Revisiting Brakhage 4: Abstract Expressionism, Nature and the Radical Aspiration of Film

James Boaden

In 1962 Charles Boultenhouse wrote a short essay on Stan Brakhage entitled ‘Pioneer of the Abstract Expressionist Film,’ where the cursive camerawork that had come to characterise his filmmaking is compared to the broad brushstrokes and layered palimpsest of imagery in Willem de Kooning’s Woman I (1948 – 51).

(1) In 1966, as part of a varied set of events related to independent film organized by Amos Vogel, at the New York Film Festival, Annette Michelson delivered a paper she called ‘Radicalism in Film, Europe and the United States’, which appeared the following year in the journal Film Culture under the title ‘Film and the Radical Aspiration’ and has been much anthologized since.(2) In that text Michelson quotes at length from a speech by Brakhage that was reproduced in the Village Voice, where he describes trying ‘to make an impression of my feelings’ as he filmed in an empty street in East Berlin, gathering the traces of his trembling movement on the film inside the camera that he describes as part of the body. Like Boultenhouse, Michelson recognized in Brakhage’s writing the rhetoric of Abstract Expressionist painting, in which the body, the mind, and the work are intrinsically tied together into an organic whole. More recently, in an astute reading of Brakhage’s work James Peterson has suggested,

Barely anyone writing about Brakhage’s work can avoid likening it to Abstract Expressionism. Few critical opinions in the avant-garde are as widely held as this one, but it is repeated more often than it is thoroughly examined.(3)

Michelson’s criticism comes at a moment when self-expression was being questioned across the spheres of the arts. In the chance compositions of John Cage and his acolytes, in Yvonne Rainer’s downcast gaze and everyday movement at Judson Dance Theater, and within ‘Minimalist’ sculpture there was a palpable waning of affect. The critique of Abstract Expressionism itself could be seen in Roy Lichtenstein’s graphic approximations of brushstrokes that appeared that year, freezing the idea of the authorial mark as a mode of expression. Lichtenstein provided the art deco style poster for the Film Festival Michelson was speaking at. On her return from almost a decade spent in Paris, Michelson immersed herself into an artistic world that was shifting meaning away from authorial intent and towards the audience’s participation – as theorized at the time by her close acquaintance Susan Sontag. For Michelson, at that time, Brakhage’s work was not only anachronistic but also thoroughly regressive.

Michelson specifically contrasted the American avant-garde with the contemporary situation in Europe:

‘It is the acceptance of the dissociative principle, its sublimation and ultimate conversion to aesthetic purposes that characterize recent advanced filmmaking in France and elsewhere in Europe. It is the almost categorical rejection of that principle and the aspiration to an innocence and organicity that animates the efforts of the ‘independent’ film-makers who compose something of an American avant-garde’

The ‘organicity’ that Michelson critiques can be found in what she understands as the way in which Brakhage seems to unproblematically equate his camera with his body, and in turn himself with nature. What Michelson willfully ignores in this equation is Brakhage’s use of montage. Peter Bürger has written of the ability of montage – a term, for him, covering both filmic disjunctive splicing and collage – to disrupt the unity of what he calls the ‘organic work of art’:

The man made organic work of art that pretends to be like nature projects an image of reconciliation of man and nature. According to Adorno, it is that it no longer creates the semblance of reconciliation.(4)

A detailed examination of the montage structure of any of Brakhage’s films that concern themselves with the natural world – Sirius Remembered (1959), which documents the decaying corpse of his dog; Dog Star Man (1961-64), which presents Brakhage as a woodsman struggling against the elements in the Colorado Rocky Mountains; or Mothlight (1963), a collage of flower petals, leaves, and moth wings through which light is projected – shows that it is the dialectic between nature and mechanical potential of film that is of direct concern to the filmmaker. Quite apart from the vulgar equation between painting and the natural world seen in Abstract Expressionist painting, Brakhage’s films are as much about the impossibility of reconciliation as they are about the representation of the natural world.(5) In this way Brakhage’s films may be understood as directly partaking in what Michelson calls film’s ‘radical aspiration’ as they attempt to draw attention to the very contradiction between technological progress and the quest for natural being in the world and in turn make an urgent plea for new ways of negotiating these seeming antinomies without recourse to simple, and naïve, reconciliation.


(1) Charles Boultenhouse, ‘Pioneer of the Abstract Expressionist Film,’ Filmwise 1, 1962, pp. 26 – 7.

(2) Annette Michelson, ‘Film and the Radical Aspiration’, Film Culture, no. 42, (Fall 1966), p. 34 – 42,136.

(3) James Peterson, Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order: Understanding the American Avant-Garde Cinema, (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1994), p. 61.

(4) Peter Bürger, (trans. Michael Shaw), (1974), Theory of the Avant-Garrde, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 78.

(5) See TJ Clark, ‘In Defense of Abstract Expressionism’, October 69, (Spring 1994), pp. 22-48, and James Boaden, ‘Black Painting (with Asheville Citizen)’, Art History, vol. 31, no. 1, (February 2011), pp. 166-191.


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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