ‘Literature’s corrupting influence is only felt when the senses are neglected’ ; in the predominance of sensory stimulation Brakhage is supporting Greenberg’s ideas as a model for film as art. It is in the handmade films of Brakhage’s mid-to-late period that the application of Closed Eye Vision reaches it Greenbergian best. Working with found objects, paint and even simply just scratching into the film, Brakhage sees film not simply as an extension of the photographic medium. Instead of simply capturing images with a camera he reduces the film medium to its bare essentials of a moving surface. In creating abstract patterns directly to that surface that when viewed through a projector appear as rapidly changing flashes of moving shapes and color, Brakhage uses the mechanizations of animation to produce a purely sensory experience of movement in time; the Newer Laocoon of film realized.

Problems in Brakhage
There are however some seeming discrepancies between Brakhage’s films and ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ that must be discussed if his model is to be accept as the Newer Laocoon. Brakhage admitted to have been very influenced by poetry, which would seemingly render his films ‘impure’ by Greenberg’s standards. Rosalind Krauss notes that ‘for Greenberg the literary is temporal’ and it is for that reason that it was to be excluded from painting. Film however as movement in time is temporal and thus would naturally be closer to the affects of poetry; both media overlap into the that same characteristic. Perhaps most importantly it should be noted that while the influence of poetry can be found in his films, his films move increasingly away from this influence. His epic Dog Star Man (1962-64) uses superimpositions and handmade film techniques to create imagery that is abstract and sensory, yet there is still the narrative of the man climbing the mountain to cut down the tree. Furthermore, an assortment of thematic elements such as the passing of the seasons, the astronomical footage throughout the series and the birth of the child in Part 2 of the film suggest poetically that the climb is symbolic of ‘all human endeavor’ . By the time of his later films however – even those with literary allusions in their titles – the focus is squarely on the sensory experience, and the overt, literal poetic imagery of Dog Star Man that can be easily reduced to language is no longer present. This shift is confirmed by Brakhage himself:

I began, I think quite naturally, to want film to get free of even its closest kinship, to grow, up in a way, so we could know what a film can be in itself, not film as theatre. That is not a film as poetry, not film as literature, not film as illustration, moving picture illustrations of literature or all the things that it mostly is as you see when you turn on the TV

One could also argue that the titling of the works based on allusions to other works of art – whether musical (Love Song, 2001), literary (The Dante Quartet, 1987) or painting (Garden of Earthly Delights, 1981) – is a sign of the ‘corrupting influence’ of other media. While these titles may give the viewer a point of reference when encountering the work, the films resist any clear representation of the other media. Take for example The Dante Quartet. The hand-painted film, while drawing on Dante’s Inferno in name, does not make any other literary allusion outside of its title and the title of its subsections. The imagery is purely abstract; Brakhage intentionally avoids attempts at creating a figurative visual landscape on the screen with the paint. Talking about a section of hand painted film that was made as part of The Dante Quartet but ultimately rejected by him, Brakhage explains its exclusion; ‘the reason that this hunk is framed and doesn’t exist within The Dante Quartet – which is what it was originally made for – is its an outtake because its too close to the nameable’ . Therefore by this stage, Brakhage is resisting the poeticism of his earlier films and is creating works of pure, abstract visual sensation.

Another charge that can perhaps be leveled at Brakhage is the influence of Abstract Expressionism in his work, in the sense that the use of abstract painting marks Brakhage’s films as impure by Greenberg’s standards. The problem of the film medium is that it has generally has only three options of creating the visuals; either filming an object, collaging objects or creating animations. The first renders film as corrupted by photography, the second by collage and the last by painting and drawing. Brakhage then highlights the problem of the media’s ambiguity of a truly essential production technique by not relying solely on one method of creating visuals. Instead, he uses all of them to produce abstraction in film. Films like the aforementioned Dante Quartet use hand painted dyes, Garden of Earthly Delights utilizes ‘montane zone vegetation’ placed onto the film surface itself, and the late career photographed film Commingled Containers (1997) uses distorted lenses and refractions of light through water to produce an abstract effect.. While The Dante Quartet utilizes painting and The Garden of Earthly Delights collaging, Brakhage is not using these techniques in making films that ‘pretend’ they are these other media. If he were then he would negate the movement aspect of film and render the film as a still image; he simply would paint the one frame and repeat it again and again for the length of the film. Rather, the movements of the films produce the effect of a sensory experience quite different to abstraction in painting. Limited by the stillness of canvas painting, Jackson Pollock used large, sprawling canvases to immerse the viewer in a field of abstraction. Brakhage works on the smaller scale of 16mm film and even when projected does not immerse the viewer in quite the same way. Instead the movement of the film animates the imagery; the abstract forms bubbling and shifting in color across the surface of the film. The eye cannot fix onto one single frame and study it intensely as one is able to with a Jackson Pollock painting like Lavender Mist (1950). Rather, the effect of the rapid changes of the wash of color on screen produces an ‘adventure of perception’ that can only be experienced in film. Therefore while it is perhaps similar to Abstract Expressionism in its use of painting, the handmade films of Brakhage do not attempt to mimic the same effects and instead utilize abstraction in a way that highlights the film medium instead of reducing it the stillness of the painting medium proper.

Conclusions
Thus by examining the principles of Clement Greenberg’s ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, it is possible to extrapolate from it a model for art production that focuses on the purity of the essential nature of a medium and the sensory experience of abstraction, and that the essential nature of the film medium is movement in time. Looking at the narrative films of the French New Wave, the reliance on narrative and language – the domain of literature – render them as following a model of film production that does not fit with Greenberg’s ideas. The structural-materialists meanwhile do utilize film as movement in time, yet with the exception of films like Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer, the use of abstraction in films produced by the movement is not as an essential part of their practice as the cognitive qualities that the often figurative films explore. Brakhage’s later handmade films on the other hand, produced under his theory of Closed Eye Vision, are films that treat film as a medium of movement in time and utilize abstraction in a manner that produces an ‘adventure in perception’. Furthermore, by debating the issues of the influence of literature and other media on Brakhage as well as the obvious visual similarities to Abstract Expressionism, it becomes clear that the model Brakhage proposes in Closed Eye Vision is very much in keeping with Greenberg’s ideas. Therefore the handmade films of Stan Brakhage can be seen to be the ‘Newer Laocoons’ of the film medium, with Closed Eye Vision as the theoretical framework by which Greenberg’s ideas are translated into a model for filmmaking.