The possibility that cinema could dwell on the imaginative resonance of the instant, manifested in Deren's Meshes and in Markopoulos's psychodramas, was taken in nonnarrative directions by Brakhage. During his stay at the Institute of Fine Art in San Francisco and in his travels between Colorado, California, and Manhattan, Brakhage came to know experimentalists of the older generation—Broughton and Peterson on the West Coast; Deren, Menken, Maas, and Joseph Cornell (p. 318) in New York. He absorbed ideas from all of them but quickly forged his own personal style.
Brakhage defined the film lyric in his work from the mid-1950s: The Wonder Ring (1955), Flesh of Morning (1956), Nightcaps (1956), and Loving (1956). For Brakhage, the lyrical film records the act of seeing and the flow of imagination. In his "first-person" filmmaking, a jerky pan becomes a glance; a flash frame, a glimpse; a flurry of cuts, sensory transport. Brakhage's films capture light as it radiates, reflects, refracts, dapples, and dazzles. The Wonder Ring. commissioned by Cornell when he heard that the New York City elevated train was about to be destroyed, gives us the city as a stream of layers, warped and fractured by the glass of the train windows (Color Plate 21.11). The abstract patterns suggest light hitting the eye and stirring associations.
Brakhage continued to explore the lyric in his "domestic" films, such as Window Water Baby Moving (1959) and Thigh Line Lyre Triangular (1961); his "cosmic" cycle Dog Star Man (completed in 1964); his 8mm series Songs (1964-1969); and his cycle Scenes from Under Childhood (completed in 1970) defined the genre. His output was prodigious—over fifty films in the 1960s and nearly a hundred in the 1970s.
The most elaborate of Brakhage's films of this period is Anticipation of the Night (1958). Here a sketchy psychodrama about a man hanging himself is recast by the lyric approach. The protagonist is not even a body, only a shadow. Most of the film is an exploration of surface, hue, and movement in the visible world. An aggressive handheld camera makes light smear and blur across the frame. Brakhage links shots by texture or color, as when a light-streaked stretch of night footage is cut to a burst of light through treetops (Color Plate 21.12). Anticipation of the Night established the lyrical film as one of America's central contributions to avant-garde cinema.
Brakhage pursued the genre with a series of films about his family. In Window Water Baby Moving, Jane Brakhage's pregnancy and childbirth is rendered in flashbacks and a weave of pictorial motifs (21.59).
Brakhage conceived of the artist as a visionary who perceives and feels more deeply than others. He sought to capture on film untutored vision, a sense of space and light unspoiled by knowledge and social training:
21.59 Motifs of light, fertility, merge in Window Water Baby Moving.
21.60 A corpse's flesh as lyric material in Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes.
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 an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of "Green"? ... Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the "beginning was the word. "12
World History
