The Philosophical Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes: The Silent Films of Stan Brakhage

Abstract

Susan Sontag warns of the dangers associated with critical interpretations of art that work off the mistaken notion that art is reducible to an accurate interpretation if ‘certain codes, certain “rules” of interpretation’ are applied and followed (Sontag 1966, 13). 2 Herein, I seek to revisit the filmic art of Stan Brakhage through the lens of philosophy in a way that avoids this tendency toward reification in critique, acknowledging at the outset that the depth and complexity of Brakhage’s work makes it impossible to approach anything resembling a correct interpretation. For the capacity for these films to make meaning lies beyond the grasp of even the most deft and careful critic. Instead, what I am offering the reader is a constellation of interpretive gestures gathered around the central theme of philosophy as they emerge from the phenomenological tradition. I attempt to intimate several possible ways that these films might express their truth. 3 Sontag states that in most interpretations of art, the intellect takes revenge on art in the attempt to do the unthinkable, namely, render great art ‘manageable,’ because as she rightly attests, great works of art hold the power to ‘make us nervous’ (Sontag 1966, 12). This, I propose, is exactly what Brakhage’s films do they shake us from our commonplace ways of seeing, understanding, and discoursing about the world, and accomplish this in a philosophical manner. His films work toward the recovery of the ‘bodily’ dimension of thought and return us to the original moments, liminal events, that mark out human becoming as we make the passage from the abyss, the void of absolute, impersonal Being, to a formal sense of conscious self-awareness. Brakhage, unlike any other filmmaker, captures and re-presents the precarious and uncertain nature of such acts defining human subjectivity, haunted as they are by the looming, foreboding presence of death, and does so, in great part, through the formal and stylistic choices he makes as a filmmaker and artist.