Brakhage

I hated how this thing started for the first... many pages. I had a lot of trouble reading the tech stuff. It didn't grab my attention, but once I got past it it was good. I was really expecting Brakhage to be a pretentious, high church avant-garde, heirarchist. He was actually a breath of fresh air from a lot of the other readings. He told how to do something he was obviously passionate about. He made it clear what was so appealing about his methods. He was inside the material rather than harping about the framework of movements, what deserves merit based on blah criteria etc. I liked his bit on Kenneth Anger's triptych as well. I like the assertion that it really was something else in the screening with only fifteen people. I was assuring to know, for Anger's sake at least, that his effort was rewarded with the voucher of a legendary figure at least, that if we cannot experience it, it is promised that it was good. It makes it more valuable in a way, the rarity. It's mythic.

I want to try some masking. He made it seem like there was no good way to do it perfect, but a stamp or sticker, or a vertical divide might work. I want to incorporate that into my film.

I liked the bit about closed eye visions being multicolored patterns and recall visions being scratched on. The closed eye creates its own random shapes and colors; the low signal from the retina causing the brain's receptor organ to shimmer and ripple. The memory is percieved as warped and warn, fragments of the original peeking through the fuzz, the feeling more preserved but still impressionistic. It's like these two are how you make art to begin with, your pure, intuitive imagination, the colors and light from inside, combined with your impression of the world no matter how much of its integrity is lost. No one has photographic clarity within, we don't have the megapixels, we don't have the ability do take things down with such detail. We can take a million separate things and combine them as a rough shape, faded and scratched, bleeding at the outlines, a distorted attempt at understanding a single theme, motive, individual, object, concept, place.