Experimental Stories is a program dedicated to filmmakers who have made avant-garde cinema history: the 19th edition of Archivio Aperto pays tribute to the great filmmaker Stan Brakhage, with a retrospective of 10 films made between 1959 and 2001, screened on film.
Curated by Cecilia Ermini
«Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception». This is how Stan Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision begins. First published in 1963 as a special issue of Film Culture, the book appeared in Italy in 1970 in an edition published by Feltrinelli. Its opening lines introduce one of the most radical reflections on vision in the history of cinema: an attempt to free the gaze from the conventions of representation and restore it to its physical, intuitive, and imaginative dimension.
Born in Kansas City in 1933, Brakhage made Interim, his first film, at the age of eighteen, embarking on a career that would span more than fifty years and nearly 400 works. Psychodramas, autobiographical films, images of birth and death, cosmological visions, cycles inspired by poetry, and films painted or scratched directly onto the filmstrip make up a body of work in which the stated subject is often merely a point of departure. What Brakhage investigates is the very act of seeing, and the relationship between perception, consciousness, and the world.
His filmmaking practice challenges the distinction between recording and creation through the use of handheld camerawork, unstable movements, variations in focus and exposure, fragmented editing, and the physical manipulation of film, transforming the image into a sensory experience. Scratches, paint, superimpositions, and materials attached directly to the filmstrip turn film from a transparent surface through which to look into a site where vision itself takes shape.
His films are thus traversed by bursts of colour, chromatic fields, shifts in light, and fleeting forms that seem to emerge and dissolve before they can even be recognised. Rather than representing the world, Brakhage seeks to convey perception in motion: everyday vision, structured by language and recognition, gives way to a freer, more unstable and subjective mode of seeing. Cinema thus becomes an experience of the eye and, at the same time, a form of thought: light moving through time, matter becoming image, image becoming perception.
In collaboration with Light Cone.