Revisiting Brakhage 1: Ten Years After

James Boaden

March 9th 2013 marked the ten-year anniversary of the death of the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage.

I remember hearing about Brakhage’s death in 2003 as it followed very shortly my own first experience of his work. The film I watched was a 16mm version of 23rd Psalm Branch, the film that Brakhage had made as a response to the American war in Vietnam in 1967, it was shown in a small screening organized by Mark Webber at the Photographer’s Gallery, at that time still in its pokey premises on the fringes of Covent Garden. The screening marked the beginning of the invasion of Afghanistan by British and American troops; it was one of the first events of many in subsequent years that looked at Vietnam through the lens of Afghanistan.

At the time I saw it, 23rd Psalm Branch was the most intoxicating thing I had ever seen, and remains so now. The film incorporates footage shot from the television set that Brakhage and his family had recently installed in their remote log-built home in the mountains of Colorado, the images show the American war in Vietnam as it was played out on millions of screens across the country and beyond. Like Carolee Schneemann’s earlier Viet Flakes (shot through a magnifying glass from the pages of LIFE magazine) the film was impressive for the way in which it combined a commentary on media and its ties to world history with a distinctly personal approach. The personal in the film comes through the way in which it combines the artist’s hand – through the smearing of dyes and painted patterns over the images captured on film.

Brakhage’s images taken from the television were intertwined with others that he found in old newsreel footage, of the kind that he grew up watching during a childhood where he was tutored by the cinema screen. These newsreels showed the parade grounds of the Third Reich, the speeches of Hitler and Mussolini, and aerial shots of Europe reduced to a wasteland of rubble and mud. In this way the film was tied closely to the filmmaker’s interest in trying to recall his own experience of childhood as he was watching and filming the culturation of his own five children. The alternation between the structured, highly disciplined forms of fascist display – the marching of troops in public spaces – with the formlessness of destruction is reflected in the painting of the film, as rigid grids of painted dots sink into veils of painterly ink. The juxtaposition of the handcrafted against the mechanics of the medium – a dialectic as old as filmmaking itself – has only rarely been used to such startling effect, as it comments on the way in which war makes machine of man.

The second part of the film takes place in contemporary Vienna where shots of the Viennese actionists are juxtaposed with footage taken inside the building in which Sigmund Freud lived and worked. While the actionists played out the trauma of the Second World War through hysterical performance, Brakhage worked as a bricoleur attempting to rebuild and reorganize by using editing as an analogue for psychic revision. The jerky shots of the decorative stained glass of Freud’s hallway and the spandrels of his staircase revel in the everyday, and highlight the aspects of the building that appear within the psychoanalyst’s writings.

Today, at the end of the war in Afghanistan, after a decade in which the art of protest has marginalized the personal and in which the psychoanalytic has been stripped of the connections it has maintained with the political since its birth, Brakhage’s film remains a startling document of an earlier moment. What struck me at the time were the similarities between the film and a number of visual artists that I had been looking at and thinking about. It reminded me in particular of Robert Rauschenberg’s paintings that incorporated images taken from mass media with his own painterly brushwork, juxtaposing material from different time periods against one another, and combining personal images with those depicting world events. 23rd Psalm Branch seemed to fit particularly well with the lesser known works from the second half of the 1960s which engaged very directly with the politics of the time, such as A Modern Inferno which represented icons of the civil rights struggles, atomic war, and the legacy of the Shoah. Brakhage had made 23rd Psalm Branch explicitly for 8mm distribution so that it would be watched in the home, returning the television imagery to the domestic sphere – in much the same way A Modern Inferno was printed in LIFE magazine, returning reworked images to their site of origin. However, as I began to watch worn VHS copies of Brakhage’s earlier films I realized that 23rd Psalm Branch is like no other film he made either before or since, and as I began to read more widely about Brakhage’s work I began to realize why his films were so rarely looked at alongside painting and sculpture of the period. My own research over the decade since that screening at the Photographer’s Gallery has attempted to look at Brakhage’s filmmaking against that of other filmmakers and artists that he knew, and has been profoundly troubled by the way in which the world he built for himself within his films often seemed to contradict the ideals of the counterculture in which it was viewed. In the following posts for this blog I want to summarise some of the problems with looking at Brakhage’s work today, in particular its seemingly regressive politics, and appraise some of the most common assumptions made about it, not in order to redeem its faults but rather to put it into a broader historical perspective.


James Boaden is a lecturer in the history of art at the University of York. He is currently working on a book about the circle of Stan Brakhage from 1950-1965. He has curated film screenings at BFI Southbank, Tate Modern, and La Virreina, Barcelona and has published essays in Art History, Oxford Art Journal, and Little Joe.

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