I saw Stan Brakhage's Text of Light at Anthology Film Archives last night as part of their Essential Cinema Series. At 67 minutes long, the film is in its entirety a study of light refracted from an ashtray. Pure color, sparkling, shifting. I saw slight transformations of shapes; rhythms kept and then abandoned; repeating themes and patterns of horizon-like color, star-twinkling, dusk after-images. And after awhile I began to see mimetic imagery---faces both male and female, full bodies in coats, the distinct face of a cat, the sky, cloud cover, smoke (perhaps from a cigarette in the ash tray?) and ash. But I can't say for certain whether these were photographed images or something my mind's eye conjured to dance upon the abstracted light. Light asked to perform feats of aesthetic wonder.

Fred Camper, an expert on Brakhage's films, explains that Brakhage:

discovers metaphors for landscapes in the patterns of reflection and diffraction: rivers, volcanoes, and mountains are suggested by images so delicate they’re worthy of J.M.W. Turner. The film is simultaneously a vision of the world's creation and an inner landscape of spatial and light effects organized almost as if light were music.

For awhile I wondered about the filmmaker's realtionship to light. He asks it to represent shapes and images on to a surface of film and then to replay these again from the film onto a screen (and for the viewers last night watching in the Maya Deren Theater, "the brightest screen available worldwide" according to Anthology). Something all filmmakers do, but for the most part, taking this relationship with light for granted. Brakhage conversed deeply with light, asked it to tell its stories, sing its songs and dance its dances. Brakahge explains:

What I began doing was always holding the camera in hand. For hours. Clicking. Waiting. Seeing what the sun did to the scene. As I saw what was happening in the frame to these little particles of light, changing, I would shoot the camera very slightly. If you want to know how slightly you have to realize I was never photographing in an area bigger than this fourth fingernail.

I was surprised by how vivid the color came across. The reds and yellows, so strong and warm. And the deep divulged by the blues and violets seemed endless. And yet, that is not telling the whole truth---for in creating movement in this film, in making it a film that had rhythm and pacing, that felt like watching a piece of music by Messiaen, he used color depth, too. Not just color selection from the spectrum, or where it originated on the screen, but whether it was a shallow, foggy representation of color, or whether it had the deep vivid feeling that grasped at and jumped into our eyes, our minds and our hearts.

Receiving an email today from Marshall Yaeger, inventor of the Kaleidoplex, I began to think of the imagery in Text of Light as being something akin to a kaleidoscope, but a kaleidoscope in time, more fractured, malfunctioning, more organic. A kaleidoscope where the light itself had a say in what was to be seen.

Finished reading Salman Rushdie's Shame, which takes into consideration authorship of history and the play of power & revolution (specifically how one can become the other, and how this vicious cycle feeds on itself) and succeccessfully represents how a character can so embody an emotion: Sufiya Zinobia becomes the pure energy of shame , finally visiting upon Omar Khayyam Shakil---a character who has known no shame, but perhaps deserves to---as a Beast, as Shame incarnate. I was reminded of Marquez' One Hundered Years of Solitude in the way that characters and places seem to exist in both reality and in some imagination or other. Shame seemed less dreamy than hazy, vertigo- or fever-induced.

I think Rushdie was successfully able to talk about power and politics, and specifically how it related to his mother country while still telling a magical tale. He slipped in the politics, in a Brechtian, diegetic-breaking way, and with humor. I enjoyed the way he would weave the tale and then seem to unravel what he had just told, only to show you that a more elaborate, or perhaps farther-to-completed version was being woven right underneath.

Some highlights to come back to at some point:

• Rani's scarves depicting Iskander's exploits
• Bilquis' survivial of the explosion, and hazily coming to in Raza's life
• Haroun's revolutionay spittle from the back of a giant turtle

It is official, friends, there is no end; We’ll drop you off around the bend and pick you up right there again.

You are one of my most cherished readers. And my father? Stan Brakhage is a seer. He looks vast.

I'm hoping you can point me in a _____ (considerate?) direction in academia. Who is doing work (reading/writing) in 2004 that would accept a young graduate student for complimentary reading, leraning of the writing form.

aciodic

study the application of progressive (viz. Fourierian) social science with the poetic in writing / the arts / poetry / writing.

Fine time in headlights. We sink further until she finds us. Drenched with wet sex,we head uptown , upstate, upland and finally upon pine forests sinking in a gradual shift north and east, north again until the Rains. Please reign in that guitar, Southerners, they tell us, though we fail to mention an older version -- B-Side from the nineties -- that offer everything recorded in the West underclassman gymnasium. One of us knew Live. The others, a fucked up situation, and guitars among them all. Hello, Leslie.