Diese excessive technicality of ancient law zeigt Jurisprudenz as feather of the same bird, als d. religiösen Formalitäten z. B. Auguris etc. od. d.. Hokus Pokus des medicine man der savages
May 27, 2013 § Leave a comment
I know virtually nothing about the practical side of film-making. The practical side of any art is the only side really worth going on about and the only side that can be endlessly articulate, but I personally take about one snap shot every twenty years, so the technical and creative sides of photography, which can be unbelievably complicated both physically and mentally, are almost unknown to me, and I must speak as one of the idle audience, who simply looks at films.
From this point of view I find the films of Stan Brakhage are not only of the highest interest in the contemplation but of the first importance in the current history of this form of art, because they have a dramatic vitality of eyesight which is something unique and very much his own. That is to say, that the things which he and his camera see may be dramatically interesting or they may not, but the act of seeing it, with Brakhage, is intensely dramatic, and it is this dramatic continuity of seeing which commands or determines the sequences and associations of the things seen, and which is, for me, the heart and meaning of his films, especially of Prelude. This seeing is dramatic, not simply theatrical or pictorial. Much fancy photography in Hollywood, and plenty of decent art photography, like that of say Eisenstein, is theatrical: it is the inner and passionate and raw act of seeing, converted into a handsome exterior gesture. The most refined trickery of cutting, of panning, of lighting etc. results normally in a sort of visual rhetoric — to which I have no objections except that it is, to use a distinction of Gertrude Stein’s, more lively than alive. As it can be seen from Colorado Legend — Brakhage can command this rhetoric beautifully, in a rather advanced and thoroughly enjoyable commercial film, but he has a much greater and distinguished gift. This is for the direct dramatic sight of things, which seem, under the pressure and provocation of his stare, to force themselves on the camera in their own order and deportment as much as they seem to be selected or guided by the camera. The result, or rather the action, is a sort of hostile or erotic struggle between eye and object — as against the eye and object both posing or dancing elegantly for your disengaged pleasure. read more
NOTES: Galileo Galilei
my nerves are bad to-night 
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