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10/10
USA
1964 : Stan BRAKHAGE : 75 mins
Weapon shapely, naked, wan,
Head from the mother's bowels drawn,
Wooded flesh and metal bone, limb only one and lip only one,
Grey-blue leaf by red-heat grown, helve produced from a little seed sown,
Resting the grass amid and upon,
To be lean'd and to lean on.
Walt Whitman, Song of the Broad-Axe
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Brakhage d.2004, included in Oscar "those we have lost" montage.
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Colour (!) / silent (!!) / 4 parts + prelude.
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Dog (brown, tail-wagging) + Man (hunter, Brakhage himself?) + Star (the
sun, flares visible)
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72-minute fugue state.
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Incomprehensible?
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Works on non-rational, non-verbal level: instinctive. Abstract.
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Succession of images. Distortions. Some gross-out. Many perplexing.
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Repetitions: solar flares. Manipulations of the image: back and forth.
Slow motion.
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Not especially accessible or easy. Uncompromised vision (of genius). Succumb
and rewards will follow.
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Moments of trippy-hippiness. Also of Whitmanesque engagement with wilderness.
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Cormac McCarthy Child of God. "This breaking brimstone galaxy"
(McCarthy: Suttree? Outer Dark?)
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Primal, sisyphean struggle uphill.
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Birth and death. Nature. Ice/snow.
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Stumbling onwards - the axe-wielding hunter and Brakhage the director
alike.
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Stumbling into uncharted territory. Lost and unsuitably dressed (his flimsy
boots).
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Also something of a slog for audience?
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SILENT. In the auditorium, we provide the soundtrack. [At screening
caught, on Newcastle Quayside, Brakhage's images accompanied by raucous
cries of drunken passers-by. Sunday night, December, 2004]. Clack
of seats from impatient walkouts [At screening caught, walkouts audible
talking outside the auditorium, their comments in the corridor].
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"Chaos / control ... Chaos / control" (Six Degrees of Separation)
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Comparisons invidious. Greenaway Water Wrackets.
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As with Walt W, to describe is somehow to diminish.
Wooded flesh and metal bone, limb only one and lip only one,
Grey-blue leaf by red-heat grown, helve produced from a little seed sown
6th December,
2004
[seen 5th December : CineSide,
Newcastle-upon-Tyne : one-off public show]
For other
films rated 9/10 and 10/10 check out our Hall
of Fame
by Neil
Young
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